SELIG ADLER, renowned primarily as an authority on American isolationism and one of the great teachers in the State University of New York at Buffalo’s department of History, died unexpectedly of heart failure on November 8, 1984 at the age of seventy five.
Retired since 1980, he was active until his death at the Archives at the State University College at Buffalo. The manuscripts he collected in connection with his From Ararat to Suburbia: A History of the Jewish Community of Buffalo, NY (1960) and since, are located there and were dedicated in June, 1984 as the Selig Adler Jewish Archives of Greater Buffalo.
Since the publication of his major work, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (1957), Adler has been recognized as the chief analyst of isolationism in twentieth-century America. This monograph has been republished as a paperback and has been anthologized in part in many publications. Adler’s other published works include The Uncertain Giant, 1921-1941: American Foreign Policy Between the Wars (1966), which chronicled diplomatic trends between the two wars. Also, with the assistance of Professor Thomas E. Connolly, Adler’s From Ararat to Suburbia (1960), described Buffalo, New York’s Jewish heritage, demonstrating both its uniqueness and how it reflected so much of American Jewish History.
Adler wrote almost forty articles as well as reviews in scholarly journals and chapters in books beginning in 1937 until his death that revised many of our previously held beliefs. The many speeches and addresses he made were often on controversial matters such as isolationism as obsolete in its pre-World War II form.
Adler was active in the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, delivering scholarly papers and their program committees. Adler was a life member of the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Historical Society and belonged to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Adler’s awards and honors include memberships on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Distinguished Professorships and Awards for Excellence in Teaching, citations by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Zionist Organization of America, and First prize of the American Association of State and Local Historical Societies for his article on President McKinley’s ill-fated operation in Scientific American (1963).
Adler was born in Baltimore and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Buffalo in 1931. He received the MA and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois in 1932 and 1934. He became a full professor in 1952, the Samuel P. Capen Professor of American history in 1959, and a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in 1975.
At the time of his retirement in 1980, a Festshchrift was published in his honor (An American Historian, Essays to Honor Selig Adler). He is survived by his wife, Janet, and children Ellen Krantz and Dr. Joseph G. Adler, and five grandchildren. A Selig Adler memorial fund has been established with the University at Buffalo Foundation.
Milton Plesur
State University at New York, Buffalo
WILLIAM J. BOSSENBROOK, professor emeritus of history at Wayne State University, who was born on August 25, 1897, died in Bradenton, Florida, on October 16, 1984. He attended Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1920. In 1931 he obtained his PhD degree from the University of Chicago under the direction of James Westfall Thompson and Ferdinand Schevill. He taught at the State College of Washington and then came to Wayne State University. Here he remained until his retirement in 1968.
Professor Bossenbrook was a co-author of Foundations of Western Civilization (Boston, 1939-40) and a contributing editor to Allan Nevins and Louis M. Hacker (eds.), The United States and Its Place in World Affairs 1918-1943 (Boston, 1943). His major work, The German Mind, an interpretation of the cultural role of Germany in the development of Europe, was published in Detroit in 1961. In 1968 a volume of essays, The Uses of History (ed. Hayden V. White), was published as a tribute to him by his former students scattered across the face of America.
Professor Bossenbrook will be remembered by his many friends and colleagues with respect and affection. He gave generously of his time and knowledge to all who stopped him in the corridors or came to his office door. He was one of the great lecturers in the University, a robust and passionate interpreter of history, a scholar delighting in the exchange of ideas. He had an almost incredible ability to convince his students and colleagues that thinking was everybody’s business. We are all deeply in his debt.
Goldwin Smith
Wayne Stale University
CHARLES W. DAVID, long-time member of the AHA, “scholar, teacher, librarian,” as the title of a 1965 Festschrift in his honor concisely summarized, died on April 2, 1984 in his 99th year.
