FRANCES D. ACOMB, a member of the Duke history department from 1945 to 1975, died on January 19, 1984, at the age of seventy-six at her home in Durham, North Carolina, where she had lived since retirement. Born in Donora, Pennsylvania, she took her BA degree at Wellesley in 1928, her MA at Smith in 1932, and her PhD degree at the University of Chicago in 1943. At Chicago she studied with and served as research assistant to Louis Gottschalk, who remained a lifetime friend. Before completing her graduate work she taught in secondary schools and served as an instructor in history at Winthrop College. After receiving her doctorate, she taught briefly at State Teachers College in Albany, New York. During the Second World War she was employed in Washington as a historian with the United States Air Force, completing a monograph published in 1952, Statistical Control in the Army Air Forces. At Duke she taught introductory courses in European history and advanced and graduate courses in her specialties, the Old Regime and the French Revolution. She was best known for two books, both published by Duke University Press: Anglophobia in France, 1763-1789: An Essay in the History of Constitutionalism and Nationalism, published in 1950, and Mallet du Pan (1749-1800): A Career in Political Journalism, published in 1973; both received praise from reviewers for their careful research and meticulous scholarship. To the volume edited by Bernadotte E. Schmitt, Some Historians of Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), she contributed a thoughtful chapter on Albert Mathiez. An active member of the American Historical Association and of several national and international historical societies, she contributed articles and book reviews to the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and other journals throughout her career. Microfilm copies of the Mallet du Pan family papers, which she painstakingly gathered in archival sources from London, Paris, and Geneva, will be deposited in the Perkins Library of Duke University.
Joel Colton
Duke University
ROBERT G. ATHEARN, professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a foremost historian of Colorado and the American West, died at his home on November 13, 1983, after a lengthy illness. He was sixty-nine.
Athearn came to CU-Boulder in 1947 after completing a doctorate under the late Ernest S. Osgood at the University of Minnesota. He retired in 1982. During the 1982 commencement he was awarded the university’s most prestigious honors, the Robert L. Stearns Award of the Alumni Association and the University Medal. In addition, two permanent awards were established in his name. The CU-Boulder history department created the Athearn Lectureship, an annual lecture series. Former students and friends established the Robert G. Athearn Award, a biennial award of the Western History Association for the best book published on the twentieth-century West.
Athearn was author of ten books and coauthor, editor, or contributor to sixteen others. In addition, he has written fifty articles for scholarly journals and more than one hundred book reviews. He served on editorial boards for eight periodicals and advisory boards for six professional organizations. He received Fulbright, Ford Foundation, and Montana Heritage grants and numerous awards, including a distinguished-career award from the American Association for State and Local History. His most recent recognition was the John Caughey Award of the Western History Association.
Athearn’s books include Westward the Briton, High Country Empire, Rebel of the Rockies, Union Pacific Country, and a major history of Colorado, The Coloradans.
CU-Boulder Chancellor Harrison Shull said of Athearn when presenting the University Medal: “He has spent his entire teaching career at the university where his greatest success has been in scholarship and graduate training. And while the number of master’s and doctoral students he has trained is large, most important is the fact that they have gone on to be active professionals in their field, thereby giving the university the reputation of having one of the best Western history programs in the country.”
Athearn was born in Kremlin, Montana, on August 30, 1914, the son of the late Fred D. and Clarinda Lomen Athearn. He attended public schools and Northern Montana College at Havre, Montana, and earned bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees from the University of Minnesota. He served as line officer in the US Coast Guard 1943-45.
He is survived by his wife, the former Claire B. Raney, whom he married in 1942; a son, Frederic J. Athearn of Boulder; a daughter, Dana Leigh Deem, and a granddaughter, Christina, of Dallas; and a brother, James L. Athearn of West Glacier, Montana.
FRANCISCO A. BALMASEDA, associate professor of history at San Antonio College and long-time member of the American Historical Association, died in San Antonio, Texas, on November 4, 1983. He was forty-eight.
