Jackson Holbrook Bailey
Jackson Holbrook Bailey, professor emeritus of history at Earlham College, and one of the United States' most respected scholars of Japan, died at his home near Brattleboro, Vermont, on August 2, 1996. He was 70 years old.
A native of Maine, born in 1925, Bailey came from an old Quaker family and his Quaker faith was one of the determinative influences of his life. After service as a noncombatant in the Army Medical Corps in World War II, which first took him to Japan, he graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in 1950. He took an MA at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1952, then spent several years in Japan working for the American Friends Service Committee. Returning to the United States, he earned his PhD. in Japanese history at Harvard University, where he was a student of Edwin O. Reischauer.
In 1959 Bailey returned to Earlham College, where he spent his entire teaching career. Early in the 1960s, he spearheaded an innovative cooperative program with Antioch College, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, to develop a program with Earlham in what was then called "Non-Western Studies," focusing on Japan. The program not only brought leading scholars, speakers, and visiting lecturers of Japan to Earlham, but also took Earlham faculty and students in a variety of fields to Japan for varying periods of study. Three decades later, Bailey's efforts had grown into an East Asian Studies program with an international reputation, and the Institute for Education on Japan, which offers guidance on incorporating Japanese language, culture, and history into elementary and secondary school curricula and advice to business people and communities seeking Japanese investment. Bailey retired from full-time teaching in 1987 but continued to teach part-time for several years afterward, and he was active in institute affairs until his death. In his last years at Earlham, he held the Landnun Bolling Chair in Public Affairs.
Bailey was the author of numerous scholarly articles and publications. He edited a series of occasional papers for the Institute for Education on Japan and translated a number of Japanese scholarly works into English. His most important book was his last, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives: Political and Economic Change in a Tohoku Village (1991). In the 19705 he was an advisor for the PBS series Japan: The Living Tradition, and Japan: The Changing Tradition.
In 1988 the Japanese government awarded Bailey the Order of the Sacred Treasure, the highest honor that it gives to a non-Japanese. In 1996 the Association for Asian Studies named him the recipient of its Franklin Buchanan Award, and the same year he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Earlham College. He held four honorary doctorates from institutions in the United States and Japan. In 1991 he received the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award of the American Historical Association. His nominator stated, "I doubt that any historian has worked as hard or as effectively as he to bring Asia into the undergraduate curriculum. He started on this long before 'multicultural education' became fashionable. Jackson Bailey is a fine historian whose career has been dedicated to teaching."
Bailey is survived by his wife, Caroline Palmer Bailey; four children; and seven grandchildren.
Thomas D. Hamm
Earlham College
Stuart B. Kaufman
Stuart B. Kaufman, professor of history at the University of Maryland, died of a heart attack at his home in Garrett Park, Maryland, on January 19, 1997, at the age of 54. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis, and his son, David.
Stuart was educated at the University of Florida (B.A. 1962, M.A. 1964) and Emory University (Ph.D. 1970), and taught at Morris Brown College in Atlanta (1965-66) and Texas A & M University (1967-69) before coming to the University of Maryland in 1969.
It was at Maryland that he forged a career utilizing his skills as a teacher and an editor. He began his editorial work with Louis Harlan on the Booker T. Washington Papers—serving first as a Nation Historical Publications Commission Fellow in the Advanced Editing of Documentary Sources (1969-70) and later as an assistant editor (1970-73).
He established his own project, the Samuel Gompers Papers, in 1974. Under his direction the project collected copies of hundreds of thousands of pages of Gompers documents and, between 1986 and 1997, published six volumes of selected documents. A seventh volume was completed before Stuart's death and will be published in 1998. In addition, the project published two microfilm collections.
Stuart's monographs included Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1848-1896 (1973); Challenge and Change: The History of the Tobacco Workers International Union (1986); and A Vision of Unity: The History of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union (1986). In 1988 he founded Labor's Heritage, a quarterly journal of labor history, and he served as its editor until his death.
