Walter B. Hill Jr.
Walter B. Hill Jr., 59, a senior archivist and the first subject area specialist in Afro-American history at the National Archives, died July 29, 2008, of leukemia at the Washington Hospital Center. Dr. Hill was actively involved in many professional organizations, including the Organization of American Historians (OAH) where he served as chair of the Research and Access to Historical Documentation Committee. In addition to his service to the OAH, Dr. Hill served as National Vice President and Executive Council member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; a Commissioner on the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture; and Chief Historian for the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Walter Hill had a distinguished thirty-year career at the National Archives where he assisted countless scholars, historians, editors, and documentary filmmakers investigating the African American experience. As a scholar he published a number of articles, guides, and essays on African American history as documented in federal records. Among his most important contributions was a reference information paper on “Federal Research Relating to Civil Rights in the Post-World War II Era.” In addition to his work at the National Archives, Dr. Hill taught at Saint Louis University, the University of Maryland, and Howard University, where he was an adjunct professor until his death.
Walter Hill was born in St. Louis and attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he earned a B.A. in history in 1971. He received an M.A. degree from Northern Illinois University in 1973, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1988 where he studied under Ira Berlin. He also served as a consultant on the movie Glory.
Walter Hill had a passion for history and a deep love for his work and for the National Archives. He truly believed that the past is prologue and sought to instill that belief in a generation of archivists he mentored until the end of his life.
This gentle man was also a fiercely competitive athlete and, among other sports, was an ardent handball player. He twice won the Maryland state doubles championship.
Survivors include his wife, Irene Hill, his son Matthew Hill and daughter Alexis Hill, three sisters; and countless friends, colleagues, and admirers.
—Michael Kurtz
National Archives and Records Administration
John Y. Simon
Professional historians, documentary editors, and the general public have suffered a major loss in the death of John Y. Simon, professor in the Department of History, Southern Illinois University. Best known as the executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and editor of thirty-one volumes of the Grant Papers, Simon passed away on July 8, 2008. As a youngster, Simon worked in Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Bookstore where the legendary Ralph G. Newman introduced him to major authors in the field of Lincoln and the Civil War. A 1955 graduate of Swarthmore College, he earned his Master's (1956) and doctorate (1961) degrees under Paul Buck at Harvard University. While a graduate student, he was a teaching fellow for three years. He then taught at Ohio State University from 1960 to 1962 and became executive director and managing editor of the newly formed Ulysses S. Grant Association in 1962. In 1964, he joined the history faculty at Southern Illinois University as an associate professor and became professor in 1971.
Simon was a prolific author and a much-acclaimed teacher, lecturer, and public speaker. He regularly spoke to a variety of professional and amateur historical groups and often appeared on television, gaining the reputation as an individual who could make complicated historical issues understandable through the use of clear language, analytical insight, and good humor. Students flocked to his classes. He taught undergraduates on the Southern Illinois University home campus and by television around the state of Illinois. It was not unusual for students to applaud at the end of one of his lectures. Simon was major professor to numerous graduate students.
His most significant contribution, however, was his work with the Grant Papers. Anyone seriously interested in studying the period of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age could not do so without consulting the Grant Papers. Intelligently and meticulously edited, these volumes set a standard and made Simon a leader in the field of documentary editing. Library shelves are full of books which cite the Grant Papers and acknowledge John Simon’s generous personal aid, besides. A founder of the Association for Documentary Editing earlier in his career, from whom he received the Julian P. Boyd Award, he also received the Lincoln Prize and the Lincoln Forum’s Richard N. Current Award, in later years, in recognition of his lifetime of achievement. In July 2008, Illinois Senator Richard Durbin honored Simon by reading his life story into the Congressional Record.
Anyone who ever met John Simon or heard him speak will always remember his sharp wit, his infectious laugh, the inimitable inflection of his voice, his vast historical knowledge, his love of students, his generosity in sharing information and insights, and the cloud of cigarette smoke that perpetually seemed to encircle him. John Y. Simon influenced the lives of all the many people he touched, and he will be sorely missed.
Preceded in death by his son and son-in-law, he left behind his wife, Harriet, the love of his life and documentary colleague; his daughter, Ellen S. Roundtree; and grand daughters, Rachel Harriet and Amanda Betty.
Memorials may be made to the Ulysses S. Grant Association c/o John F. Marszalek, 108 Grant Ridge Road, Starkville, MS 39759 or to the Philip Furst Simon Memorial Fund, Friends of the Carbondale Public Library, 405 W. Main St., Carbondale, IL 62901.
—John F. Marszalek
Mississippi State University
John E. Taylor
John E. Taylor, a long-time archivist at the National Archives, died September 20 at his home. Taylor’s encyclopedic knowledge of World War II intelligence records and his ability to locate them made him legendary among students, journalists, authors, and historians. He was eighty-seven years old.