Professor Balmaseda was born in Camaguey, Cuba, and became a citizen of the United States on November 11, 1954. After serving in the United States Army, he received BA and MA degrees from Trinity University and the PhD from Case-Western Reserve University.
Professor Balmaseda is survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Francisco A. Balmaseda of San Antonio, Texas; a son, Andrew of Erie, Pennsylvania; and many friends.
Robert F. Marcom
San Antonio College
ANNETTE K. BAXTER, Adolph S. and Ellie Ochs Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, died in a tragic fire with her husband on September 18, 1983, at their summer residence on Fire Island. They are survived by two children.
Professor Baxter earned her AB at Barnard College in 1947, where she worked with Basil Rauch and Chilton Williamson. She earned her PhD at Brown University in 1958, where she worked with Donald Fleming.
She was a member of the Barnard history department since 1962, Ochs Professor since 1975, and chair of the department from 1974 to 1983. She was also chair of the American Studies Program since 1963.
Professor Baxter published Henry Miller, Expatriate (University of Pittsburgh, 1961), as well as several contributions to Notable American Women. She was a frequent reviewer of publications in American cultural and women’s history.
A member of the AHA since 1952, Professor Baxter was a panelist at the AHA workshop on Women’s Studies in Boston in 1971, a member of the Beveridge Prize Committee from 1977 to 1982, and a member of the Congressional Fellowships Program Committee from 1979 to 1982. She was also a member of the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Political Science Quarterly.
DAVID SANDLER BERKOWITZ, who died March 7, 1983, at the age of sixty-nine, was professor of history and political science at Brandeis University since 1949. He took all his degrees at Harvard University, where he received the PhD in 1946. In that year he became chairman of the social science department at Emerson College, but was soon drafted to become executive officer of the Association of Colleges and Universities of New York State and consultant to the New York Commission on the Need for a State University. The work led to publication of his Inequality of Opportunity in Higher Education, a significant forerunner to the first Fair Education Practices Act.
In 1948 Professor Berkowitz left Albany to join the Brandeis faculty as associate professor, assistant to the president, and director of university planning. In the latter capacity he recruited faculty, developed an academic calendar, designed buildings, managed real estate, refined exemplary town-gown relations with the City of Waltham, and oversaw much of the on-campus administration during those first years. He also taught a variety of courses—on the history of ancient and medieval political theory, the Renaissance and the Reformation, Tudor and Stuart periods of British history, and the intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He helped organize the history of ideas department and through the year mentored a large number of dissertations. In addition, he served as chairman of the Faculty Library Committee and of the Faculty Compensation Committee, where his organizing talents helped develop the library and improve faculty salaries and fringe benefits. He initiated the Brandeis Society of Bibliophiles and was, for twenty-one years, the president of the New England Renaissance Conference.
Professor Berkowitz’s books include Bibliotheca Bibliographica Britannica (1963-69), From Ptolemy to the Moon (1965), Bibliotheca Bibliographica Incunabula (1967), and In Remembrance of Creation (1968). At the time of his death he was working on proofs of his book Humanism in Public Order, recently published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition, he had worked for many years on John Selden, the seventeenth-century historian-jurist. In 1979 Professor Berkowitz received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies to pursue that research, and in 1979-80 he was a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. The book on Selden was two-thirds written at his death. Articles of his have appeared in the Renaissance Quarterly, the American Journal of Legal History, Quaerendo, and Octavo, published by the Brandeis Society of Bibliographies, which he edited for many years.
Professor Berkowitz was a much beloved figure, original, tough-minded, logical, and straightforward, with a richness of mind and a depth of understanding that made him an intellectual force on the Brandeis campus for more than three decades. He is survived by his wife, Jessie (Cohen) of Newton; a son, Carl Sandler of Chester, New York; a daughter, Naomi J. Bernstein of Lewiston, Maine; his mother, Nellie, of Alliance, Ohio; his sister, Ann Baker Gold of Fort Lee, New Jersey; and two grandchildren.
Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran
Georgetown University
HENRY DAVID, a member of the American Historical Association, died on January 21, 1984, in Washington, DC, at the age of seventy-six.
Dr. David received a BA degree from the College of the City of New York in 1929, and MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University in 1930 and 1936 respectively. He received another MA from Cambridge University in 1969. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
During World War II, he served both in New York City and London as director of research for the North American Division of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Subsequently, he became advisor on American affairs to the BBC.
Dr. David was professor of history at Queens College from 1938 to 1954, and served as chairman of the department. From 1954 to 1959 he was a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. He served as executive director of the National Manpower Council, Columbia University from 1951 to 1961, and later became a member of the council. Its work helped shape the development of human resource policies, primarily at the federal level. From 1961 to 1963 he was a member of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and later served on the Citizen’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women during President Johnson’s administration.
Dr. David was president of the New School for Social Research from 1961 to 1963, where he had been Dean of the Graduate Faculty Political and Social Sciences for the two previous years, and where he also held an appointment as professor of economics in the graduate faculty.
During the academic year, 1969 to 1970, Dr. David took leave from his position at the National Academy of Sciences, and became Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, where he was also a Professorial Fellow of Emmanuel College.
In September 1974 he was appointed professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. Following that appointment he served on the staff of the National Institute of Education as director of the national, four-year study of vocational education from September 1977 to November 1982. He then worked on disseminating the results of the study and on preparing additional materials for publication.
Dr. David was the author or editor of books and articles in the fields of history, labor, manpower, education, science policy, and futures research.
He is survived by his wife, Bryna Ball David of Washington, DC; a son, Paul Allen David of Palo Alto, California; and two grandchildren.
JOE L. DUBBERT, forty-three, professor of history at Muskingum College, died September 27, 1983, after a valiant fight against cancer.
Professor Dubbert leaves his wife, Mariana, son Marshon, daughter Kimberly, mother Lura Dubbert, brothers and sisters-in-law, Bob and Marilyn Dubbert of Laurens, Iowa, Bill and Lucie Dubbert of Washington, DC, nieces and nephews, friends, students, and colleagues.
Born in Laurens, Iowa, Dr. Dubbert pursued a fascination for rural American culture at Parsons College (BA, 1962) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1967). He joined the history department of Muskingum College in 1967 and is credited with reanimating the study of American history at the institution. Noted for his fairness, his common sense, and his sensitivity to student concerns, Dr. Dubbert was a hugely popular teacher whose intellectual stature was widely respected by sixteen years of student classes. Above all a teacher, Dr. Dubbert was deeply committed to scholarship. A frequent speaker at professional meetings and at conferences on social history, he published a book, A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition, which is a nationally recognized “landmark” social history.
SIDNEY GLAZER. professor of history emeritus at Wayne State University, died in his book-filled hotel room in downtown Detroit on July 8, 1983. He is survived by his brother. Stanford, a psychologist, and his nephew, Larry Glazer, a Lansing attorney.
Born in Dighton, Michigan, November 1, 1906, Professor Glazer completed his undergraduate education at Wayne State University in 1927; he then earned his advanced degrees at the University of Michigan. He taught at Wayne State University for forty-five years. A foremost authority on the history of his own state, he is credited with having taught Michigan history to more Michigan teachers than any other person. He was co-author (with Milo Quaife) of Michigan: From Primitive Wilderness to Industrial Commonwealth (1948). He also published The Middle West: A Study of Progress (1962) and Detroit: A Study in Urban Development (1965).
Professor Glazer’s superb combination of solid scholarship and impressive personal qualities made a lasting impression on his students, many of whom became eminent as lawyers, judges, and business people. He was active in the Michigan Historical Society, and he was an adviser to the Michigan Constitutional Convention, 1961-62. He was a man of gentle kindness and unusual integrity, always reliably supportive of his students and his colleagues. He never wavered in his enthusiasm for his university, his city, and his state.