A Rhodes scholar, Charles David taught history at the University of Washington and at Bryn Mawr College before coming to the University of Pennsylvania in 1927 as professor of history. From 1940 until leaving the university in 1955, he served as director of university libraries as well as continuing his distinguished academic career in history.
At an age when retirement and leisure usually beckon, Charles David energetically pursued additional library responsibilities. From 1955 to 1961 he was director of the Longwood Library in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania; in 1961 he founded the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library in Greenville, Delaware; and from 1961 until his final retirement in the mid-1960s he served as the director of library development at the Marine Historical Association, later to become the library component of Mystic Seaport Museum, in Mystic, Connecticut.
Library buildings and library collection development were Charles David’s principal library interests. While at the University of Pennsylvania he fostered the growth of the Union Library Catalogue of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area. As an early proponent of union catalogs he was for many years a member of the American Library Association’s National Union Catalog Committee. Charles David held many other library association offices, including that of executive secretary of the Association of Research Libraries for most of the period between 1947 and 1956.
WILLIAM L. DOWNARD, 1940-1984, was an inspired teacher, a prolific scholar, a capable administrator and a warm, personable individual to all who knew him. His death on August 17, 1984 came at a time when as the new Vice President for Academic Affairs, he had already instituted many innovative ideas and had brought a new sense of unity, purpose and excitement for the future to all other members of the Saint Joseph’s College community.
Bill graduated from Saint Joseph’s in 1963 and participated actively in alumni affairs and maintained many of his college friendships for the remainder of his life. He continued his education in his native Cincinnati and earned his master’s degree in history there in 1964. During that time he also taught high school. Bill’s PhD was pursued at Miami University of Ohio. His dissertation was later published as The Cincinnati Brewing Industry: A Social and Economic History (1973).
He taught at Mount Saint Joseph College in Cincinnati and was able to combine his fine personal attributes with a formidable background of knowledge which earned him continued student admiration. The Saint Joseph’s College student body elected him Professor of the Year in 1974-75 and recipient of the Wooden Cask Award for Community Service in 1977.
Bill’s scholarly work continued throughout his professional career. Besides his dissertation publication, he also compiled The Dictionary of American Brewing and Distilling Industries (1980) and numerous journal articles on American social history. In recognition of such activities, the Saint Joseph’s faculty voted him the recipient of the Father Edwin Kaiser Faculty Scholar Award in 1982.
Desiring a career in a more fully administrative area, Bill accepted an American Council on Education Fellowship in 1983-84 leaving behind him seven years as chairman of the SJC History/Political Science Department. When Saint Joseph’s Vice President for Academic Affairs resigned in July 1984, a faculty search committee named Bill to the position. He instituted a whole new direction for his office, and rallied the faculty and administration in a renewed dedication to our educational goals.
Bill’s lasting legacy will come in our determination to pursue his excellent ideas. He is survived by his wife, Sue, and children, Becky, David, Mary Beth and Steve.
John Phillip Posey
Saint Joseph’s College
PAUL HENRY GIDDENS, 1903-1984, president emeritus of Hamline University, former professor of United States history and politics at Allegheny College, and a specialist in the history of the petroleum industry, died in Meadville, Pennsylvania, on October 26, 1984.
Giddens earned an AB degree from Simpson College in 1924 and an AM from Harvard University two years later. He began to teach at Simpson College in 1926, and in the years immediately following taught briefly at colleges in Iowa, Indiana, and Oregon and at the Universities of Kansas and Iowa. He received a PhD in US history at the University of Iowa in 1930.
He joined the faculty of history and political science at Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1931. He was already publishing significant amounts of material on colonial Maryland, his doctoral field, and on amendments proposed to the US Constitution, but soon took up the study of nearby oilfields of northwestern Pennsylvania. His research obtained from the archives of a small museum located at the world’s first commercially successful oil site led to the preparation of a manuscript, The Birth of the Oil Industry (1938), a classic study reprinted by Arno in 1972 and again in 1974 under the title, The Early Petroleum Industry. His other works include Early Days of Oil (1948) and Standard Oil Company (Indiana, 1955).
