In Memoriam |
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In this issue: |
Ann Leger-Anderson, historian of women of the Canadian prairies and a former member of the Organization of American Historians, passed away on February 22, 2006, in Ann Leger-Anderson was born in A serious-minded and exigent scholar, Ann was similarly demanding in the classroom. One of her students stated, “She is clearly an excellent scholar and well read in the subject matter. She takes the subject, the class, the students and the essays very seriously.” She was demanding of herself and of her students, but generous too, in the time she devoted to helping students prepare their essays. Although she reinvented herself as a Canadian women’s historian and was a naturalized Canadian citizen, Ann continued to teach American history until 2005. She retained ties with colleagues in the United States and was a frequent presenter at the Northern Great Plains History Conference. These connections as well as her association with the Organization of American Historians kept her alive to new developments in women’s and gender history and brought a valuable comparative perspective to her understanding of the history of women on the Canadian prairies. q —Ian Germani Marshall William Fishwick, teacher, author, and world traveler, died May 22 at his Blacksburg home. He was eighty-two. Fishwick was professor emeritus in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech when he retired in 2003. He is widely regarded as originator of the academic movement known as Popular Culture, and he cofounded the Popular Culture Association in the late 1960s. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, and a graduate of Jefferson High School, Fishwick held degrees from the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale University. He later received honorary degrees from Krakov University, Bombay University, and Dhaka University. During his career, he received eight Fulbright Awards and numerous additional grants which enabled him to introduce the popular culture discipline at home and abroad in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Korea. Fishwick founded the journal International Popular Culture and was cofounder of the Popular Culture Association. He served as the association’s president and was advisory editor of both the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of American Culture. Throughout his career, he contributed articles on American studies and popular culture to papers and journals all over the world; he also published numerous articles and commentaries in American magazines and newspapers. In 1997, he was presented the Life Achievement Award in Popular Culture by the Popular Culture Association. Fishwick’s literary career began while he was at sea with the Atlantic Fleet during World War II. His collected poems, The Face of Jang, were published in 1945. After the war, he earned a doctorate in American Studies at Yale University. His dissertation was published as A New Look at the Old Dominion. He went on to write more than twenty books and edited an additional dozen in the fields of history, literature, education, theology, and communication. A life-long interest in heroes resulted in such titles as Virginians on Olympus, The Hero: Myth and Reality, The Hero: American Style, Heroes of Popular Culture, and The Hero in Transition. Other titles included Lee after the War, General Lee’s Photographer, Springlore in Virginia, and Faust Revisited. His books on popular culture included Seven Pillars of Popular Culture, Common Culture and the Great Tradition, Great Awakenings: Popular Religion in America, and most recently, two textbooks, Go and Catch a Falling Star and An American Mosaic. An inveterate traveler, Fishwick reminisced about his journeys in Around the World in Forty Years. His most recent book, Cicero and Popular Culture, is in press and will be published posthumously. Fishwick was a member of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church and former Historiographer of the Diocese of Southwest Virginia. He was a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Blacksburg. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Ann La Berge (Fishwick), four children, the Reverend Jeffrey Fishwick, Ellen McLean, Susan Green, and Lucy Reinhardt, two step-children, Leigh Claire and Louisa La Berge, and thirteen grandchildren. —Jean Elliott On August 13, 2006 Kermit L. Hall suffered a heart attack while swimming at Hilton Head, South Carolina. His death, at sixty-one, was a huge loss to historians and to the larger academic world. The son of a tire worker and bookkeeper, Kermit was a first generation college graduate, earning a B.A. from Akron City University (now the University of Akron) in 1966. He received his M.A. from Syracuse University in 1967 and then served as a Captain in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. After military service, he earned a Ph.D. in 1972 in constitutional History, studying under Paul Murphy at the University of Minnesota. In 1980 he received a Master of Science in Law from Yale Law School. An accomplished historian, Kermit moved into administration in 1992. He served as a college dean at the University of Tulsa and at Ohio State, as provost at North Carolina State, and then as president of Utah State from 2000 to 2004. In the early winter of 2004, he became president of the University at Albany. Kermit was a dynamo of scholarly energy. He published about seventy-five scholarly articles and book chapters, mostly on constitutional history, the Supreme Court, and legal history. He was the author and editor of more than twenty-five books, including The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (1989), The Oxford Companion to American Law (2002), and with Paul Finkelman and James W. Ely Jr., American Legal History: Cases and Materials, third edition (2005). He is perhaps best known for his Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, second edition (2005) which won a number of prizes, and for a reference book, was a minor best seller. During his career, he served on numerous professional committees and boards, gave hundreds of lectures worldwide, and