Even after his retirement in 1975, Professor Glazer was an important person to the department of history of Wayne State University, of which he was a founding member. He continued to charm numbers of people who gathered informally at his hotel from time to time to hear a scholar and a gentleman of whom it was said; he was always interesting and always interested. He will be missed by his academic friends and also by the civic community of which he was such an exemplary member.
Richard D. Miles
Wayne State University
HAROLD J. GRIMM, professor emeritus and former chairman of the history department at Ohio State University, died after a long illness on November 10, 1983. He was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on August 16, 1901. He received an AB degree from Capital University, a diploma from Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary, and MA and PhD degrees in history from Ohio State. He was the recipient of three honorary doctorates.
Professor Grimm began his distinguished teaching career at Capital University. In 1937 he accepted a position at Ohio State and remained there until his retirement in 1972, with the exception of the period 1954-58 when he acted as chairman of the history department of Indiana University. His great success as an educator was recognized by the granting of two prestigious teaching awards at Ohio State, in 1950 and 1963. He served as Doktorvater to some three dozen PhD students. His strong pedagogical interest carried over also into historical writing as exemplified by his influential textbook, The Reformation Era, which for years has been recognized as a standard work on the subject.
Professor Grimm contributed actively to a number of scholarly organizations, including the AHA. He played a central role in the founding of the American Society for Reformation Research and served as its president as well as American editor for the journal, Archive for Reformation History. He helped establish the Center for Reformation Research in St. Louis and for many years sat on its governing board. In 1961 he was chosen president of the American Society of Church History.
It is apparent today that Professor Grimm must be considered a key figure in the maturation of Reformation scholarship in America. Perhaps most important here was his contribution to broadening the scope of the field, particularly in the direction of social history. Appropriately, his last book summed up his own work on the urban Reformation.
A warmhearted and humane man, Professor Grimm graced the lives of all who met him. He was kindly and a patient teacher, a generous and sympathetic friend. We will greatly miss him.
Carl C. Christensen
University of Colorado
SISTER FRANCIS ANN HAYES, OSF, College of Saint Teresa professor of history and chairperson of the Humanities Division, died after a brief illness in Rochester on Tuesday, November 29, 1983.
Sister Francis Ann was born in the Chicago area, June 13, 1918. She joined the Sisters of Saint Francis, Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, Rochester in 1935. Her entire life was spent in the field of education and she taught at all levels. From 1940 to 1956 Sister Francis Ann taught at Rochester, Austin, and Caledonia. She was principal at Lourdes High School, Rochester, and assistant principal at Saint Augustine (now Pacelli) in Austin. Sister Francis Ann was appointed to the faculty of the College of Saint Teresa in 1956.
Educational experiences include a BA from the College of Saint Teresa, an MA from the Catholic University of America, and further studies at the Asian Institute, Hamline University, and Sophia University in Tokyo, and the Catholic University of America.
Collegiate assignments include membership on the Administrative Council, 1960-66; Board of Trustees, 1964-70; Student Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees, 1970-73; Committee on Discipline, 1962-66, chairperson, 1965; Library Committee, 1963-70; Curriculum Committee, 1969-71, 1972-present; vice chairperson, College Faculty and chairperson of the Elections Committee and coordinator, Academic Advisory Committee, 1972-80.
Her publications include articles in the Courier on the “Sisters of Saint Francis”; a history of the Sisters of Saint Francis, Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, Rochester, for the New Catholic Encyclopedia and “Years of Beginning: A History of the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis of the Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, Rochester.” She also lectured to civic and church groups on Asiatic history and the Catholic Church in America.
Sister Francis Ann is survived by one brother, Robert Hayes, Flossmoor, Illinois; a sister, Major Patricia Hayes, (USAF Ret.), San Bernardino, California, and nieces and nephews. Her parents and one brother preceded her in death.
LAURENCE JAMES HOLT died suddenly of a heart attack on July 24, 1983. He was forty-three years old.