In addition, he served as acting historian of the U.S. Department of Labor (1974) and acting director of the Industrial Relations and Labor Studies Center at the University of Maryland (1986). He was instrumental in the creation of the George Meany Memorial Archives and the preservation of AFL, AFL-CIO, and trade union records. He served as director of the Meany Archives (1987-89) and subsequently as advisor to the executive director of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies for archival affairs from 1989 until his death.
The "real history" of the labor movement, Gompers once said, was to be found "in the archives of our offices and in the memories of men." He looked forward to the time when scholars, working in these records, would present labor's story to the world. Early in his career, Stuart Kaufman embraced both the challenge—Gompers was president of the AFL for nearly 40 years and left a written record of almost three quarters of a million pages of documents—and the opportunity of telling this story.
Stuart's vision was truly democratic. He wanted readers of the Gompers volumes to be able, as he once put it, to "roll up their sleeves and plunge into Gompers' world," where they could discover "labor's heritage," "a richly textured" kaleidoscope of American life, a "mosaic picture" viewed through the eyes of working men and working women. His objective was to provide the tools—thoughtfully selected and accurately rendered documents supplemented by carefully researched and tightly written annotations—and then to let the volumes speak for themselves. He will be remembered for his commitment to the telling of labor's rich and complex story and the craft and skill he brought to his work.
Peter J. Albert
Samuel Gompers Project
University of Maryland
Melvin Kranzberg
Melvin Kranzberg, principal founder of the history of technology in the United States, died of cancer at his home in Atlanta on December 6, 1995, at the age of 78. Born and raised in St. Louis, Kranzberg earned his A.B. from Amherst in 1938 and his M.A. (1939) and Ph.D. (1942) from Harvard. Originally trained as a historian of modern France and Europe, his first book was The Siege of Paris, 1870-71 (1950), and many undergraduates will recall his volume 1848: A Turning Point? (1959) in the Heath Problems in European Civilization series. After completing his graduate studies, Kranzberg served as a sergeant in army combat military intelligence in Europe, earning several decorations including a Bronze Star for heroism. After the war Kranzberg taught at Harvard, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Amherst, before going to Case Institute of Technology in 1952, where over the next 20 years he shifted his teaching and research interests to the history of technology. From 1972 to his retirement in 1988, Kranzberg held the chair of Callaway Professor of the History of Technology at Georgia Tech.
Mel Kranzberg's developing concentration in the history of technology stemmed from his attempts to encourage an interest in historical studies among his many engineering students at Case. He became very active in the American Society for Engineering Education and served as secretary of its division of humanities and social sciences before he and others founded the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 1958. Along with a handful of colleagues, Mel sought to establish the history of technology as an autonomous field of inquiry, and not merely "applied science" or a subset of economic history. He served as SHOT secretary from 1959 to 1974 and editor of the society's quarterly journal Technology and Culture from 1959 to 1981. Along the way he produced (with Carroll Pursell) the two-volume Technology in Western Civilization (1967), which became a critically needed text for many new courses in the history of technology.
Kranzberg dedicated the rest of his life to promoting the history of technology both in this country and abroad. He authored more than 150 articles as well as 11 books on a wide array of topics that increasingly ranged away from European history to focus on the history of technology, engineering education, and science-technology studies. He founded and directed the first American Ph.D. program in the history of technology at Case, and in 1968 was cofounder of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC). He chaired several national advisory committees and was an active member and president of Sigma XI, the scientific research society. Recognitions too numerous to list included six honorary doctorates and a host of medals from historical, engineering, and scientific societies as well as from the State of Israel.
An accounting of Melvin Kranzberg's many honors does not adequately define the man nor the lasting imprint of his work. He was an academic entrepreneur in the finest sense, creatively using his talents to build lasting institutions and promote the careers of many young scholars. Everyone who knew Mel has a favorite story, usually one that somehow relates his wonderful sense of humor and outgoing demeanor. Mel's personality dominated both SHOT and ICOHTEC for many years and left a legacy of friendliness and scholarly cooperation that still infuses those organizations.