He became professor of history and political science and chairman of the department at Allegheny in 1938, and in 1943 he began to serve concurrently as curator of the mother lode of his research, The Edwin L. Drake Well Memorial Park and Museum, Titusville, Pennsylvania. Soon after World War II, Giddens, together with a group of colleagues from nearby schools, founded The Washington Semester Program of American University. He was also a member of the board of editors of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow.
He became president of Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953. His dominant purpose in his tenure of fifteen years was to strengthen its character as an undergraduate college of liberal arts. Giddens fondest accomplishment at Hamline was its accreditation to receive a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa soon after his retirement.
On his departure from Hamline in 1968 he worked as an historical consultant to the Standard Oil Company (Indiana). He produced a prodigious amount of literature on oil history for assorted publications through out his life. Honors included honorary degrees awarded by Simpson College, Allegheny College, and Hamline University.
Giddens was a member of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Association of University Professors, the Newcomen Society, Alpha Tau Omega, Pi Gamma Mu, Pi Kappa Delta, and Phi Alpha Theta.
He is survived by his wife, Marie Robins Giddens, Meadville, Pennsylvania; a daughter, Judith A. White, Washington, DC; two sons, Thomas R., Rockford, Illinois, and Jackson A., Silver Spring, Maryland; two sisters, and two grandchildren.
Jackson A. Giddens
ROBERT L. HOFFMAN, 1937-1984, Associate Professor of History at SUNY Albany died on November 7, 1984, while walking to class. He was to have given a lecture in his Trials in History course, one of the most respected and popular courses in the undergraduate curriculum. This course grew out of Professor Hoffman’s research on the Dreyfus Affair. As he thought about its deeper implications, he developed a history course that would examine important trials, from those of Socrates and Jesus to Eichmann and Lieutenant Calley. It was an instant success and has shown students how history can be used freshly and creatively.
Professor Hoffman was born in Washington, DC in 1937, received his BA from Harvard University in 1959, his MA degree from Brandeis University in 1961, and his PhD degree from that institution in the History of Ideas in 1968. He taught at the University of Vermont in 1964-5, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1965-8, and has been a member of the SUNY Albany History Department from 1968-1984. He has had Research Fellowships from the SUNY Research Foundation and was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was Director of SUNY Albany’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program and has been on many university and departmental committees. As a committee member he gave freely of his time and always brought to bear a balanced judgment, keen critical acumen, and rigorous analytical powers. He was the type of colleague who gives cohesion to a university.
Professor Hoffman was the author of Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon (1972), More than a Trial: The Struggle Over Captain Dreyfus (1980), and numerous articles. He was working on a far-ranging study of twentieth-century French society and culture, of which More than a Trial was the first major product.
Robert Hoffman was a Quaker and a pacifist, and was among the most kind and gentle of people. At the same time he was intensely concerned with justice and injustice, in the past and the present. Both of his books addressed that problem, as did the courses he taught. The fact that the issues which were of the most direct personal importance to him had profound influence on his teaching and scholarship reveals the essential unity of his life, as did the example he set for all who knew him as colleagues and studied under him as students.
Warren Roberts
State University of New York, Albany
SISTER MARIE CAROLINE KLINK HAMER, OP, died after a long illness on August 5, 1984. She took the BA at Siena Heights in 1939, the MA at The Catholic University of America in 1941 and the PhD from the same university in 1943. She joined the department of history at The Catholic University of America in the next year and became an ordinary professor in 1961 but resigned her position three years later. From 1964 to 1969 Sister Marie Caroline held high administrative positions at two colleges belonging to her order, Barry College at Miami, Florida and St. Charles College in the city of that name in Illinois.
In the years 1969-71 she was the recipient of research fellowships at the Yale Law School and at the Institute of Southern History at the Johns Hopkins University. From 1972 to 1983 she was a member of the department of history at Norfolk State College at Norfolk, Virginia.