despite moving into administration, continued to attend scholarly conferences. Beyond the classroom and the world of academic publishing, Kermit was a significant public intellectual. Even while president of two universities, he found time to participate in Teaching of American History grants and to lead seminars and institutes for the Center for Civic Education. In 1994, he was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. Kermit was deeply committed to fine scholarship, good teaching, and public education. Indicative of this commitment was his first act as president of the University at Albany. He rejected the idea of an elaborate presidential inauguration and insisted that the funds allocated for the inauguration be used to start a scholarship fund at the university. He then contributed some of his own resources to the scholarship fund. Immediately after assuming the presidency at Albany, Kermit took steps to create the first Honors College at the university. Unlike many university administrators, Kermit continued to teach and write. He was scheduled to teach an honors seminar on the history of the Supreme Court when he died. Most historians saw him as a powerful force within the profession: smart, thoughtful, energetic, always involved, and ever ready to help undergraduates, graduate students, and younger scholars. He was all of that, but he was also an accomplished fisherman, a tenacious bird watcher, and someone who—at age sixty-one—still drove a vintage red Corvette. He will be deeply missed by those of us who worked with him and knew him well and by countless others who benefited from his scholarship and his vast contributions to the field. His early and untimely death is a tragic loss for the academic community. —Paul Finkelman Stow Persons, the Carver Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Iowa, died in Iowa City, Iowa, on January 6, 2006 at the age of ninety-two. Persons was born on June 15, 1913 in Mt. Carmel, Connecticut, the son of Frederick Torrell and Florence Cummings Persons. On September 4, 1943, he married Dorothy Reuss in Princeton, New Jersey. Stow received both his B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University and taught at Princeton from 1940 until he joined the University of Iowa Department of History in 1950. He served as acting dean of the Graduate College in 1960-1961 and as chairman of the Faculty Senate and Council in 1969-1970. Persons held visiting professorships at the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar, Stetson University, San Francisco State College, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Colorado. To say that Persons’s scholarly interests were capacious is to deal in understatement. Moving across a broad and diverse spectrum of historical inquiry, he took as subjects New England’s advocates of free religion, declining gentility in nineteenth-century As the practitioner of intellectual history par excellence, Persons attracted a large following of undergraduates throughout his long career. Today a prize, named for him, is awarded annually for the best senior thesis in the History Department. Supervising the training of thirty-seven students and working closely with scores of others, His wife Dorothy Reuss Persons of Iowa City, his daughter Catherine Persons and his son-in-law Peter Rob of Nome, Alaska survive him. —Mary Kelley James Harvey Young, Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University, died on July 29, 2006 at ninety years of age from complications following a stroke. Harvey was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1915. He received his B.A. from Knox College in 1937. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1938 and 1941 respectively where he studied with the distinguished Civil War historian James G. Randall. In spite of the fact that his interests soon turned to the history of American medicine, he maintained a lifelong interest in Abraham Lincoln and Illinois history. His first and most famous book, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation (1961) was widely respected as a serious and pathbreaking social history of patent medicines in the United States. The colorful newspaper ads that other scholars had amused themselves reading while pursuing more serious lines of historical inquiry, Harvey established as the focus of his first-rate study and the inspiration for the rest of his career. Toadstool Millionaires was reprinted and distributed in paperback by Consumer’s Union and forty years later, became one of the first “classics” made available electronically on the World Wide Web. In 1967, he published a sequel, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth Century America. A New York Times reviewer paid tribute at that time by noting that “a subject that in other hands had always been exploited as a joke or horror story” had been identified by him as a “social phenomenon of genuine, continuing importance in American life.” A medical history review article concluded in 1979 that Harvey was perhaps “the most widely read and influential medical historian alive.” He also published several edited books before finishing Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (1988), a comprehensive study of the enactment of the Progressive era’s pioneering 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. Harvey published nine books altogether and almost 150 articles or book chapters. He trained thirty-eight Ph.D. students, and when he retired in 1984, he had two honorary degrees, many fellowships and lectureships, and the highest awards in medical and pharmaceutical history. At Emory, his twentieth-century U.S. Social History course was the most popular course in the department. The first Arts and Sciences professor to receive the university’s highest award for graduate teaching, he influenced the thinking—or attempted to do so—of several soon-to-be politicians including Newt Gingrich (R-Ga) and Max Cleland (D-Ga). As one of his students noted, “he had a fine mind, but an even temperament,” and it was this quality, above all others that endeared him to his colleagues and his students. —Suzanne White Junod |
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