Mel Kranzberg was always the optimist, and there were those who criticized his apparent unwillingness to confront the more negative consequences of technological change. But arguing that the history of technology must be more than the internal study of machines and processes, Kranzberg had pioneered what he termed a "contextual" approach that emphasized the importance of understanding technology within a broader cultural setting. Always placing highest priority on the role of humankind, Mel summed up his views with his simplistic but also elegant notion that "technology was neither good nor bad, nor was it neutral." Mel Kranzberg's enthusiasm and wit are sorely missed, but his influence lives on within the institutions that he played such a major role in constructing.
Mel Kranzberg is survived by his wife, Les, of Atlanta; two sons by a previous marriage, John and Steven, both of St. Louis; a brother, Maurice, also of St. Louis; and four grandchildren.
August W. Giebelhaus
Georgia Institute of Technology
Carl Hamilton Pegg
Carl Hamilton Pegg, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former chair of the history department (1960-65), and author of Evolution of the European Idea, 1914-1932 (1983), died February 9, 1996, in the Carol Woods Health Center in Chapel Hill after a long illness. He was a nature lover who enjoyed long walks through acres of undeveloped woodland he owned near Chapel Hill, a large portion of which was donated to the Nature Conservancy shortly before his death.
Pegg was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, on April 13, 1905, and attended grade and high schools there. He arrived in Chapel Hill as a freshman in 1923 and by 1929 had completed requirements for the A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in history. He then taught for one year at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
In 1930 he returned to Chapel Hill where he remained on the staff of the history department until retirement in 1975. In the mid-1930s Pegg was assigned to plan and administer the social science course, a survey of Western history required of all freshmen. He developed for the course a large syllabus and, with others, a textbook, America and the Changing World (1942, 1947), which was also used in undergraduate classrooms elsewhere. Later he wrote Contemporary Europe in World Focus (1956) on Europe since 1918. A number of his articles appeared in German and French historical journals. Many of his former students recall his emphasis, all through the time of Soviet power, on the importance of nationalism as a durable force in history, and on the idea of European union.
Pegg contributed to the development of the university by laying the foundations for a separate undergraduate library and by building courses and collections in 20thcentury European and in Russian and Asian history. This included a large exchange program with Russian libraries.
During his career Pegg directed approximately 50 M.A. theses and 36 doctoral dissertations. Pegg is survived by his wife, Eleanor C. Smith Pegg, formerly of Newport News, Virginia; one daughter, Elizabeth Gregory Staton, of Hillsborough, North Carolina; and two grandchildren.
George B. Tindall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
William Dillon Piersen
William Dillon Piersen, along with his wife Charlotte and their 16-year-old daughter, Katherine ("Katie"), died at the age of 54 in a traffic accident in Arkansas on December 30, 1996. They were on their way home from a holiday visit to Charlotte's parents in Houston, Texas.
Bill was in his 20th year as a professor of history at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Charlotte was on the staff of the library at Vanderbilt University, and Katie was an outstanding student at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School in Nashville.
Bill was born and raised in Highland Park, Illinois. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1964 and went on to Indiana University, where he received two M.A.'s in history and in folklore, and a Ph.D. in history in 1975. During graduate school and after, he taught at Purdue University, Springfield College in Massachusetts, and Texas Tech University before coming to Fisk in 1977.
Despite the heavy teaching and service load at Fisk, Bill was the author of three well-received books, several articles and book chapters, book reviews, and more than 450 abstracts of journal articles. His books included Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth Century New England (1988); Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage (1993); and From Africa to America: African-American History from the Colonial Era to the Early Republic. 1526-1790 (1996). Black Yankees won the Old Sturbridge Village Research Library Society 1988 Book Prize for New England history and was on the Choice list of “Outstanding Academic Books” (1989). Black Legacy was also on the Choice list for 1994. He was the recipient of a United Negro College Fund Henry C. McBay Research Fellowship for 1995-96, particularly for his planned further investigation into early African American culture.