The deceased was a woman of marked ability who would undoubtedly have made a considerable reputation for herself as a scholar in the field of American constitutional history if either choice or circumstances had not led her to devote the greater part of her time and energies to teaching, counselling, and administrative duties. She had a forceful intellect, unusual articulateness and a sharp wit. At heart she was a warm and generous person. Her former students and colleagues will long remember the superior quality of her teaching and her thoughtfulness to students.
John Zeender
The Catholic University of America
STEPHEN KOSS, 1940-1984, professor of history at Columbia University, died in New York City on October 25, 1984, following a heart transplant operation. He received all his higher education at Columbia, taking his AB in 1962, the MA in 1963, and the PhD in 1966. After a year as an instructor at the University of Delaware, in 1966 he joined the faculty at Barnard College, rising from assistant professor to professor. In 1970 he began to direct graduate students in modern British history at Columbia University and moved entirely to that department in 1978.
He established his scholarly reputation with a series of five biographical studies exploring different facets of the Liberal Party in the early twentieth century. Lord Haldane: Scapegoat for Liberalism and John Morley at the India Office, 1905-1910 (revised from his dissertation) both appeared in 1969; the series culminated in 1976 with Asquith, the first biography of that complex politician not in some way official, which drew on recently available sources to paint a remarkably perceptive and objective portrait. The imervening books—Sir John Bronner, Radical Plutocrat, 1842-1919 (1970) and Fleet Street Radical: A.G. Gardiner and the Daily News (1973)—established two preoccupations of Koss’s later work. Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (1975) sensitively traces the precipitous decline in influence of that once potent force, and the two volumes of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981, 1984)—the first volume covering the nineteenth century, the second the twentieth—are a major scholarly monument in the field.
His extraordinary disciplines as a researcher and writer and an amazing instinct for sources were matched by great personal kindness and a wonderful capacity for friendship. An essayist and reviewer of authority and elegance, he was perhaps more widely known in Britain than any other American writing on British history; he exemplified a late phase of the broad Anglo-American intellectual connection, whose history in the decades from the 1860s to the First World War he was writing when he died. In less than twenty years of active life as a scholar and writer, he accomplished far more than most historians accomplish in a whole lifetime. His loss is profoundly felt by a generation of undergraduate and graduate students, by his colleagues at Columbia, and by a wide range of admirers on both sides of the Atlantic.
R. K. Webb
University of Maryland Baltimore County
FREDERIC C. LANE, 1900-1984, president of the AHA in 1964, died at his home near Westminster, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1984. Lane, educated at Cornell and Harvard and for 38 years associated with The Johns Hopkins University before his retirement in 1966, was a leading economic historian of medieval and Renaissance Venice, known for his studies of the Arsenal (translated into French) and of Andrea Barbarigo (translated into Italian), for his general history of Venice (translated into Italian and German, with a French translation forthcoming), and for his numerous articles, many of which were collected into a book on his retirement. His vigorous scholarly industry lasted up to his death, at which time he was preparing the index to what will perhaps be his most notable contributions to medieval economic history, Coins and Moneys of Account (to be published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in the spring of 1985), the first of a two-volume study, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, co-authored with his former student, Reinhold C. Mueller, of the University of Venice. Besides his role in this association, Lane was also a president of the Economic History Association in 1958 and of the International Economic History Association in 1965. His numerous honors included, after his retirement, an honorary degree from Michigan State University, the dedication of a special issue of the Economic History Journal (1980) on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and two prestigious prizes in Italy—the 1980 International Galileo Prize, awarded annually to a foreigner for outstanding contributions to the study of Italian culture and history; and the 1984 International Prize of the Francesco Saverio Nitti Foundation, awarded by economists (in this instance to an economic historian) through the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei. A bibliography of his work appeared in the 1966 volume of collected studies, and this was updated in the 1980 issue of the Journal of Economic History dedicated to him. A complete bibliography will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Italian journal, Ateneo veneto.