Jim, as he was known to his many friends, was a New Zealander who came to Harvard in 1960 to do his graduate work in American history. He received his PhD there in 1965, and later turned his doctoral dissertation into an important book, Congressional Insurgents and the Party System, 1909–1916 (Harvard University Press, 1967). By then he had returned to New Zealand to teach at the University of Auckland. Save for occasional leaves (one at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a visiting associate professor of history in 1981), he stayed at Auckland nineteen years, from 1964 to 1983. He then took on a new job as chief historian of New Zealand Historical Publications in Wellington. He had just embarked on this work when he died.
Jim had great enthusiasm for historical research, and wide-ranging interests. These can be gathered from the titles of a few of his publications: The Emergence of Modern America, 1890-1920 (Heinemann’s, 1972); “Louis Hartz’s Fragment Thesis” (New Zealand Journal of History, April 1973); “The Trade Unions and Socialism in the United States (Journal of American Studies, Dec. 1973); “The New Deal and the American Anti-Statist Tradition,” in John Braeman, et al., eds., The New Deal (Ohio State University Press, 1975); “Trade Unionism in the British and US Steel Industries, 1880-1914: A Comparative Study,” Labor History (Winter 1977); and “Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand, 1894-1901: The Evolution of an Industrial Relations System,” New Zealand Journal of History (Oct. 1980). His next book, in draft form at his death, was to have been on compulsory arbitration of labor disputes in New Zealand, from the 1890s forward. Few historians were as well read or as thoughtful about trends in labor history, old and new, or as versed in the literature of labor history affecting many countries.
As befitting a scholar and teacher of his distinction, Jim earned a number of honors, including a Distinguished Scholar Award from the ACLS (1974), and a Nuffield Foundation Traveling Fellowship in 1973. He was book review editor for the New Zealand Journal of History, and a member of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians.
His many friends will best remember Jim’s infectious enthusiasm for history and politics. Knowledgeable and curious, he was a splendid talker and a generous critic. Like his wife Jill, he was wonderful company. He leaves Jill and two children, Rachell and Daniel.
James T. Patterson
Brown University
OLIVER H. KNIGHT, professor of American history at the University of Texas, died October 28, 1983. Professor Knight had two careers. Before World War II he served as a journalist with the United Press’s Washington Bureau and with such newspapers as the Fort Worth Star Telegram and the Wisconsin State Journal. Following his participation in World War II as an officer in the United States Army, Professor Knight studied at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wisconsin where he received the PhD degree in 1959.
Upon receiving his PhD degree, Professor Knight taught in the field of journalism, first at the University of Indiana and then at the University of Wisconsin where he became a full professor. While at Wisconsin, he published a number of articles in journalism, and his book, I Protest: Selected Disquisitions of E. W. Scripps, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, won the Luther Mott Award for Research in Journalism in 1967.
In 1967, Professor Knight joined the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso as professor of American history and remained there until his death. Professor Knight was a distinguished western historian. His two books on the West, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners (1960) and Life and Manners in the Frontier Army were both well received by the academic community. In 1974 he received the James L. Sellers Memorial Award for his article “War or Peace? The Anxious Wait for Crazy Horse,” from the Nebraska State Historical Society and the following year he won the Faculty Research Award at the University of Texas at El Paso, which is the highest award the faculty can bestow on one of its own.
Professor Knight was sixty-four at the time of his death. He is survived by his son Michael of Madison, Wisconsin.
Carl Jackson
University of Texas at El Paso
RICHARD P. MITCHELL, professor of history at the University of Michigan, and a specialist in the history of the modern Near East and North Africa, died in Cairo on September 12, 1983. He was spending the academic year in Cairo conducting research at the American Research Center in Egypt.