Bill was the author of articles in the Journal of American Folklore, the Journal of Negro History, Research in African Literatures, and Indiana Magazine of History among others. His book reviews appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, the New England Quarterly, and the Journal of theEarly Republic. His abstracts for ABC-CLIO of articles in such journals as African Economic History, the Liberian Studies Journal, and the Journal of American Folklore appeared in America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts.
Bill's interests were wide-ranging within the field of African American and American history and culture of the colonial era. He had an inquiring mind and was fearless in following his interests wherever they might lead, regardless of the received wisdom. His research and writing have been praised for their originality and clarity of expression. He drew on sources and insights from folklore and popular culture, religion and magic, cooking, medicine, music, language, or from whatever might be useful to elucidate the African and African American role in creation of American culture and history. As he stated shortly before his death, "My work takes Africa seriously as one of sources of our national culture, and I have argued that American culture cannot be understood without serious attention to its African heritage."
During his 20 years at Fisk, Bill became a leading member of the faculty. He served as chair of the department of history in 1980-87 and 1993-96, and had just been appointed director of the division of social sciences in 1996. He served twice as chair of the faculty assembly and on numerous committees, including chair of the promotion and tenure committee.
Bill worked extremely hard on his teaching and was well-liked and respected by his students. He achieved the difficult task of being academically demanding and rigorous while simultaneously encouraging the students with a warm and friendly manner. One of the honors he cherished most was being named the outstanding teacher in the division of social sciences for 1993-94. He dealt with all students from freshman to senior level with the same equable and stimulating approach, and inspired many to go on to further graduate or professional studies.
In all his roles, whenever he perceived something could be done better he did not sit back and complain, but jumped in and tried to find solutions. Thus, he volunteered to teach in the introductory freshman- level writing course because he felt it was so important. He developed a new course in African American heritage that is now part of our required core curriculum. And he devoted many long hours to teaching in another required core course, "The World and Its Peoples," a survey of world history and culture. For this latter course, Bill had over the years written a two-volume book comprising his much-revised lecture notes, which he eventually planned to publish as a textbook. Like all of his work, it is an extremely stimulating and original piece of writing.
Bill will be sorely missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and students at Fisk as well as by the academic community throughout the country. He was tragically struck down at the peak of his academic career, but we all have much to learn from his work and life.
James A. Quirin
Fisk University
Forrest Carlisle Pogue
Forrest Carlisle Pogue, historian and author of a four-volume biography of Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, died Sunday, October 6, 1996, in Murray, Kentucky. He was 84 years old.
Pogue, a native of Eddyville, Kentucky, graduated from Murray State University and earned an M.A. at the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from Clark University. His distinguished teaching career included service at Murray State University, Virginia Military Institute, George Washington University, the Navy War College, and the Army War College.
He began his teaching career at Murray State in 1933, where he continued until he was drafted in World War II. Designated a "combat historian/interviewer," Pogue accompanied American troops at D-Day and conducted interviews with soldiers, often under battlefield conditions, across much of Europe. His combat interviews earned him the Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre. Following the war, he was selected to write the official history of Eisenhower’s command. Pogue’s The Supreme Command was published in 1954. That volume was followed by his substantial contribution to The Meaning of Yalta, published in 1956. In the same year Pogue was named director of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Virginia, and became Marshall’s official biographer. His monumental four-volume biography of Marshall received wide acclaim as a thorough and balanced account of World War II and its aftermath. For the biography Pogue spent more than 40 hours interviewing Marshall and conducted interviews with many world leaders who had dealt with Marshall.
Pogue received numerous awards for his scholarly works on World War II and the Cold War, and for his pioneering role in oral history. In 1994 he was honored with the dedication of the Forrest C. Pogue Center for Research Publications at the Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia.