Richard A. Goldthwaite
The Johns Hopkins University
EUGENE H. ROSEBOOM, a distinguished scholar of American presidential elections and Ohio history, died on September 19, 1984, near Columbus, Ohio. He was age ninety-two. A professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University, where he taught for forty-two years, Professor Roseboom introduced several generations of Ohio students to the excitement and intrigue of US political campaigns and elections.
Born in 1892 in Frankfurt, Ohio, Roseboom attended the Ohio State University, receiving his MA in 1916. During World War I he served as a private first class with the Army infantry in France. He returned from Europe to pursue doctoral studies at Harvard University, where he earned his history PhD in I932.
As a scholar Professor Roseboom had many publications, including several books with an enduring influence. He collaborated with his long-time colleague Francis P. Weisenburger to write an objective History of Ohio, first published in 1934. For more than a half century this volume has remained the standard text for courses in Ohio history. In 1956, his history colleagues recognized Professor Roseboom’s eminence in Ohio history when they elected him President of the Ohio Academy of History.
Publication of his one-volume History of Presidential Elections in 1957, brought Professor Roseboom further distinction. This book soon became the definitive objective survey used in college courses. Each presidental election-year, journalists and public figures consulted it to learn the details of past candidates, campaigns and election results. One such reader was former President Harry Truman. In 1959 he wrote that the Roseboom volume should be “required reading” for high school seniors and college students, so that “our youngsters would . . . find out just exactly what makes the Government tick.”
Professor Roseboom had a quiet wit and a special concern for accuracy and balance. Like thousands of his former students and colleagues at Ohio State University, I honor his attainments and mourn his death.
Alfred E. Eckes, Commissioner
US International Trade Commission
Washington, DC
YASAKA TAKAGI, 1889-1984, an honorary member of the American Historical Association since 1965, died at his Tokyo home on April 28, 1984. He was the founder, dean, and conscience of American Studies in Japan.
Professor Takagi’s ancestry made it natural for him to undertake the study of the West. He was the second son of Naibu Kanda (1857-1923), a graduate of Amherst and a leader in English education in Japan, who was the adopted son of Kôhei Kanda (1830-1898), a pioneer student of Western learning under the Tokugawa shogunate. After graduation from the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University, he began a brief period of government service before being selected to fill Japan’s first permanent post in American history and diplomacy. The Hepburn Chair at Tokyo Imperial University, dedicated to American constitutional law, history, and diplomacy, was established by the gift of the American financier A.B. Hepburn in 1918. Takagi prepared himself with a lengthy period of study abroad at Harvard, Chicago, and other centers.
Takagi returned to Japan to start his lectures as assistant professor in 1924. From then until his retirement from Tokyo University in 1950, and for a decade thereafter at Gakushuin University, he worked to establish the field of American history in Japan. He was probably the first non-American academic specialist to teach American history outside the United States in a major university. Takagi’s scholarship was concentrated on what he saw as the well-springs of American democracy in its formative years. His publication in 1931 of Beikoku seiji shi josetsu (Introduction ta American Political History), provided Japanese students with a classic account that retains its value today.
Takagi was a man of rock-like integrity. It was said of him that he did not change the thrust of his lectures from pre-war, to war time, to post-war years. In the darkest days of World War II, he continued his exposition of American democratic values to his young students, most of whom would soon have to depart for Pacific battlegrounds.
His stature was naturally the greater in postwar years, when publication of his lectures (Amerika) and Kindai Amerika seijishi (Modern American Political History) reached far larger audiences. As Librarian of Tokyo University, he struggled to rebuild its shattered system, and in order to establish American history on a proper documentary base, he organized an interdisciplinary project that produced a seven-volume Genten Amerika shi (Documentary American History). He led in the organization of the Japanese Association for American Studies and in 1969 donated his own large collection of books to the newly established American Studies Center at Tokyo University.
