REGINALD F. ARRAGON, member of the AHA since 1918 and professor emeritus of Reed College, Portland, Oregon, died November 7, 1986. He was ninety-five years old.
Professor Arragon attended Northwestern University where he received his AB in 1913 and his AM in 1914. He went on to study at Harvard University and received his PhD in history in 1923 and was Sholz Professor there from 1923–1962.
His best known book was, Transition from the Ancient to the Medieval World, 1936, Holt. He also authored several articles including, “Poetic Art as a Philosophic Medium for Lucretius,” 1961, Essays in Criticism; “College Teaching as a Profession,” 1961, College and University Teaching; and “History’s Changing Image,” 1964, American Scholar.
HENRY BLUMENTHAL, professor emeritus of Rutgers University, Newark, died February 17, 1987, at the age of seventy-five.
Born in Graudenze, Germany in 1921, Dr. Blumenthal received his AB from the University of Berlin in 1933. Upon emigrating to the United States, he attended the University of California where he received his MA in 1943 and PhD in 1949.
In his research career as an American diplomatic historian, he published Reappraisal of Franco-American Relations, 1830–1871, 1959, University of North Carolina Press; France and the United States; Their Diplomatic Relations, 1789–1914, 1970, University of North Carolina Press, reprinted by Norton in 1972; and American and French Culture, 1800– 1900: Interchanges in Art, Science, Literature, and Society, 1975, Louisiana State University Press.
Dr. Blumenthal was a forty-seven year member of the AHA and and was also a member of the Organization of American Historians. He is survived by two brothers.
FRANCIS J. BOWMAN, professor emeritus of history, University of Southern California, died on July 4, 1986 at the age of eighty-six in Long Beach.
Professor Bowman did undergraduate studies at Augustana College, Illinois and went on to receive his AM, 1926, and PhD, 1929, from the University of Iowa.
He was an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow in history to Sweden from 1928–30 and began his teaching career at the State College of Washington in 1930. He joined the faculty of the University of South ern California in 1939. He was a guest professor at the Universities of Uppsala, 1947–48 and 1956; Stockholm, and Gothenburg, Sweden, 1956. He served as a delegate to the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, 1929; Paris, 1950; Rome, 1955; and Gothenburg, 1960. His published works in clude, “Historians and Historical Theories,” among other reviews and articles published by American and European journals.
Dr. Bowman had been active for many years in scholastic and professional organizations including the AHA. He served on the board of Phi Alpha Theta in several capacities including that of president. He is survived by two brothers, a daughter, and two grandchildren.
Sarah B. Genter
STETSON CONN, former chief historian of the US Army and distinguished World War II historian, died on November 8, 1986 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was seventy eight years old.
Born in Ohio, Dr. Conn earned his BA in economics from The George Washington University in 1933 and a MA in American history in 1934. He went on to study at Yale University, earning a DPhil in 1938. He taught as an instructor and assistant professor of American history at Amherst College, Massachusetts for eight years before accepting the position as senior editor in the office of the then Chief of Military History in 1946. He assumed the post of Chief Historian of the Army in 1958 and continued in that position until his retirement in May 1971.
During his time as chief historian, Stetson Conn created a productive and highly praised faculty. His office published nineteen volumes of the Korean War, a history of Army logistics, a history of German defeat in the East, and a textbook on American military history for use in universities. Two of the World War II histories carry his name as coauthor. In addition, he produced a volume in the Yale historical studies, Gibraltar in British Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century, and colleagues credit Dr. Conn as a major architect of the Army’s monumental eighty-volume history of World War II.
After his retirement, Dr. Conn compiled a bibliography of Woodrow Wilson’s papers. He also published a history of the Church of the Epiphany, Washington, DC, followed by a history of St. John’s Church in Waynesboro, Virginia, and then a history of All Saints Church in Winter Park, Florida.
His first wife Mary Alice died in 1971, and he is survived by his second wife Benny, two daughters, a sister and brother, and ten grandchildren.
David F. Trask
Chief Historian, US Army
RHODA GOLDEN FREEMAN, Calman Professor of History and chair of the department of history and political science, Upsala College, died of cancer on September 12, 1987 in New Jersey at the age of fifty-eight. Professor Freeman received her BA from Hunter College, her MA from The George Washington University, and her PhD from Columbia University in 1966. That same year she joined the faculty of Upsala College. Known for her warm, supportive relations with her colleagues, she received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1971 and became chair of the department in 1974. She gained the position as dean of the college but selected to return to the department in 1979.