During his long and distinguished career, Forrest Pogue befriended and nurtured numerous historians. He remained a steadfast alumnus and supporter of Murray State University and was recognized as a distinguished alumnus in 1964. His work has made an indelible mark on the history of World War II and its aftermath. in commenting on Pogue's biography of Marshall, Stephen Ambrose aptly attributed to Pogue the two distinguishing characteristics of the general: "character and integrity." He will be sorely missed by his many friends within and outside the profession.
Survivors include his wife, Christine Brown Pogue of Murray, and a sister, Mary Frances Stevens, of Dawson Springs, Kentucky.
Joseph H. Cartwright
Murray State University
Robert J. Rayback
After a long illness, Robert J. Rayback, professor emeritus of American history at Syracuse University, died on February 27, 1996. Born in 1918, he was 78 years old. He was born and received his early education in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1940 he graduated from Western Reserve University summa cum laude. He did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, receiving his M.A. in 1942 and his Ph.D. in 1948.
Professor William B. Hesseltine directed Rayback's doctoral dissertation on Millard Fillmore. In 1959 the Buffalo Historical Society published a revised and expanded version of this dissertation under the title Millard Fillmore, Biography of a President. Reviewing this book for the American Historical Review, Professor Roy F. Nichols wrote, “This is a curious and complicated story well told …. The author has combined with his excellent analysis the burden of defense and justification …. The author is to be complimented for assuming a difficult responsibility.”
Rayback was appointed instructor in 1945 and became a professor in 1960. He retired in 1983. His research on Fillmore and the Whig Party led him to offer courses in 19th-century and New York state history. Rayback emphasized the close relationship between history and geography. In 1959 he joined with Frank Richards in publishing Richards Atlas of New York State. During the 1950s he also formed a partnership with liberal arts dean Eric Faigle in developing a course that they conducted at Cooperstown at the New York State Historical Society’s seminars in American culture.
Rayback became much interested in Native American history. This led him to a close relationship with Oneida tribes. In 1965 at a pow-wow of Oneidas from New York, Wisconsin, and Canada, he was ceremonially made a blood brother of tribe. He aided the Oneidas in prolonged litigation over their treaty rights to land.
Rayback was a leader in preserving historical sites such as an ornate movie theater of the 1920s, a weigh-lock building on the old Erie Canal, and a French fort on Lake Onondaga.
Robert J. Rayback was a fine scholar, a much loved teacher, and a participant in many phases of New York history, geography, and the fight for Native American rights.
Nelson M. Blake
Syracuse University
Stephen T. Riley
The death of Stephen T. Riley, director emeritus of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), on February 15, 1997, ended the career of one of America's most eminent historical administrators of the 20th century. The 89-year-old Riley was a victim of Alzheimer's disease.
Riley was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1908. He excelled in grade and high school, and went on to Clark University, where he took an A.B. in 1931 and an A.M. in 1932. He began a doctoral program in American history at Clark but suspended his education in 1934 when he was offered the job of assistant librarian at the MHS. It was the height of the Great Depression and Riley was hard-pressed for funds. In 1953 he completed his coursework and dissertation at Clark and received his doctorate.
Riley remained at the MHS for his entire professional career of more than four decades. He was on a leave of absence for three years during World War II, serving in the U.S. Army. He was appointed head librarian in 1947 and director in 1957. He retired at the end of 1976.
Both as librarian and director, Riley concentrated on collecting historical manuscripts, his "true love," So single-minded was he in this endeavor that he earned the sobriquets "the Grand Acquisitor" and "sticky fingers Riley." His peers regarded him as the most successful institutional collector of historical manuscripts in the nation. One of his colleagues described him as "that great vacuum cleaner of the collecting world, whose keen senses almost seemed to detect the odor of 17th- and 18th-century papers being opened anywhere within a 50- or 100-mile radius of Boston." Another friend noted that "adding to the Society's collection was a joy [for Riley]. He could outwait the most tenacious collector, in the end making a donor want to give an assemblage of materials to the Society, knowing that Steve Riley would faithfully see to their maintenance and availability to scholars.”
