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In this issue:
Charles N. Glaab
Jack Temple Kirby
Antony Wood
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Charles N. Glaab
Charles N. Glaab, whose scholarship helped form the foundation for the field of urban history, died peacefully at his home in Toledo, Ohio, on May 1, 2009, at the age of eighty-one. Glaab had suffered recently from cancer and heart problems, but he was still teaching at the time of his passing.
Glaab was born December 19, 1927 in Williston, North Dakota, where he was imbued with his homesteading family’s powerful work ethic. Glaab began his undergraduate work at Colorado A&M University in 1945, but his studies were interrupted in 1946 by two years of Army service, mainly with a military police unit in Japan. In 1948, he resumed his education at University of North Dakota, where he received bachelor of philosophy and master of arts degrees and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. He received his doctorate from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1958.
During his time at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Glaab plunged into urban history, serving as a research associate with the University of Chicago’s History of Kansas City Project, directed by R. Richard Wohl, his intellectual mentor. He remained with the project during a two-year stint at Kansas State University (1958-1960), and his first book, Kansas City and the Railroads, emerged from that work. In 1960, he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he remained for eight years and directed the Urban History Section (1960-1963) and the Fox Valley Research Project (1963-1964) for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
While at Milwaukee, Glaab produced The American City: A Documentary History (1963); Factories in the Valley: Neenah-Menasha, 1870-1910, with Lawrence H. Larsen (1969); and numerous articles and papers. His premier work was the first edition of A History of Urban America (1967), coauthored with A. Theodore Brown. Although conceived as an effort “to use urban growth as an organizing theme in a study of the American past and to try to discover the historical meaning of that useful but elusive adjective, urban,” it quickly became a required text for a generation of students and sealed Glaab’s position as a leading figure in urban history.
Although fruitful, the Milwaukee years grew increasingly contentious, as the history department was riven by the ideological and pedagogical debates of the 1960s. For Glaab, an intellectual conservative who was naturally shy, the conflict eventually proved intolerable. This brought a quick end to his stint as department chair and prompted him to accept an invitation in 1968 to join the history department at the University of Toledo, which was building its doctoral program.
Glaab continued to produce noteworthy scholarship during his forty-one years at Toledo, including two revisions of A History of Urban America and Toledo: Gateway to the Great Lakes, coauthored in 1982 with Morgan Barclay. He edited the Urban History Group Newsletter and the Northwest Ohio Quarterly and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban History, Urban Affairs Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Annual Reviews. But he devoted most of his attention to teaching and supervision of graduate students in urban history.
His doctoral students knew him as a warm but demanding taskmaster who insisted on intellectual rigor and precise use of language. But he also respected his students’ judgment and never attempted to make us intellectual carbon copies of himself. When I was working on my dissertation on urbanization in Louisville, I called upon him several times for advice on how to resolve seemingly intractable analytical dilemmas. He would listen carefully as I outlined a problem and options for solving it. Then he invariably responded to the effect: “It sounds like you have a good handle on it; I respect your judgment.” Although I might have wished him to do so, he neither recommended an option nor second guessed the one I chose. But when another committee member questioned my analysis of an issue that was outside Glaab’s ken, he made it clear that I must satisfy his colleague in order to satisfy him.
Glaab finally retired in 2006 at the age of seventy-eight, though he continued to teach on an emeritus basis. He presided over the dissertation defense of his last doctoral student just a week before his death and only days before completing the final examination for an upper-level urban history course.
--Carl E. Kramer
Indiana University Southeast
Jack Temple Kirby
Jack Temple Kirby, the W.E. Smith emeritus professor of history at Miami University, Ohio, died of heart failure on August 11, 2009 at the age of seventy years old in St. Augustine, Florida.
One of the leading historians of the U.S. South, Jack Kirby wrote eloquently and passionately about the region’s culture and rural landscapes. His earlier works focused on social and cultural history. In Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (1972), he was one of the first scholars to understand the racism that underwrote the southern reform movement. His Media Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (1978) described the stereotypical portrayals of white southerners in twentieth-century mass culture. After 1978, Kirby’s scholarship shifted more to studies of the rural South. In Rural Worlds Lost: the American South, 1920-1960 (1987), he described the major transformations that swept the region after World War I and the impact on the various regions of the South, its people, and its cultures. He wrote eloquently and sympathetically about poor black and white southernersabout the different regions, crops, cultures, and communities that constituted the modern South. In his last two books, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscapes and Society (1995) and Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (2006), he focused on the relationship between southern rural landscapes and their inhabitants, and the ways that each had shaped the other. Mockingbird Song won the 2007 Bancroft Prize. According to the prize committee, the book, while set in the South, was about far more than the region. The jurors found it “elegantly conceived and beautifully written,” noting that “Kirby reflects profoundly on the relationships of Americansand humankindto the natural world.”