Richard Mitchell was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 21, 1925. He served in the United States Marine Corps, 1943-46, and saw active duty in the Pacific. After his discharge, he pursued his undergraduate training at Northwestern University and Clark University (BA, 1949) and then entered Princeton in 1949 for graduate work in the languages and history of the Near East. At Princeton, Mitchell won many fellowships and honors including Fulbright (1951-52) and Ford Foundation (1953-56) grants for study and research in Egypt and a subsequent grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He received his PhD in 1960 with a dissertation on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Professor Mitchell first came to the University of Michigan as an instructor in the department of Near Eastern studies, 1956-58. In 1958, he joined the State Department and during the next five years served in Washington, Kuwait, and Yemen. He returned to Ann Arbor as assistant professor of history in 1963, and was promoted to associate professor in 1968 and full professor in 1974. He has also served as associate director of the Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies, 1973-75, as well as a consultant to the State Department.
In his special field, the history of the modern Near East, Richard Mitchell is known primarily as an authority on the important theme of Islamic fundamentalism in the twentieth century. His important book, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1969 and has since been republished in two different Arabic translations. The Hoover Institution is now issuing a new paperback edition. Just before his death, Mitchell had completed work with Lois Aroian on a comprehensive history of The Modern Middle East and North Africa to be published shortly by Macmillan.
When Richard Mitchell started his own graduate work in 1949, the field of modern Near Eastern history was relatively undeveloped in this country. Much of his attention in the twenty years since 1963 was devoted to training graduate students. More than twenty students completed PhDs under his chairmanship: many of them now teach all over this country and abroad. Mitchell was particularly successful in establishing a very warm human relationship with his students and followed their careers closely and affectionately.
He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Middle East Studies Association, 1974-77. Over the years, his research was supported by grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, Inc. and the Joint Committee for the Near East of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies.
In 1954, Richard Mitchell married Alita Mae Jones of Wheeler, Indiana. They had three children: Joshua Mark, Jessica Maia (Mrs. Michael Daher), and Jeffrey Peter Abbott.
Jacob M. Price
University of Michigan
RICHARD MILLMAN, professor of history, was killed in an automobile accident in New Jersey on August 25, 1983. He was fifty years old. His sudden, tragic death was a great shock to us all. We will miss him very much.
Dick Millman was born in Chester, Pennsylvania in 1932. He received a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College, then went to the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a doctorate in history in 1963. His main interest then and for the next twenty years was nineteenth-century European diplomacy. Of course, no PhD in the humanities could ever take any chances. Even after teaching for seven years—first at Temple University, then at the University of California at Davis—he felt it necessary to note in his placement file: “Can coach basketball and baseball.”
He came to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1968 as an associate professor. His rank was the result of his first book. British Foreign Policy and the Coming of the Franco-Prussian War, published by Oxford three years earlier. It was his doctoral dissertation not much revised. The book was very well received. It was the first full scholarly treatment of British foreign policy between 1864 and 1870, a period which Dick depicted as a moment of British restraint and prudence toward Europe.
Research was a major part of Dick’s life; at times it seemed as if he was more in Europe than America. But he took time for much else. Teaching was important to him at both the undergraduate and graduate level and he served on over two score dissertation committees. He was casual in the classroom, conversational in lecture style. He had total command of his subject, reported one observer, “without pretense or scholarly pomposity.” He took his turn at departmental work, was one of the architects of our PhD program, and served four years as Director of Graduate Studies, longer than any other member of the department.
Dick’s second book, which won him promotion to full professor in 1980, was entitled Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878. Also published by Oxford, it scrutinized the policies of Lord Derby, Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury from 1875 to 1878 as they pertained to the fate of the Ottoman empire and the relationships among the great powers. In length (600 pages) and importance it was instantly compared with the masterworks on British foreign policy that lead off all the bibliographies.
Dick stopped short of dealing with the Congress of Berlin in Britain and the Eastern Question to avoid making the book longer, but at his death he had completed a manuscript on the Congress and was hard at work on a fourth monograph dealing with the origins of the First World War. For the future he planned biographies of Disraeli and Gladstone. In his own words, he wanted “to depict British foreign policy in the half century before 1914.” No more, no less. It was a grand design of the sort that is rarely attempted by modern historians. But Millman’s “industry and determination are unbelievable,” testified a colleague. “I have no doubt that he will complete in his lifetime all these projects.” At his death he was well on his way.
