In Memoriam |
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Susan Porter Benson died at home in The daughter of storekeepers Alvin and Lorraine Porter, Susan Porter Benson was born in Porter Benson contributed a monograph of monumental importance to the history of labor and women in the United States. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores (1986) pioneered the historical analysis of service industry labor, and the book remains a model for single-occupation studies. Demonstrating the value of scholarly sharing, Porter Benson collaborated with Barbara Melosh to craft “work culture” into an effective conceptual category for women’s labor history. The analytical tool revised understandings of occupational expertise, allowing Porter Benson to examine relations in the burgeoning service sector that Marxist analysis had heretofore limited to encounters between male craft skill and management strategies on the factory floor. Her longstanding engagement with consumer culture animates the forthcoming Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar USA. The book traces the continuity of irregular and inadequate income that circumscribed working-class spending in both the 1920s and the 1930s, challenging standard characterizations of the 1920s as the “Age of Mass Consumption.” As co-editor of a special issue of Radical History Review, Porter Benson generated interest in the study of public history. The influential issue led to her co-editing, along with Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenzweig, of Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (1986). This collection, in turn, inspired “Critical Perspectives on the Past,” the popular Temple University Press book series. “Sue has been an extraordinarily generous mentor to dozens of scholars in myriad settings—as a journal editor, as a program committee member, or a book series editor,” offered Rosenzweig. “And, if we could bring these people together, they would collectively and unanimously attest to Sue’s generosity and what can only be called ‘wisdom.’” Porter Benson had no equal as a mentor to undergraduate and graduate students. She lived a commitment to a democratized historical community. She devoted special attention to the professional development of non-traditional students, whether older students, students of color, or those from working class backgrounds. Her guidance allowed a diverse group of students to situate race, sexuality, gender, and class at the center of the historical experience, transforming our collective understanding of the past. Her students comprise part of the large but loving community who mourn her passing. She is survived by her husband, Edward Benson, her daughter, Katherine Musler, and her mother, Loraine Porter. Charles McGraw Donald F. Carmony, Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, died February 14, 2005, at the age of ninety five. Don Carmony was born in Shelby County, Indiana, on January 18, 1910. He graduated from Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis) in 1929 and began teaching there while also doing graduate study at Indiana University, completing his PhD in 1940. For more than two decades he taught and administered in Indiana University’s extension division at Fort Wayne and South Bend. He joined the Bloomington history faculty in 1955, the same year he became editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. Don’s historical interests focused on the pioneers of his native state. He studied with two IU historians who created the first enduring scholarship in Indiana history, Logan Esarey and R. C. Buley. His published scholarship included numerous articles and essays but centered on a two-volume history of the state, co-authored with John Barnhart, Indiana: From Frontier to Industrial Commonwealth (1954), and Indiana, 1816-1850: The Pioneer Era (1998). The latter volume was the culmination of a half century of research and will remain the standard reference for the period. A significant part of Don’s scholarship endures in the pages of the Indiana Magazine of History that he edited over a twenty year period, much of it with the assistance of Lorna Lutes Sylvester. Don’s teaching focused on his Indiana history classes, which enabled thousands of students to continue their lives and careers with a deeper understanding of the importance of place. Don taught and mentored graduate students on dissertation committees and especially as potential authors of articles in the IMH. Much of his teaching extended off campus in the hundreds of lectures he gave to service clubs, teacher workshops, and community groups. Don Carmony became a “public historian” long before the label was created by playing key roles in celebrations of the bicentennial of the American Revolution, of Indiana’s sesquicentennial of statehood, and of the university’s sesquicentennial, and in guiding a history of the General Assembly, developing early historic preservation guidelines, and organizing history teacher programs. Many awards recognized the quantity and quality of Don’s work. They included the University’s Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 1994 and a Sagamore of the Wabash presented at a special ceremony in the Indiana State House. Especially important was the establishment of a chair in his name in the Indiana University History Department. Don’s commitment to Indiana and its history did not make him a Hoosier provincial. He often spoke of the necessity to teach and learn about other parts of the world. He was a progressive voice on current issues, including support for public education and civil rights. In 1930, he spoke at the Indiana conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the only white speaker on the program at a time when many white Hoosiers were closer to the Ku Klux Klan than the NAACP. James H. Madison Paul Gagnon was a French historian, a founding member of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an advocate for the importance of history in all curricula from primary school to the university. He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he graduated from the High School of Commerce. After service in the Navy during WWII, he went on to receive a BA in history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD from Harvard. His personal educational experiences convinced him of the appropriateness and value of a liberal arts education for young people of working class background and of the crucial role played by public institutions of higher