When it came to collecting historical documents, Riley wrote the book. Some of his major acquisitions were the papers of the Adams family; Thomas Jefferson; the Paul Revere family; Robert Treat Paine; Elbridge Gerry; Francis Parkman; and Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall.
Riley's contributions to the MHS transcended the collecting of manuscripts. He transformed the library from an amateur to a professional facility by hiring trained cataloguers and reference librarians, establishing a paper conservation laboratory and microfilming program, expanding and reorganizing the physical plant, and making numerous other improvements.
Above all, Riley infused the library with his own passionate love of research and learning, making it a scholar's paradise. Numerous authors praised Riley in their introductions and acknowledgments for his unstinting service to American historical scholarship. It needs to be underscored that Riley was as helpful to a neophyte graduate student as he was to a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. The author of this memoir can provide personal testimony to this assertion.
On a broader plane, Riley can be credited with completing the institutional transformation of the MHS from a private "gentlemen's history club," utilized almost exclusively by a handful of members (all male), to a national research center open to all serious scholars, including women.
Following his retirement, Riley became a member of the society's "extended family" of retired scholars. From 1977 to 1991, when he fell ill, he was almost a daily visitor. Positioned in an attic office, he kept up an active correspondence with friends and scholars, and worked on an edition of the private papers of Robert Treat Paine. Because of his long association with the MHS and intimate knowledge of its holdings, staff members and researchers constantly sought him out for information.
To the end, Riley remained a faithful consort to Clio, directing researchers to documents "you must read," and cajoling members and friends of the MHS to donate their manuscripts and family papers to the library. His love for the MHS-and for his devoted wife Alice (Riehle), whom he married in 1947- remained granitic until his final breath.
Thomas B. Adams, a past president of the MHS, expressed a thought at Riley's retirement that has even greater meaning now at his passing: "As long as men search the past for paths into the future, or perhaps are satisfied merely to find their way into the present, his [Riley's] name will be repeated with respect and affection. "
Louis Leonard Tucker
Massachusetts Historical Society
Ellery Stowell Schalk
Ellery Stowell Schalk, professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and an authority on early modern France, died of cancer on February 1, 1997, at his home in El Paso. He was 58. He is survived by his wife, Ninon Peugeot Schalk, and four sons.
He was born November 10, 1938, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised Northampton, Massachusetts. He received his B.A degree in 1961 from Wesleyan University. A year of study at the Sorbonne in Paris (1965-66) cemented his lifelong love of French history, society, and culture. He earned his M.A and Ph.D. (1962 and 1970) at the University of California at Berkeley. He taught for a year as an instructor in the civilization program at the University of Chicago before coming to UTEP in 1970 as assistant professor. He rose through the ranks, becoming professor in 1987. He served as chair of the history department from 1986 to 1988, and again in 1990-91.
Schalk rapidly developed an international reputation after the publication of his highly acclaimed book on the French nobility, From Valor to Pedigree (1986). A decade later the book was published in France as L'Epee et le Sang (1996). In that path-breaking work, Schalk used study of mentalitis to trace the evolution of the concept of nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Schalk's interest in the nobility began as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he completed a Ph.D. dissertation under William J. Bouwsma on the concepts of the nobility in France. His early published work continued that focus with articles entitled "The Appearance and Reality of Nobility in France during the Wars of Religion" (1976); "Ennoblement in France from 1390-1650" (1982); and "Nobility and the Challenges of the Modern World in Early Modern France" (1982). In 1988 he edited a festschrift by former students of William Bouwsma entitled Culture, Society and Religion in Early Modern Europe, published as a volume of Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, In the following decade, he published another eight major articles in journals and collected volumes. Recently he contributed chapters to Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility (1991); Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (1991); and Evenement, identite et histoire (1991).
