In Memoriam |
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In this issue: |
Roy Rosenzweig’s legacy transcends professional categories. His insatiable curiosity, courageous character, creative mind, and restless organizing—along with his warm interest in a remarkable variety of people—made it hard for him to hold still long enough in a single place to be labeled. As I listened to people talk about Roy at the memorial service in Arlington on December 9 and at the AHA remembrance on January 5, I was struck by two conclusions. First, we all clearly knew the same Roy. We had all experienced how to work with Roy was to build an intense and very rewarding personal relationship. But, second, I was also struck that we each knew a different Roy, partly because he was the link between our different neighborhoods that Jean Agnew had described as constituting “Royville,” and partly because he naturally related to people where he found them, each one differently. At the Arlington service his wife Deborah named the quality that struck me most about Roy. He was above all a connector. He loved introducing people who inhabited one of the neighborhoods in Royville to people who lived somewhere else. Roy made and nurtured relationships and communities better than anyone I ever met. As he moved from neighborhood to neighborhood he gave each of us a sense of participating with others, of being part of the larger community, Royville. And Royville reflected not only his generosity of spirit and warmth, but also his commitment to live life more humanely, more civically, than academic cultures often nurtured. Criticizing history as “a deeply individualistic craft” in 2006, Roy said his collaborations were experiments at making history more social and collaborative. Roy’s legacy is a big one. The AHA and other organizations have recognized Roy’s creative leadership in the new world of digital technology. But creative work in new technologies was only the latest phase of a larger quest to democratize the practice of history. He used different terms to describe this quest, but it centered on three words: democracy, audience, and practice. Ever since graduate school in the 1970s, Roy had a passionate faith in the capacity of history to make a more democratic world if only historians could figure out how to transcend the self-enclosing practices and privileges of academic culture and how to share the democratic and transformative possibilities in the new historical scholarship with people outside the academy. He once said that he had entered the historical profession at a time when “the ‘60s were still very much alive,” a time when political movements challenged historians to create a new content and practice of “history from the bottom up.” For Roy, this meant at first listening to the voices of everyday folks—to how Worcester workers experienced work and leisure. Later it led him to spearhead a synthesis through the new American Social History Project and in the pages of the Radical History Review. For Roy, as for his mentors Herb Gutman and David Montgomery, the practice of history needed to grow out of and propel movements for political change. Above all it meant developing new ways of connecting the practice of history with wider and varied audiences. This led him to encourage community oral history projects, movies and radio series, to develop a book on how history was practiced in museums, an article on conflicts between academic and popular interests that swirled around American Heritage magazine, and a pathbreaking coedited book that widened understanding of how to present the past. Roy believed that critical attention to the intersections of professional and popular uses of the past offered a starting point for historians to imagine new ways of involving more Americans in their history. The democratic challenge to professional practice did not end with monographs and textbooks that created more democratic content by inserting hitherto invisible actors. The harder challenge was of practice and audience and behind that of figuring out how history could make a real difference in the world. By the early 1990s Roy had concluded that the future of democratic practices of history required more rigorous exploration of how nonacademics understood and used the past in their daily lives. This question led us to collaborate on the project that became The Presence of the Past. We hoped to listen to and report voices that would suggest the richness of popular uses of the past. We quickly learned that nothing in our professional training equipped us to make sense of the diverse and creative ways people used the past. At around the same time, Roy was coming to focus increasingly on teachers and their classrooms as creative arenas in which scholars could connect with different audiences. Now, as many focus on his contributions to digital history, I want to recall that Roy said in one of his last interviews: “The key thing that drew me to working with ‘new media’ was the possibility of reaching new and diverse audiences.” There it was, his continuing quest for democratizing practice. To me Roy, was an inspiration for facing the difficult challenges of democratizing the practice of history. I hope his example can help light the way as we try to build on his legacy. —David Thelen James H. Cassedy, a historian at the National Library of Medicine, died of cachexia (a physical wasting disease) at his home in Bethesda on September 14, 2007. Cassedy received his B.A. in American Literature from Middlebury College in 1941, and he then served in the Army during the Second World War. After the war he worked for the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Information Agency while also attending graduate school. He received his M.A. in 1950 and his Ph.D. in American Civilization in 1959 from Brown University. Cassedy’s first position as a historian was at Williams College in 1959-1960. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he served as executive secretary of the History of Life Sciences Study Section (1962-1966) and then as deputy chief of the European Office in Paris (1966-1968). In 1968, he joined the staff of the National Library’s History of Medicine Division as a historian, a position he held until his retirement in 2006. At the History of Medicine Division, Cassedy edited the Library’s Bibliography of the History of Medicine for the entire period of its existence, 1969-1993. He also served as editor of the publication’s online version, HISTLINE. Cassedy helped to create and then managed several other programs of the division, including its seminar series and its Visiting Historical Scholar program. All of these endeavors benefited from his creativity and dedication. Although claiming that he had little interest in administration, Cassedy not only managed these programs successfully, but he did a commendable job as acting chief of the division for a period of over a year. Above all, James Cassedy was a distinguished scholar in the history of American medicine. During his career he authored five books, and he had essentially completed the manuscript of another at the time of his death. He also authored numerous articles and book reviews. His particular interest was in the history of public health and the use of statistics in medicine in the United States. His scholarship was recognized in various ways, including the award of the prestigious William Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine in 1987 for his books American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800-1860 (1984) and Medicine and American Growth, 1800-1860 (1986). James Cassedy received every major honor that the national professional society in his field, the American Association for the History of Medicine, could bestow. In addition to the Welch Medal, he was awarded the Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and delivered its honorary Garrison Lecture. He also served as president of the association in 1982-1984. An easy-going, friendly, and kind man, Cassedy was always eager to meet and assist colleagues who came to the library to do research. If they came too often or stayed too long, he would charm them into giving a presentation in the division’s seminar series. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues. John Parascandola Larry I. Bland, editor of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, historian, author, and teacher, died Tuesday, November 27, in Lexington, Virginia. He was sixty-seven years old. Generally recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the life and career of George Catlett Marshall, Bland was working on the sixth volume of the Marshall Papers when he died. The Marshall Papers is the principle publications project of the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington. In addition to the Papers, Bland also edited George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences and George C. Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China. He was the author of numerous articles and monographs on Marshall and Marshall-related topics, such as the Cold War, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and Averill Harriman. Bland was an engaging and sought-after lecturer. In October he was the keynote speaker at the dedication of the new George C. Marshall Conference Center at the U.S. State Department in Washington. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Bland’s remarks “insightful and relevant.” Earlier this year Bland gave a series of lectures on the Marshall Plan in Turkey at the invitation of the state department. He frequently spoke at professional meetings—both in this country and abroad—historical societies, government conferences, and civic groups. In addition to his work at the Marshall Foundation, Bland served as managing editor of the Journal of Military History for nineteen years. Bland was also active in local history affairs, serving as a trustee of the Rockbridge Historical Society and as the editor of the Proceedings of the Rockbridge Historical Society and News Notes. He also prepared the maps and edited Winifred Hadsel’s two books, The Roads of Rockbridge and Streets of Lexington. The recipient of many regional and national awards, Bland most recently received The Victor Gondos Memorial Service Award for long, distinguished, and outstanding service to the Society for Military History. An avid theater buff, Bland was a volunteer technician, set builder, and gofer for his wife, Joellen, who has served for twenty-five years as director of the theater at the Virginia Military Institute. Like George Marshall, Bland was also a committed and gifted gardener. He was especially known for his deft touch with dahlias, mint, and other difficult plants and flowers. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Bland received his B.S. in Physics from Purdue University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Diplomatic History from the University of Wisconsin. After teaching at colleges in North Carolina, Bland accepted a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was recommended for the Marshall Foundation position in 1977 by Edward M. Coffman, a distinguished historian from the University of Wisconsin. Bland is survived by his wife of forty-five years, Joellen; two sons, Neil of Boulder, CO and Ryan of Lexington, KY; his mother, Emma C. Bland of Indianapolis, IN; and two sisters, Juanita Bower of Mesa, AZ and Janice Bland of Plainfield, IN. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to The George C. Marshall Foundation, the Rockbridge Historical Society, or the VMI Theatre. —Brian D. Shaw A broad-ranging intellectual historian with a special interest in American historiography, Abraham S. Eisenstadt, eighty-seven, died on November 19, 2007, in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in Brooklyn on June 18, 1920. His father, a rabbinical scholar of note, instilled in Abe a capacity for close reasoning in the pursuit of precise meaning, which he retained to the end of his life. He grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended the public schools and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, graduating magna cum laude in 1940. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army. Abe loved classical and popular music as well as history and with his brother composed songs, but discovered that the halls of academe were more hospitable than Tin Pan Alley. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1955. His dissertation, published in 1956 as Charles M. Andrews: A Study in American Historical Writing, reflected his interest in American and British history and his fascination with how historians interpret history. While a graduate student at Columbia, Abe continued his relationship with Brooklyn College. He served as a lecturer from 1950 to 1956, instructor from 1956 to 1960, went from assistant professor to full professor from 1960 to 1968, and became professor emeritus in 1998. During those years, because he was conscientious and dependable, he served the college on virtually every committee of importance and founded the Brooklyn College Historical Manuscripts Collection (1960), while carrying a full teaching load of fifteen and then twelve hours a week. From 1962 to 1963, Abe was Fulbright Professor of American History and American Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy. Abe was an impressive teacher who never lectured. He engaged his students by asking questions in an informal setting. He never belittled their responses. He explored, elaborated, or further explained them. Abe found the fifty and even the seventy-five minute period confining and enjoyed seminars, which allowed for a fuller development of student responses. Abe combined his devotion to teaching and his expertise in historiography in his editorial work. His American History: Recent Interpretations, two vols. (1962), 2d. ed. (1969) is outstanding for its judicious selections and insightful introductions, placing readings in their historiographical context. Abe also coedited, with his close friend John Hope Franklin, many volumes in the American History Series for Harlan Davidson. Abe is survived by his daughters Elizabeth Evans and Laura Eisenstadt, and two grandchildren, Sian and Colin. His wife Paulette Smith, a gifted primary school teacher, and his son Jonathan, predeceased him. While on his deathbed, Abe was cheered to receive his recently published Carnegie’s Model Republic: Triumphant Democracy and the British-American Relationship (2007). His life of scholarship ended as it began, with an appreciation of the interplay of American and British societies. —Ari Hoogenboom Christiane Harzig, historian of women, gender, and international migration, died of cancer on November 6, 2007, in Tempe, Arizona. Chris was an associate professor at Arizona State University, a position she took in January 2006. During her short life (and her long struggle as a woman to find a respected place in the academy), she inspired students and colleagues alike with her passionate commitment to cross-cultural communication not only in classrooms, research collaborations, and professional associations (including the OAH, where she served on the Thelen Prize Committee), but in her personal life as well. No one who knew Chris would be surprised to learn she was grading student papers and planning new projects until ten days before her death. Chris was an international migrant who lived regularly in Germany, the U.S., and Canada. Born in Berlin in 1952, she was an exchange student in Rhode Island already as a teenager. She later studied at Vanderbilt University while preparing for her Staatsexamen at the Free University of Berlin. (Her thesis on lynching in the U.S. South long predated North American academic work on the subject.) Her 1990 Ph.D. from the Technical University drew on years of research and residence in Chicago, begun as part of a collaborative research project on the German workers of Chicago. Temporary teaching and research positions and fellowships in Toronto, Winnipeg, British Columbia, Buffalo, Bremen, and Erfurt reinforced the transatlantic life she began as a student and continued until her death. Chris is best known in North America for her work on immigrant women in the U.S. Her dissertation—published in 1991 as Familie, Arbeit und weibliche Oeffentlichkeit in einer Einwanderungsstadt—quickly generated a larger collaborative project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. A collaboration of four female scholars (from Ireland, Sweden, Poland, and Germany) together wrote the pioneering comparative monograph, Peasant Maids—City Women (1997). Chris’s interest in women in international migration continued into her final project on domestic service work globally (see the forthcoming “Domestic Service” in the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Transnational History). A conference on the topic, to be sponsored by the