learning. He overcame a lifelong stuttering disability to become a devoted, successful, and popular teacher. While maintaining a broad a focus on history, Gagnon argued in the introduction to his major study A History of France since 1789 (1964) that, the writing and study of national history deserved an important place in historical scholarship because so many major historical developments took place within national frameworks. In 1964, Gagnon played a key role in the founding of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, becoming its first Dean of Arts and Sciences. Richard Robbins, whom Dean Gagnon hired to create the Department of Sociology, calls Paul Gagnon “the heart and soul of the university” in its early days. “Paul had the vision to create a public urban university committed to providing a first class liberal arts education to students of working class background. He would never accept the idea that these students could only follow a vocational educational path.” Gagnon was a passionate advocate for the teaching of history in secondary schools. In nominating him for an outstanding achievement award for his work on secondary education, the Personnel Committee of the History Department of the University of Massachusetts, Boston wrote, “Professor Gagnon’s activities in this area grow out of a lifelong interest in education and educational policy, reflected in his classroom teaching and his research into the history of education in France, Great Britain and America . . . he served as a consultant to a number of distinguished commissions including the Paideia Group, Pfizer,Inc, the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Social Studies, the United States Department of Education and the American Federation of Teachers.” The National Council for History Education has established in his honor the Paul A. Gagnon Award to be given to a teacher for scholarship or outstanding achievement in the promotion of history in the schools. After retiring from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Gagnon served as a senior research associate at Boston University’s Center for School Improvement and published widely on questions of state public school history curricula and standards. In his 2003 article “In Pursuit of a ‘Civic Core’ A Report on State Standards,” he wrote, “Alexis de Tocqueville gave us a tall order a century and a half ago. He opened Democracy in America with his plea to American and French leaders alike ‘First among the duties that are at this time imposed on those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy.’” Gagnon believed that young people needed a thorough knowledge of history to be effective citizens of a democracy and that their teachers needed a quality liberal arts education in order to help them attain this knowledge. Paul Gagnon died April 28 in his Cambridge home at the age of eighty. He leaves his wife Mona Harrington, his sons Benjamin and Thomas, and his daughter Eliza. q Paul Bookbinder University of Massachusetts, Boston William Henry Harbaugh William Henry Harbaugh, Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History (Emeritus) at the University of Virginia, died on April 28, 2005, at his home in Charlottesville. He was eighty-five. Harbaugh was born in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from Barringer High School in Newark, he went to the University of Alabama, where he played baseball and joined the ROTC in anticipation of the coming war. He graduated in May 1942 with a degree in journalism and a minor in economics. In August, he went to Europe with the U.S. Army. His campaigns included Operation Torch in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily with General Patton’s 7th Army, and the German counteroffensive near Strasbourg. Crossing the Rhine in the region of Germany from which his ancestors had emigrated in the 1730s, Harbaugh’s battalion participated in the liberation of several Nazi slave labor camps, satellites of Dachau. The day after disembarking in New York, Harbaugh applied in person, and in uniform, to the Master’s program in history at Columbia University. The admissions chair decided on the spot that a Croix de Guerre outweighed an undistinguished undergraduate record. He completed the Master’s program at Columbia in 1947 and then a PhD at Northwestern in 1954. Arthur Link was his dissertation advisor and life-long friend. Harbaugh taught at He did everything with infectious enthusiasm. Harbaugh was a popular undergraduate lecturer and a terrific graduate instructor and mentor. He directed fourteen PhD dissertations. Along with G. Edward White and the late Calvin Woodard, his colleagues and great friends at the University of Virginia Law School, he founded the Joint Degree Program in Legal History that became one of the nation’s best. He taught the first-year graduate colloquium in U.S. History since 1865 to an entire generation of Virginia graduate students. Dorothy Ross, Olivier Zunz, and other colleagues who team-taught the colloquium with Harbaugh have said that they learned from him and came to love him as much as the students did. He became an opponent of the Vietnam War shortly after arriving in Charlottesville, speaking often to faculty, staff, and students from the steps of Jefferson’s Rotunda; along with his colleague Alexander Sedgwick, Harbaugh participated in teach-ins throughout Virginia. He was passionate about softball too. Harbaugh organized an annual faculty-student game (followed by a picnic) in the spring of 1970. For twenty years, he managed the faculty team and wrote a postgame article celebrating the achievements of the players. Each year the graduate students vowed to avenge the previous year’s defeat; they rarely succeeded. A softball trophy was among the gifts presented by his colleagues at a retirement party in 1990. Following his retirement, Harbaugh worked to preserve Pine Knot, Edith and Theodore Roosevelt’s rustic presidential retreat fifteen miles south of Charlottesville. In 1993 the Albemarle Historical Society published Harbaugh’s thoroughly researched monograph on the site; it is still in print in pamphlet form. Early this year the Theodore Roosevelt Association awarded him their Distinguished Service Medal. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Virginia Wayne Talbot, and three children. The family has established a memorial web site at < http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/WHH/index.htm>. Charles W. McCurdy |
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