Professor Takagi’s efforts to establish American-Japanese relations on a basis of reciprocal respect were numerous, though he rarely spoke of them. He was active in the Institute of Pacific Relations, and worked behind the scenes to promote a meeting between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Konoe before the outbreak of war. He maintained a close friendship and a frequent, sometimes heated, correspondence with Ambassador Joseph Grew. Appropriately, he served as trustee of the Grew Foundation in postwar days. Takagi was among the group of Western-oriented liberals who worked quietly to persuade Japan’s leaders that the war was lost. In postwar days he was equally firm in warning General MacArthur and members of his staff of the errors in Occupation censorship and other policies. Takagi was an imperial appointee to the House of Peers before its dissolution, and he was active among Japanese working for revision of the Meiji Constitution.
As his long life drew to a close, Professor Takagi was able to see the fruits of a life he always hoped would help the building of a “bridge across the Pacific,” to use the phrasing of his mentor Nitobe. A collection of his speeches, articles, and letters, which he published under the title Toward International Understanding, contains eloquent evidence of that hope. He was named a member of the Japan Academy and he served as member of the binational Fulbright Commission in Japan. The emergence of the International House of Japan owed much to his efforts, and he was a member of the Board of Direc tors of that institution and also chairman of its Committee for Intellectual Interchange. With the years came additional honors. His collected works were republished in five vol umes, his government named him a Person of Cultural Merit, and he received the Japan Foundation Award in 1978. His last contribution, which brought the wheel of his career and hopes full circle, was to edit the works of Inazo Nitobe in sixteen volumes.
Makoto Saito
The University of Tokyo
Marius B. Jansen
Princeton University
HERBERT WEAVER, seventy-nine, professor emeritus of history and former chairman of Vanderbilt University’s Department of History, died on February 5, 1985, while vacationing at Captiva Island, Florida, He was born on July 28, 1905, in Brewton, Alabama. His ashes have been buried there in the family plot.
Weaver received his AB (1926) and MA (1935) degrees in history from Birmingham Southern College, and his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 1941, where he worked under the direction of the late Professor Frank B. Owsley. After teaching in Alabama secondary schools, Weaver became associate professor of history at Georgia Teacher’s College, Statesboro, Georgia, from 1940- 1942. He was professor and chairman of the history department there from 1942-1949. During World War II, Weaver was assigned to the US Army Air Force Intelligence/Historical Division.
In 1949 Weaver left Georgia Teacher’s College to join the faculty at Vanderbilt University, where he taught the Middle Period of American history. He was promoted to professor in 1953, served as Acting Chairman of the Department in 1953-1954, and as Chairman from 1962 until 1967. Under his leadership, the department expanded from twelve to eighteen members. His colleagues regarded him as a friendly, even-handed chairman. Prior to his retirement in 1974 he directed fifteen doctoral dissertations and numerous master’s theses. Students who worked under his supervision were uniformly impressed by his conscientiousness and by his sincere interest in them as individuals.
At Vanderbilt University, Weaver was elected to three terms in the University Senate and was secretary of that body in 1961. In 1968 he chaired the Senate Committee on Student Relations. He was also elected to the Faculty Council of the College of Arts and Science and chaired the college’s Academic Standards Committee from 1956-1959. He was a member of the university committee that drew up the Report on Academic Freedom and Student Discipline that was adopted by the Faculty Senate in June 1960. He also served several years on the University Athletic Committee. In 1973 Weaver was the recipient of the University’s Thomas Jefferson Award, given to a faculty member for distinguished service in the councils of governance at Vanderbilt.
