Arnold M. Pavlovsky, a longtime member of the AHA, died unexpectedly at home in Southampton, New Jersey, on September 23, 2012, at the age of 63. He received his BA from Franklin and Marshall College in 1970 and, after a year at Johns Hopkins, transferred to Princeton in order to work with the late Sheldon Hackney in southern history. He received his MA in 1972 and his PhD in 1974. Arnold’s Princeton dissertation examined the transition from Populism to Progressivism in Florida; Hackney’s pioneering Yale dissertation and first book examined that same transition in Alabama.
For many years Arnold taught at community colleges and public schools in both Florida and New Jersey. He was a 20year member of the US Army Reserves, and his eventual passion was writing about the Civil War, including two ebooks on important Confederate military leaders—J. E. B. Stuart and John Singleton Mosby—and a multivolume e-book study of Civil War photographs that he unfortunately did not live to complete. During many summer research trips to several archives around the country, he had uncovered a number of previously unpublished and often barely known photographs of ordinary Civil War military and civilian figures that offered new perspectives on the conflict.
Arnold advocated e-books for historians as a practical means of addressing the contemporary challenge of declining interest by university and commercial presses in traditional scholarly books. He had, in fact, intended to present a paper on the value of e-books at the 2014 AHA annual meeting in Washington, DC. He is survived by his sister.
—Howard P. Segal, University of Maine
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