At the time of his death, Schalk was working on a history of Marseilles from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries, based on extensive research in the archives of Marseilles conducted over the last decade, In his new book Schalk planned to carry out his study of mentalites to the urban elites, intertwining social, political, and religious factors to explain the transformation of Marseilles from a medieval to a modem city. Plans are under way for a team of scholars, led by David Schalk of Vassar College, to complete the unfinished manuscript and bring it to publication.
Throughout his career, Schalk accepted appointments as a visiting professor at universities throughout North America and Europe. He also served as president of the Society for French Historical Studies (1991-92), as program committee member (1990-91), and as a member of the executive committee (1991-94). He was an active member of the Western Society for French History, for which he served as council member (1978-82 and 1985-88), as local arrangements committee member, and as program committee member. He was also active in the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in which he served as chair and member of the nominating committee.
Schalk was a much-loved and respected teacher at the University of Texas at El Paso. Students who got to know him discovered a genial and unpretentious man who had a vast knowledge of the early modern period in Europe, and France in particular. His major effort was to narrow the gap between European and American history, teaching the latter in a more international context. For many years he taught "America and its European Heritage," a two-semester course that began with the Renaissance and traced major events on both continents to the present. More than once a confused student reported at the beginning of the semester that he must be in the wrong course because the professor was talking about the Renaissance in an American history course. Recently, he developed a mirror image of the course that he taught to French students at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin.
One outgrowth of his international research and teaching was his commitment to foreign study opportunities for students. In recent years he had developed exchange programs between UTEP and the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin in France and the University of Ulster at Coleraine in Northern Ireland.
Our department has lost a genial colleague, who contributed much to creating the close-knit and friendly atmosphere in the UTEP history department that has benefited all of us. Despite the scholarly success he met in later years, Schalk always remained a modest and unassuming man. Many colleagues learned of his many accomplishments only after he passed away. He truly embodied in his personality the classic academic ideal of "a gentleman and a scholar."
David A. Hackett
University of Texas at El Paso
William E. Scott
William E. Scott, professor emeritus of history at Duke University, died in Durham, North Carolina, on April 17, 1997, He was 74 and had been ill for an extended period.
A native of Chicago, he attended Yale University, but his stay there was interrupted by service in the United States Army from 1942 until 1945, He subsequently received his B.A from Yale in 1947 and his PhD, in European diplomatic history from the same institution in 1954,
He served as an instructor in history at Yale from 1954 to 1958 and came to Duke University as an assistant professor in September 1958, He retired in 1993,
A meticulous and admired teacher, he was the author of Alliance Against Hitler: The Origins of the Franco-Soviet Pact, published in 1963, A French edition of the book appeared in 1965,
For a number of years prior to his retirement, he had been at work on a broad-scaled study tentatively entitled The Origins of the Second World War, 1933-1939. Half or more of the manuscript was in draft form prior to the onset of his illness. In 1992, concerning this incomplete study, he wrote the following statement: “The principal contribution which I intend to make is an evaluation of the central role of Adolf Hitler: his personality, his ‘grand design’ in foreign policy; the motives and probable causes of his major decisions in foreign policy; and finally the extent of his responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Surprisingly, there is no consensus on these questions. Several attempts have been made to lesson Hitler’s significance. My own interpretation is that the evidence clearly established that Hitler wanted war from the beginning, planned for it and started it. Only the timing and the exact shape of the war when it broke out were uncertain. Another major theme will be the operation of the Balance of Power against Hitler. The book will be organized around a reappraisal of the great crises leading up to the war: the Proclamation of German Rearmament, March 1935; the Italo-Ethiopian crisis, September 1935-May 1936; Remilitarization of the Rhineland, March 1936; the Anschluss, March 1938; Munich, September 1938; the Prague Action, March 1939; the Polish Crisis, August 1939:’
His marriage to Marian Franson in 1945 ended in divorce in 1975, The four children of the marriage survive: they are Peter E. of Terra Haute, Indiana; Jane E. of New York City; William E of Cupertino, California; and Thomas A of Bethesda, Maryland. In addition there are five grandchildren,
Robert F. Durden
Duke University
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