A National Archives employee for sixty-three years, Mr. Taylor began working at the agency the week World War II officially ended in September 1945, before most employees at the Archives were born. Often asked when he would retire, his standard answer was, “Not this week.” During his time at the Archives, Mr. Taylor assisted thousands of individuals—from best-selling authors to college students—researching books, dissertations, articles, and term papers. Researchers from around the world have cited him for his grasp of history and his ability to recall where historical records could be found.
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein first met Mr. Taylor as a researcher himself.
“John Taylor was the first person I met at the National Archives many years ago while searching for a dissertation topic,” Weinstein said. “With me as with everyone, Mr. Taylor was generous with his time and with his ideas. His distinguished career brought honor to the dogged research enterprise which the Archives embodies. He is irreplaceable, of course, and he will be sorely missed.”
Mr. Taylor was honored by a number of organizations for his work in assisting researchers. Among those awards was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Society Distinguished Service Award in 2006; the OSS was the forerunner of the CIA. In 1997, the Japanese embassy honored Mr. Taylor for his assistance to Japanese historians and journalists over the years. The National Intelligence Study Center honored him for providing guidance to authors who write about U.S., British, and Russian intelligence. And the American Jewish Historical Society gave him its first “Distinguished Archivist Award” for a lifetime of work as an archivist.
A Washington Times article in 2003 referred to Mr. Taylor as a “wizard of research” and “one of the least well-known yet most revered men in Washington.” At that time, he received a “lifetime achievement” award from the Scone Foundation, established by Stanley Cohen to honor important yet unknown professionals.
“He’s like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat,” author David Kahn (author of The Codebreakers) told the Washington Times, saying Mr. Taylor could produce “amazingly useful documents from the immensities of the archives (that) makes all of us writers look like wizards of research.”
Over the years, hundreds of authors have cited Mr. Taylor’s help in their research at the Archives. In a 2003 article, the Baltimore Sun observed: “There may be no [other] American whose name appears in the acknowledgements of so many books.”
—Miriam Kleiman
National Archives and Records Administration
Richard C. Wade
Richard C. Wade, widely regarded as the father of urban history in the United States and the first president of the Urban History Association, died on July 19, 2008, at his home on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Born in 1921 (the exact date is elusive) in Des Moines, Iowa, and raised in suburban Winnetka, Illinois, he earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Rochester, where he played varsity basketball and baseball and was such a fine tennis player that he was a member of the Junior Davis Cup team. Wade returned to the University of Rochester to teach after receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1956.
Unusual among historians for his active and continuing interest in politics at every level, Wade commuted from Chicago to manage Robert F. Kennedy’s successful upstate New York campaign for the United States Senate. He was among the small circle of top advisors to Senator George McGovern in his race for the presidency in 1972, served as a Chicago Housing Commissioner from 1967 to 1971, chaired the New York Governor’s Commission for Historical Preservation from 1974 to 1978, and chaired the New York State Commission on Libraries from 1989 to 1993.
But it was as a pioneering urban historian that Wade will longest be remembered. After teaching at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1960s, he moved to the University of Chicago in 1963, where his eight-year tenure as professor of history proved to be one of the most remarkable in the history of American higher education. His unique combination of enthusiasm, insight, caustic humor, brisk idealism, good judgment, and intellectual brilliance inspired more than twenty young scholars to redirect their lives to the study of American urbanization, myself among them. In 1971, Wade became Distinguished Professor of History at the new Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he worked to bring yet another group of historians to the study of urban history and where he became especially active in the effort to reduce adult illiteracy. The all-day conference that marked his retirement from CUNY on October 27, 1994, attracted such speakers as George McGovern, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Hope Franklin, David Nasaw, and many of his former students.
Especially in his early career, Richard Wade was as prolific as he was influential. His first book, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830, was based upon his Harvard dissertation. It challenged the prevailing frontier thesis by asserting that Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, and St. Louis were far more important in the settling of the Ohio River Valley than farmers and trappers. Similarly, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 argued that bondage was common in urban areas but that the peculiar nature of city living, and especially the practice of “hiring out” and “living out” undermined the peculiar institution in places like Charleston, so that slavery was declining in urban areas even before the Civil War. Finally, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, written with Harold M. Mayer, was unusual for its focus on neighborhoods, rather than the central business district, and for its use of photographs as part of the argument, not as gratuitous illustrations.
Professor Wade’s last public appearance was before the “Seminar on the City” at Columbia University in September 2006, when he reflected upon his many years as a teacher, scholar, political advisor, and public intellectual. He leaves his wife, Liane Thomas Wade, and four stepchildren who grew up on Roosevelt Island.
—Kenneth T. Jackson
Columbia University