William A. Hoisington Jr.
University of Illinois at Chicago
RICHARD KENNETH MURDOCH, died January 20, 1984, at Marietta, Georgia, after an illness which had incapacitated him for over six years. He was born May 8, 1913, in Colon, Republic of Panama, the son of Richard and Mabel Barrett Murdoch. He grew up in the Boston area and graduated from the Roxbury Latin School in 1932. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1936, and his MA in 1940 and PhD in 1947 from the University of California at Los Angeles. He served in the Uni1cd States Army Air Corps (1942-46) and as a reserve officer in the Air Force (1946-70), retiring as a lieutenant colonel.
He was a member of the history department of Carnegie Mellon University (1947-57). University of North Carolina (1950-51, 1956-57 as a visiting professor), and of the University of Georgia (1958-78). A specialist in Latin American history, Professor Murdoch concentrated in the Spanish borderlands in the Southeastern United States. He published The Georgia-Florida Frontier, 1793–1796: Spanish Reaction to French Intrigue and American Designs (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951) and numerous articles and book reviews. He was director of the University Center in Georgia (an inter-college cooperative group in the Atlanta-Athens area, 1959-78).
Kenneth Coleman
University of Georgia
WILHELM NIEMÖLLER. one of the earliest and foremost historians of the Protestant Church struggle in Germany during the Hitler era, died in Bielefeld, West Germany, on October 13, 1983, at the age of eighty-five. Born in Lippstadt (April 7, 1898) where his father was pastor, he served in World War I and then studied theology at Bethel, Münster, Greifswald, and Erlangen. Ordained in 1924, six years later he was appointed pastor of the Jakobus Kirchengemeinde in Bielefeld, which he served for thirty-three years until his retirement. It was a big congregation of over 5,000 souls and he prided himself on knowing all members and visiting them in their homes. Called to service in World War II as a regular officer, he nevertheless took occasion to preach whenever opportunity presented itself. After his retirement he was a hospital chaplain for seventeen years. His pastoral duties were always foremost for him and he was an outstanding preacher.
He joined the National Socialist Party in its early years, but later became one of the leaders, along with his elder brother Martin, of the Confessing Church. After World War II he was among the first to be concerned with the history of that movement and he wrote many volumes and articles dealing with it and kindred topics. He gathered much source material for his work which resulted in one of the great archival collections on the Kirchenkampf. It is housed with the Archives of the Evangelical Church in Westphalia. He was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Göttingen in 1959 and in 1981 the city of Bielefeld awarded him its Kulturpreis. A forthright person, he was direct in his comments and critiques. He and his wife of fifty-nine years, Ingeborg, were genial hosts to many scholars who went to Bielefeld to work in the archives he had collected. He was generous in his help to others who were working in the field where he was one of the great masters.
Ernst C. Helmreich
Bowdoin College
JAY M. PAWA, a member of the American Historical Association, died unexpectedly on October 13, 1983, at the age of fifty-two. He completed his undergraduate work at State University of New York College at Fredonia in 1953. After two years in the navy, Professor Pawa earned his MA degree from Teacher’s College, Columbia University in 1957. Following three years of high school teaching and coaching football, he returned to Teacher’s College, receiving his doctorate in 1964.
From 1962 until his death Professor Pawa taught at State University of New York College at Oneonta, offering American history courses focusing on the labor movement, nativism and racism. the New Deal, and his beloved New York City. His classroom presentation, always memorable and often profound, leavened the vigor of a trained athlete with the analysis of a seminal intellect. A productive scholar, Professor Pawa published a number of important articles dealing with the working class, black radicals, and the assault on civil liberties that followed the Great War. Recently Professor Pawa completed a book, Eye of the Red, a brilliant study of New York’s Lusk Committee, established in 1919 to investigate political noncomformists.
