In Memoriam

Edward C. Carter II

Edward Carlos Carter II, Librarian of the American Philosophical Society and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, died last month of a heart attack. He was seventy-four. A native of Rochester, New York, Ted graduated from Penn State University in 1954 and went on to receive a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. He taught at Phillips Academy, the University of Delaware, St. Stephen's School in Rome, Johns Hopkins University, and Catholic University before taking up his appointment in 1980 as Librarian of the American Philosophical Society--the learned society founded by Benjamin Franklin. At that time he also joined the faculty at Penn, where he was an immensely popular teacher of undergraduate seminars.

Ted was responsible for an explosive growth of acquisitions of manuscripts and books related to the history of science in the American Philosophical Society Library, including such remarkable collections as the papers of Nobel prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock and the extraordinary sketches of the nineteenth-century naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale. He also implemented a successful new program of Library Resident Fellowships and was instrumental in bringing new technology and conservation techniques to the Library. The use of the Library by the scholarly public more than doubled during his tenure.

Ted served as chairman of the Board of St. Stephen's School, president of the Independent Research Libraries Association, and member of the boards of the National Humanities Alliance, the Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. Among his numerous accolades, Ted was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, and in 1995 the library at St. Stephen's School was named in his honor.

The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Yale University Press), a ten-volume edition of the writings and drawings of the early American architect and engineer, was Ted's principal scholarly accomplishment. As editor-in-chief of the Latrobe Papers he was responsible not only for raising sufficient funds from a range of sources but also for setting the goals and standards of the project. "The Chief," as the Latrobe staff fondly referred to him, was a team player who worked collaboratively, but was always the team's leader and knew how to draw out the best in individuals. He inspired the Latrobe Papers staff by his enthusiasm for all and everything Latrobe, and by his faith that high quality scholarship and timely completion of each element of the project could go hand-in-hand. His leadership was critical to bringing the project to successful completion, an uncommon feat these days in the world of historical editing.

Ted always demonstrated great personal interest in those whom he drew into his various enterprises. He was generous in his appraisals of their work and accomplishments, celebrating them whenever possible, and at the same time pointing them toward higher goals. He was not satisfied until his students and proteges were in what he thought were the best possible career tracks, and he readily took vicarious pleasure in their accomplishments.

Ted published and gave professional talks frequently on a wide array of historical subjects. While his own insights and concepts were imaginative, he always sought ideas and confirmation from others. It was not unusual for his proteges and colleagues across the country to receive telephone calls at odd hours (early mornings, late evenings, weekends) when he was hard at work on a talk or an essay and felt the need to share his ideas and benefit from the responses of those whom he expected to be engaged in his intellectual enterprise. Much of his scholarly work, such as the Latrobe Papers, was in fact collaborative, and his acknowledgments of such joint work were unstinting.

As a mentor, Ted encouraged his proteges in teaching positions to remain involved in scholarship. Phone conversations inevitably included the query, "So how's the book coming along?" But Ted placed as high a value on teaching as he did on scholarship. When his former students and proteges landed public history positions, he urged them to keep a hand in teaching. His own career modeled this important balance of scholarship and teaching. As a professor at Penn, Ted also served as a senior thesis advisor, the only adjunct professor to do so. Colleagues at Catholic University and later Penn respected him for his innovative teaching methods.

In the end, Ted was a friend. He shared his life, his joys and concerns with those whom he cared about. For those who counted him as a mentor, as a source of advice and wisdom, and simply as a friend, he will be greatly missed. Ted is survived by his wife Louise, of Wayne, Pennsylvania; his brother Paul, of Portland, Maine; and four stepdaughters. His daughter Laura Carter predeceased him. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on 7 November 2002 at Benjamin Franklin Hall of the American Philosophical Society. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial contributions be sent to the Edward C. Carter II Library Fellowship Fund, American Philosophical Society Library, 105 S. Fifth St., Philadelphia, PA 19106 or to St. Stephen's School, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003. q

Darwin H. Stapleton
Rockefeller Archive Center

John C. Van Horne
The Library Company of Philadelphia

Lee W. Formwalt
Organization of American Historians

Sheldon H. Harris

Sheldon H. Harris, professor emeritus of history at California State University, Northridge, died suddenly on 31 August 2002 at U.C.L.A. Medical Center of a blood infection. He was seventy-four.

Harris was best known for his contributions to the fields of medical and military ethics. He was the author of Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-up (Routledge, 1994, revised edition 2002). Based on extensive fieldwork, including twelve visits to China, and on information in United States and KGB archives, this work helped expose to a world audience the operations of Unit 731 and other Japanese army units that conducted germ warfare experiments on living captives during the 1930s and 1940s. It argued that the perpetrators were never prosecuted because the United States hoped to use the results of their investigations for its own biological warfare program. Harris wrote scholarly articles, addressed numerous conferences and spoke through radio and television in several countries about Japanese experiments and epidemics that swept through areas where the experiments were conducted. Four days before his death, in a case supported by evidence Harris had gathered, a Japanese court for the first time acknowledged the existence of these crimes.

