Roy Rosenzweig, the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History & New Media at George Mason University, and a friend and councilor of the AHA, passed away on October 11, 2007, due to complications resulting from advanced cancer of the lungs.
Rosenzweig, who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1978, wrote or edited numerous books and articles including Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell University Press, 1992), co-authored with Elizabeth Blackmar, which won the 1993 Historic Preservation Book Award and the 1993 Urban History Association Prize for Best Book on North American Urban History; and, with Daniel Cohen, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). He and his colleagues at the Center for History and New Media received many accolades, including the AHA’s James Harvey Robinson Prize for 2004 and 2006 (for History Matters and World History Matters, respectively, for creating web sites to help students navigate the complexities of U.S and global history).
A long-standing and loyal member of the AHA, Rosenzweig served as the Association’s Vice President for Research from 2003 to 2006. Inventive as always, he used his tenure to bestir the AHA to break out of the inhibiting confines of the traditional annual meeting formats and introduced several new modes of presentation, and worked to open up access to scholarship not only at the meeting but from the pages of the American Historical Review. Rosenzweig was also an enthusiastic founding member of the National History Center, an initiative of the AHA, and served on its planning committee.