Energetic and versatile, Professor Pawa also held important administrative positions at Oneonta. After supervising and developing the economic opportunity program, he served as chairman of the history department for five years, championing programs in black and women’s studies. Subsequently he directed a successful college internship program.
A mere listing of professional accomplishments fails to convey the essence of the individual. A child of the Great Depression, early deprivations and the humanist component of Judaism instilled within Professor Pawa a passion for social justice. As a historian and as a man, he drew strength from New Deal liberalism, the struggles of organized labor, and the Civil Rights movement. Professor Pawa possessed extraordinary moral courage, great compassion for others, and a rare strength of character. His family, friends, colleagues, and students mourn his loss. Yet for those of us who survive him a legacy endures; hundreds of young men and women from low-income backgrounds graduated from college because Jay Pawa helped them to believe in themselves.
William M. Simons
State University of New York College at Oneonta
ALLAN SHARLIN died in March 1983 at the age of thirty-three, after ferociously battling cancer for over five years. He was an extremely promising historical sociologist, whose scholarship was unusually broad and deep and whose activity in the discipline was vigorous and inspiring.
Allan took his degrees in history—a BA from Chicago in 1970 and a PhD from Wisconsin in 1976. He also educated himself richly in demography—at Wisconsin and at Princeton’s Office of Population Research from 1976 to 1978—and in sociological theory. His grasp of these fields was so strong that he published in and taught simultaneously historical sociology, demographic methods, and social theory.
Allan’s contributions to scholarship were notable, notwithstanding the brevity of his career. He enlightened us about the social context of Max Weber’s work, stimulated new thinking in historical demography about whether early modern cities actually grew only because of rural migration, and elevated sociologists’ discussions of social mobility by showing clearly the historical specificity of the occupational ladder. His book in progress, From Estates to Bourgeois Society: The Transformation of Social Structure in Frankfurt, 1815-64 (which it is hoped will yet appear), promises to reveal, by a new combination of traditional and quantitative social history, the changes in German social hierarchy and social order during modernization. His research in progress, on demographic processes in Wurtzburg circa 1800 (which also may be completed), promises to yield new insights into population change in the early modern city.
Allan joined the Berkeley department of sociology in 1978 and immediately became an all-star colleague, not only for us but also for the demography group and his many associates on campus. Enthusiastic almost to a fault, he served energetically in his administrative roles, accepting more than his share of them, threw himself into teaching and advising, and bound his colleagues together with ties of scholarship and sociability. To use another metaphor, Allan Sharlin was the spark plug of his department.
His legion of friends and professional associates (the latter quickly became the former) around the country and in at least three disciplines testifies to the sincerity and warmth of Allan’s good nature.
Friends of Allan Sharlin can contribute to a fellowship being established by his family and colleagues in his name. It will go to support dissertation work in the three subdisciplines he mastered so well, historical sociology, social history, and demography. Contributions may be made out to the University of California, Berkeley Foundation, and sent to the Institute of International Studies, Attn: Karen Beros, 215 Moses, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Claude S. Fischer
University of California, Berkeley
LOUIS B. WRIGHT, executive secretary of the American Historical Association in 1964–65 and director of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 1948 to 1968, died on February 26, 1984, of cardiovascular disease in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was eighty-four years old.
Dr. Wright, a South Carolinian, took leave from the University of North Carolina, where he taught English, to become a visiting scholar at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in 1931. He stayed on for seventeen years as an administrator and scholar of the English Renaissance and American Colonial periods. In 1947, the trustees of Amherst College appointed him director of the Folger Library.
In his twenty years as director, Dr. Wright sought to broaden the appeal of Shakespeare and bridge the gap between the scholar and the layman. After his retirement, Dr. Wright joined the National Geographical Society as a historical consultant.
He is survived by his wife, Frances Marion Black; a son, Louis Christopher; a brother, Thomas; and a sister, Margaret.