Professor Harris was born in Brooklyn, New York on 22 August 1928, received his undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College, an M.A. at Harvard, and the Ph.D. in 1958 at Columbia University. His dissertation subject was John Louis O'Sullivan, the jingoist editor to whom the phrase "Manifest Destiny" was attributed. He was also author of Paul Cuffe: Black America and the African Return (Simon & Schuster, 1972). He taught at the University of Massachusetts from 1958 to 1963 when he joined the history department of California State University, Northridge. During his years at Northridge, Harris was active on leading university committees. Among students, he was probably best known for one of the earliest and most innovative film-and-history courses, "Hollywood in U.S. History," in which, for example, he brought Mel Brooks to class as commentator on "Blazing Saddles."

Harris retired from teaching in 1991. He is survived by his wife Sheila, and by his daughter Robin and his son David, both of San Francisco.

Ronald Schaffer
California State University, Northridge

Yehoshua Arieli

Yehoshua Arieli, McDonald Professor emeritus of American History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, died peacefully at his home in Jerusalem on 3 August 2002 at age eighty-six. Among the very few foreign scholars whose work has exerted an impact upon the historiography of American political ideas, Arieli was best known for his book Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Harvard University Press, 1964), which explores what was distinctive about the political culture of the revolutionary and early national eras in particular.

In Israel, he was the undisputed doyen of American history and American studies. He established the field at the Hebrew University and aided in its creation at the universities of Tel Aviv and Haifa. In 1993, he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian award; the citation stated that he "had set rigid standards for himself and for others, as a human being, as an intellectual, and as an historian." On his eightieth birthday, his friend Isaiah Berlin wrote that Arieli possessed "absolute integrity, amazing erudition . . . and . . . great heart."

Arieli was born in 1916 at Carlsbad (Karlovy Vim) in the Sudetenland. He emigrated to a kibbutz in Mandate Palestine in 1931. From 1937 to 1940 he studied history, philosophy, and music at the Hebrew University. He then joined the British Army's Pioneer Corps in North Africa and Greece. Captured by the Germans in 1941, he spent four years in a POW camp, managing (as he once told us) to conceal that German was his mother tongue and that he was Jewish. After the war he became head of the Youth Tar Company in Jerusalem, served with the Haganah, and, after independence, with the Israel Defense Forces in the battle for Jerusalem. In 1956 he served as military governor of Gaza. Because of--not despite--his military experiences he took a decisive public stand after the 1967 Six Day War against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He held that position for the rest of his life.

From 1951 to 1953 he studied at Harvard on a Fulbright, notably with Oscar Handlin, and received his Ph.D. in 1955 from the Hebrew University. In 1967 he founded the Department of American studies at that university. He held fellowships at the Center for the Study of Liberty (1960-1961) and the Charles Warren Center (1967-1968) at Harvard, Wolfson College, Oxford (1973-1974), the National Humanities Center (1979-1980), and the Max Planck Institute, Goettingen (1984-1985). He published six books and about sixty essays in Hebrew, German, and English, notably on the historical roots of nationalism, on the religious roots of modern societies, and on the universal and particular patterns of American nationalism.

He is survived by Yael, his wife of fifty-six years, three children, and grandchildren.

Walter Nugent
University of Notre Dame

William Bruce White

William Bruce White was a professor of American history from 1965 until his death 15 August 2001. He completed his Ph.D. under Merle E. Curti at the University of Wisconsin in 1968. In 1965 he taught at Stanford University in the Western Civilization program for two years, going on to take another two year position in American history at the University of Michigan in 1967. In 1969 Bruce accepted a position as Assistant Professor of American history at the University of Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his career. He taught there for thirty years both at Erindale College and the downtown St. George campus. While at the University of Toronto, Bruce introduced and taught over ten courses in American history--all within the area of social history. He was active in the fields of military, ethnic, immigration, African American, and Native American history. His many contributions as a valued colleague and highly effective lecturer endeared him to those who knew him. As an individual he had a quiet manner, wry sense of humor, and high personal and academic standards. Bruce's published articles were highly regarded and his book Beyond Wounded Knee: The American Army and the Indian, 1889-1991 was in progress at the time of his death.

Alice White

Willi Paul Adams

Willi Paul Adams, Professor of North American History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and the Department of History at the Free University of Berlin, died at the age of sixty-two on 3 October 2002. He was a self-described member of the pioneering second generation of German historians of the United States, homesteaders cultivating a field opened by a handful of postwar pathfinders, establishing its institutions under frontier conditions and guiding it to mature and original exploration of the American past. Willi Paul Adams was above all a bridge-builder, committed in both scholarship and professional activities to linking Americanists on both sides of the Atlantic and deepening German understanding of the historical processes that have shaped the American colossus.