German Historical Institute in 2008, will honor Chris’s life and carry forward her research agenda. One hopes that colleagues in the U.S. will also become familiar with Chris’s wide-ranging and equally innovative research on immigration policy, undertaken for her 2001 Habilitation at the University of Bremen and published in 2004 as Einwanderung und Politik: Historische Erinnerung und Politische Kultur als Gestaltungsressource. An interdisciplinary tour de force, the book consciously rejected treating the U.S. as the normative “nation of immigrants” and instead compared the interaction of memory and contemporary debates about immigration in Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Since celebrations of the granting of a Habilitation require a public lecture on a separate topic, Chris reached into African American history to speak on jazz—a topic on which she also taught in Germany. As a teacher, too, she moved with ease among the social and cultural histories of Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Chris is survived by her husband, Dirk Hoerder, now also at Arizona State University, by a daughter, Anna Hoerder-Suabedissen, and by her grandson, Kiran, whom she was able to visit in the U.K. just weeks before her death. She will be mourned and remembered by colleagues and students for her intense joy in living and learning, for her forthrightness as an intellectual and as a friend, and—perhaps most of all—for her astonishing courage. Donations in Chris’s memory may be made to the Emma Goldman Scholarship Fund at Arizona State University. —Donna R. Gabaccia Frances Richardson Keller passed away on June 26, 2007. The cause of death was a stroke. Born on August 14, 1914 in Lowville, New York, Frances earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Sarah Lawrence College in 1935. Married soon after to Chauncey Keller, she had four children. Later divorced, Frances then earned a teaching certificate in history at the University of Toledo and taught in local public schools. In her late forties, she applied to doctoral programs in history. Her experience reflects what many women historians faced in the profession. Some institutions never even responded to her applications. The head of graduate studies at one Chicago area university told her that she was not a suitable candidate because of her gender and age. She then directly confronted the history chair at the University of Chicago, where she had also applied, asking, “Are you going to keep me out of here because I am over thirty-five and a woman?” She was admitted to Chicago in 1964 and became one of John Hope Franklin’s first graduate students there. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Frances, like many of her generation, participated in political activism—student, civil rights, and women’s movements—experiences that impacted her entire professional life. Two main themes emerged in all of her writings: gender and race. Frances’s extensive publications include An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chestnut (1978), Views of Women’s Lives in Western Tradition (1989), Fictions of U.S. History: A Theory and Four Illustrations (2002). In 2004 Rowman and Little republished her translation of Anna Julia Cooper’s Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists (1988). In all of her works, Frances tried to bring the marginalized to the center. Because of budget cuts in the 1970s, many historians, especially women, worked as adjunct faculty. Frances met the same fate, teaching as adjunct faculty all her life. In 1992-1993, Frances retired from San Francisco State University, where she was recognized as an excellent teacher, inspiring students with her passion, commitment, and devotion to history. In 1997, Sarah Lawrence honored her as a distinguished alumna. Frances devoted much time and labor to professional organizations. In the early 1970s, she joined the West Coast Association of Women Historians, now the Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH), which she served as president from 1981 through 1983. Seeking to promote women historians’ work, Frances helped found WAWH’s Sierra Prize, awarded annually for the best book written by a WAWH member. Thanks especially to Frances and her husband Bill Rhetta, the prize was fully endowed in 2006 and now carries an award of $800. In Frances’s honor, the WAWH Board renamed the award the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize. Frances was also deeply involved in the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession and the Conference Group on Women’s History (now combined as the Coordinating Council for Women in History, CCWH), affiliated with the American Historical Association. During the 1980s, Frances served as copresident of the CCWHP, raising funds for the award that later became the CCWH/Berkshire graduate student dissertation prize. As copresident, Frances wrote numerous letters to members of Congress supporting increased funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Historical Publications and Records Commission as well as to eight hundred CCWHP members urging them to protest the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. Frances Richardson Keller’s professional life and activism shed light on the experience of many women historians from the 1960s to the 1980s. She was not only a maker of history, as an individual and as a member of a professional generation, but also an institution builder and a mentor to many younger colleagues. With her death, historians, especially women historians, have lost a great friend. —Nupur Chaudhuri |
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