Kirby taught his entire career, for thirty-seven years, at Miami University, retiring in 2002 to St. Augustine, Florida. He was a masterful and committed teacher, known for his engaging lectures, his storytelling, and his devotion to historical inquiry. Upon his retirement, his department noted that it had lost one of its “greatest treasures and sources of experience.”
Kirby was a mentor to young scholars all over the country. He was known for his generosity of spirit and his honest criticism. Many first books appeared in far better shape because he so generously gave his time. He was always active in the profession, serving as president of the Agricultural History Society, and, at the time of his death, as the current president of the Southern Historical Association. He edited the Studies in Rural Culture Series for the University of North Carolina Press, and served on the boards of numerous journals.
He is survived by his partner of seventeen years, Constance Pierce, professor emeritus of English at Miami University; one son, Matthew of Manhattan; one daughter, Valerie Kirby of Ft. Wayne, Indiana; two grandchildren; and two sisters, Susan Kirby of Portsmouth, VA, and Betsy Andrews of Midlothian, VA. His marriage to Ann Bulleit ended in divorce. Contributions may be made in his honor to the library at Miami University.
Jack Kirby did not simply write about the South, he enjoyed the finer points of its cultureits food, wine, music, folklore, and storytellingsomething that he reveled in himself. And he loved mockingbirds and their beautiful song. He will be remembered for not only his superb scholarship, but for his graciousness, wit, storytelling, and generosity of spirit.
--Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Pennsylvania State University
Antony Wood
Antony Wood was born in Australia, but brought up in New Zealand. He attended the University of Canterbury in Christchurch for his undergraduate education. After graduation he began an M.A. in New Zealand history at Canterbury, but his ambition was to study the history of the United States. In 1962, he was awarded a James B. Duke Fellowship to study history at Duke University. His lifelong interest in the American South, particularly the Old South, was kindled in his years as a graduate student at Duke. In 1965, he was fortunate enough to obtain a short-term replacement position at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where he taught American history for two years. That experience reinforced his interest in the South. He then returned to New Zealand and taught at his alma mater in Christchurch for three years before moving, in 1970, to Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, where he taught American history until he retired.
The scope and depth of Tony’s command of American historyand indeed other scholarly literatureswas prodigious, and he was always keen to draw students into the debates that enlivened his own field and other fields. As well as teaching the history of the American continent and the United States from the fifteenth century onwards, Tony also helped develop an innovative subject in the comparative history of war. He was an energetic supervisor of honors and postgraduate students, always demanding their best. He was a great resource for his colleagues: fiercely loyal, always interested, and ever prepared to help.
A walking bibliography on a range of historical topics, particularly those associated with the American South, Tony loved any opportunity to discuss them with colleagues. Distance prevented him from attending many historical conferences in the United States, but he was a devoted member of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA), the professional body for Americanists in the Antipodes. He regularly attended its biennial conferences, gave a number of papers, thoroughly enjoyed the discussions and the friendships, and delighted in being a member of what one wit called the “Duke Mafia,” a reference to the number of Duke trained historians in the association. He was also an active member of both the Melbourne branch of the American Civil War Round Table and the Melbourne Military History seminar, which he helped found in the late 1990s. While at Duke, Tony finished his M.A. in New Zealand history, but he never did finish his Duke dissertation.
After his retirement from active teaching, Tony would often still come to undergraduate lectures on the American Civil War, or on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. He was partly there to enjoy continued contact with students, and he was partly there to check that his successors were keeping pace with the latest historiographical debates. In our careers, we never met anyone with such command of a literature; the fact that the scholarship on the history of the United States is perhaps the largest in the English language says something of his energy, intellect, and passion.
--William J. Breen
Latrobe University
--Mark Peel
Monash University
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