Alan B. Spitzer (1925–2024)

Alan B. Spitzer, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, passed away July 23, 2024. His scholarship placed him in the front rank of historians of France’s Restoration period. Spitzer’s books, including The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui (Columbia Univ. Press, 1957); Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration (Harvard Univ. Press, 1971); and The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), established him as a major interpreter of the revolutionary currents that animated the Bourbon Restoration period.

Courtesy University of Iowa

His work led him to critically examine how generational experience, not aging per se, marks the development of historically consequential political ideology and activism. As both an intellectual and a social historian, he melded the history of ideas and quantitative social science methods to document the animating ideas and the social boundaries faced by a revolutionary generation, what he termed “the generation of 1820.” Spitzer provided an astute and critical rendering of the conflicting interpretive currents of generational analysis in “The Historical Problem of Generations” (American Historical Review, 1973), and of the “moral choice” behind the disciplinary standards for historical truth-telling in a volume of essays, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), published after he retired from teaching. His scholarship brought him regard from his field, leading to election as 1982–83 president of the Society for French Historical Studies and appointment to the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern History and French Historical Studies.

Spitzer was born in Philadelphia on March 27, 1925. He attended Penn State University before enlisting in the army at age 18 in 1943. In the winter 1995 issue of The Palimpsest, a journal of the State Historical Society of Iowa, he shared his moving reminiscences, including how he was wounded in November 1944 not long after seeing first combat. As he wrote in that essay, he was haunted all his life by the “malevolent ingenuity” through which humans have slaughtered one another. After recovering from his war wounds, Spitzer resumed his studies, graduating with a BA from Swarthmore College in 1948 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1955. After teaching at Boston University for four years, he joined the history department at the University of Iowa, where he taught until his retirement in 1992.

When the times required a thoughtful, moral, and critical presence on campus, Spitzer stepped forward. He engaged a generation of student activists, coordinated a conference on civil rights (1964), spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War (1965), led the effort to form a “free university” (1968), and chaired a committee advocating the end of funding for the war (1970). He insisted that university space is public space dedicated to tolerance and free speech. As chair of a Joint Committee for Amnesty, he presided over a mass meeting in early 1974 on behalf of those facing retribution for opposing the war; no one in attendance will forget how he facilitated an occasion for reasonable people on both sides to articulate their deep commitments.

Spitzer was an outstanding teacher of undergraduates and graduates. His innovative teaching was characterized by the incorporation of nontraditional kinds of evidence and guiding students through hands-on analysis of quantitative data. In the 1970s, Spitzer invented a fresh alternative to the standard Western civilization course. Instead of lectures to hundreds of students, the Problems in Human History course introduced undergraduates to the study of history in a seminar setting, taught by the department’s most experienced and gifted graduate students. With a cadre of dedicated teaching assistants, he helped to create new thematic “problems” courses, carefully read and took seriously student evaluations, and sustained a model for quality general education in a large public university. In 1989, Spitzer was awarded the university’s Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Spitzer was an avid fly fisherman in the streams and rivers of the West. He enjoyed hiking in national parks, was enthusiastic about playing golf, and was a lover of jazz and blues. He is survived by his wife, Mary F. Spitzer, sons Mark and Robert, three grandchildren, and four stepchildren. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Anne Larcher Spitzer, in 1997.