He was born in Leipzig and raised by his widowed mother in the Rhineland, embarking on his lifelong engagement with America thanks to a formative year as an American Field Service student in Frewsburg, New York. After brief study at the University of Bonn, he moved to the tense, vibrant atmosphere of Berlin and its Free University in 1962. Where the new John F. Kennedy Institute provided a stimulating setting for the 1968 completion of his doctoral work and his 1972 Habilitation. In that year he moved from his Berlin assistant professorship to a professorship in American Studies in Frankfurt, until he was called back to Berlin in 1977. Significant periods in the United States included doctoral research at Yale, two stints at Harvard's Charles Warren Center, teaching at the University of Chicago, and visits at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Newberry Library, Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies, and Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities; in 1997, he was a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His honors included the American Historical Association's 1976 Bicentennial Award for the best foreign-language book dealing with the American Revolution.

That book--published in 1980 (republished in an expanded edition in 2001) as The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era--grew out of his doctoral work in Gerald Stourzh's Berlin seminar on constitutionalism and republicanism, concerns that remained an enduring motif within Adams's scholarship and led notably to his 1994 translation and editing of the Federalist Papers with his wife, Angela Meurer Adams. Immigration history provided a second motif, from his 1980 essay on the German press and the American Revolution and editorship of an agenda-setting volume on German immigration, to uncompleted projects on German-American congressmen and political thought. Interpreting American history to a broader German public formed a third strand of his work. His edited 1977 U.S. history text, translated into Italian and Spanish, was widely adopted in Europe and Latin America; a coedited U.S. survey for a broad German public appeared in three versions, the most recent in 1998. His last major work, published in 2000, is a breathtaking two-volume survey of research in American history for German students. Adams also lent energy and passion to a fourth concern: the full integration of foreign scholars into the interpretive debates of American historiography. Urging on the profession what he practiced in his own scholarship and teaching, he was a significant force in the internationalization of OAH, serving as the JAH German contributing editor for nine years, stimulating roundtables, and calling much-needed attention to issues of translation.

One reviewer of his 1980 monograph lauded its careful scholarship and good sense, words that find a place in any epitaph for Willi Paul Adams. Those who knew him, including the students and colleagues to whom he gave so much of his time, would add words like wise, generous, caring, and above all, that old-fashioned term, good. He was a man of expansive curiosity, fascinated by language and the intricacies of the two tongues in which he worked, a born Socratic, always questioning and provoking, a warm friend, devoted to Angela and to his sons Johannes and Thomas, and valiant in his final struggle. He lived and worked on the frontier between his two worlds of Germany and the United States, and will be deeply missed in both q

Kathleen Neils Conzen
University of Chicago

As we go to press . . .

Historian Stephen Ambrose Succumbs to Lung Cancer

News of Stephen Ambrose's death arrived as we were going to press. A full obituary by George McGovern will appear in the February issue.

Military historian and biographer Stephen Ambrose died 13 October 2002 from lung cancer; he was sixty-six years old. Ambrose, best known for his military and biographical histories, had become a best-selling author during the last decade and served as an advisor for feature films. Some of his writings have recently become controversial, raising questions about plagiarism.

Stephen Edward Ambrose was born on 10 January 1936 in Decatur, Illinois. The son of a physician, Ambrose grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin, with the intention of going on to a career in medicine. While at the University of Wisconsin, however, he became enthralled by one of his history professors and decided to become a historian. Ambrose received his bachelor's degree from Wisconsin and obtained his master's degree in history at Louisiana State. He returned to Wisconsin to earn his doctorate in history. Ambrose was also a member of the Navy and Army R.O.T.C. at Wisconsin. He retired from teaching in 1995, spending most of his career at the University of New Orleans, and in 1998 he won the National Humanities Medal.

Ambrose published multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, but is best known for his military histories. His book D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, was his first entry into fame. Other writings include Undaunted Courage, the story of Lewis and Clark; Citizen Soldiers, recalling combat from D-Day to Germany's surrender; Nothing Like It in the World, the account of building the transcontinental railroad; and The Wild Blue, chronicling World War II B-24 bomber crewmen. The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation was his most recent book, coauthored with Douglas G. Brinkley and photographer Sam Abell. To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian will be published later this year. He also served as advisor for the film Saving Private Ryan, and his book Band of Brothers was serialized by Home Box Office.

Ambrose is survived by his wife, Moira, sons Barry, Hugh, and Andy, daughters Grace and Stephenie, five grandchildren, and two brothers.