Among Weaver’s scholarly publications is Mississippi Farmers, 1850-1860 (1945). He contributed to the seven-volume official history, The Army Air Forces in World War II, edited by James L. Cate and Wesley Frank Craven (1948-1958). Weaver edited the first four volumes of The Correspondence of James K. Polk (1969-1977), a project sponsored by the National Historical Publications Commission. He was assisted on this project by professors Paul H. Bergeron, Kermit L. Hall, and Wayne Cutler of Vanderbilt University. Weaver also published articles on foreign immigrants in the South and other topics in various scholarly journals.
Weaver was an active member of the Southern Historical Association for fifty years. He was elected to its Executive Council in 1959 and to the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern History in 1958-1961. He was chairman of the SHA Program Committee for the meeting in Richmond in 1965; chairman of the Local Arrangements Committee for the meeting in Nashville in 1958; and chairman of the Graduate Awards Committee for I969.
Weaver was also active in the Tennessee Historical Society, of which he was president in 1961-1963 and a member of the Executive Council. He also held membership in the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. He was a founder of the University Club of Nashville and a member of the Urban League, the Old Oak Club, Kappa Phi Kappa, and Pi Gamma Mu.
Weaver is survived by his widow, formerly Blanche Henry Clark, whom he married in 1944. She, too, received the PhD degree in history from Vanderbilt University (1938).
Charles F. Delzell
Vanderbilt University
ELIZABETH WEISZ-BUCK. Friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of Beth Weisz Buck were sorry to learn of her death on November 18, 1984. Beth had been a doctoral student in history, at UCLA since 1977, studying under Professor Kitty Sklar. Her dissertation focused on “Women Reformers and the Passage of Mother’s Pensions Legislation during the Progressive Era.” A very effective teacher, she was awarded a number of prestigious fellowships including the Jean Nidetch and the AAUW. In spite of a year-long bout with cancer, Beth had been able to make significant contributions to her field of US Women’s History through the presentation of papers and moderation of panels at professional meetings. As a Bush fellow, Beth served on the Lieutenant-Governor’s task force on Comparable Worth, and in that capacity developed a number of position papers on the subject. She will be greatly missed by her many friends and colleagues.
For those of us that formed Beth’s support network for the last year, her death and dying took on a special significance. Facing death and affirming life, Beth’s best qualities emerged. She elicited the best in all of us and taught us important lessons about living.
Beth’s friends have organized a graduate student award in her name in the Department of History at UCLA. Those who want to contribute may do so by sending a check made out to the Elizabeth Weisz-Buck Award to Mrs. Barbara Kelley at the History Dept., UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1402.
RICHARD CHARLES WOLF, seventy-two, a Charles Grandison Finney professor of church history emeritus at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and a pastor emeritus of First Lutheran Church, died Monday at his home after a long illness.
Among previous posts, Dr. Wolf was a professor at Oberlin College Graduate School of Theology in Ohio and an assistant professor of American church history at Yale University Divinity School in New Haven, Conn.
He was the author of the History of First Lutheran Church, Plymouth, Ohio; Our Protestant Heritage; The Americanization of the German Lutherans, 1683-1829; Lutherans in North America; and the second edition of Documents of Lutheran Unity.
He was a graduate of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, did postgraduate study at Oberlin College Graduate School of Theology and received his doctorate at Yale University Divinity School. He was ordained a minister in 1937.
Dr. Wolf was a former member of the Board of Theological Education, Lutheran Church in America; a past president and a former member of the Oberlin Chapter, American Field Service; a former member of the Oberlin Health and Welfare Commission; and a former member of the Oberlin Fair Housing Commission.
He was a member of the American Historical Association, the American Society of Church History, the Lutheran Historical Conference, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Society of Reformation Research, the Mississippi Valley Historical Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta, Tau Kappa Alpha and Phi Sigma Iota.
Survivors besides his wife Marjorie, and his mother, Estella Tawney Wolf, include a son, Norman Tracy Wolf, Cokato, Minnesota; a brother, J. Louis Wolf, Naples, Florida; and three grandchildren.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Lutheran World Hunger Relief.