While at Upsala College, Dr. Freeman authored several articles and reviews and remained a popular lecturer and guest speaker. She was also active in many professional organizations, including the AHA, and was especially committed to the work of various women’s, community, and religious organizations. She was chair-elect of the New Jersey College and University Coalition on Women’s Education at the time of her death. Other organizations she worked with were the American Civil Liberties Union, the Jewish Education Association, the American Jewish Congress, and the Middle States Association among others.
Her generosity, enthusiasm, and great organizational abilities enabled her to make an extraordinary contribution to college and community. She has been very much missed. Professor Freeman is survived by her husband, two children, and three grandchildren.
David F. Barry
Upsala College
DWIGHT E. LEE, AHA member and professor emeritus of European history, Clark University, died in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 20, 1986 at the age of eighty eight.
Following graduate work at the University of Rochester and Harvard University, he began teaching at Clark University in 1927 and remained there for forty years to his retirement in 1967. His career at Clark University, included many “firsts.” He was appointed the first dean of the graduate school, the first Jacob and Frances Hiatt professor of modern European history, and the University’s first research coordinator.
Besides his teaching career, after World War II Dr. Lee also worked with the San Francisco Conference on International Organization which founded the United Nations. He witnessed the agreement establishing the veto power in the security council, and wrote the classic article about it.
His publications include the panoramic synthesis entitled Ten Years: The World on the Way to War, 1930–1940, written just following World War II. Later in 1978, he produced his major work on the origins of World War I, holding that the “guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty did Germany a great injustice.” He was a recognized authority on the Eastern Question, and also published a work on this issue. His grasp of historiography led to his assuming the position of editor of the Problems in European Civilizations series. A born teacher, two of his students honored him in special ways. One endowed a professorship in his name and another created a substantial book and lecture fund in his name. Dwight Lee was held in high esteem both in his own institution and in the profession. As a leader of faculty, he was constantly sought out for his wise counseling, and con genial and affectionate nature. He will be sorely missed by those who knew, admired, and loved him.
George A. Billias
Clark University
DUMAS MALONE, renowned authority on Thomas Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize winner, and professor emeritus, University of Virginia, died December 27, 1986 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was ninety-four years old.
Born in Coldwater, Mississippi, Dr. Malone did his undergraduate work at Emory University. He continued on with his studies at the Yale Divinity School. After a short but distinguished career in the US Marine Corps in World War I he returned to Yale but changed his doctoral study from theology to history, receiving his PhD in 1923.
He began his teaching career at Yale University and also taught at the University of Virginia and Columbia University. He served as an editor of The Dictionary of American Biography in 1929 and in 1931 was named editor-in-chief. He continued in that position for six years until he became editor-in-chief of the Harvard University Press.
Dr. Malone dedicated more than forty years to the study and writing of Thomas Jefferson and was considered the foremost authority on the man. Considered by many as his finest achievement, his Jefferson biographies were begun in 1943. The works include Jefferson the Virginian, vol. 1, 1948; Jefferson and the Rights of Man, vol. 2, 1951; Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, vol. 3, 1962; Jefferson the President: First Term, vol. 4, 1970; Jefferson the President: Second Term, vol. 5, 1974; and The Sage of Monticello, vol. 6, 1981. In 1975 the series was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Of the many honorary doctorates, prizes, and honors of his career, among them were the Porter Prize, Yale University, 1923; the Wilbur L. Cross Medal, 1972; the Thomas Jefferson Award, University of Virginia, 1964; the John F. Kennedy Medal, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1983.
At the time of his death he was Thomas Jefferson Memorial Biographer-in-Residence. He is survived by his wife Elisabeth Gifford, a son and daughter, and a grand daughter.
JAMES O’NEILL, National Archives’ assistant archivist for presidential libraries, died March 6, 1987 in Washington, DC. He was fifty-eight years old.
Born in Renovo, Pennsylvania, Dr. O’Neill received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Detroit. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago. After teaching at the University of Notre Dame from 1957 to 1963 he moved to Washington to join the staff of the Library of Congress. From 1965 to 1969, he was an associate professor at Loyola University in Chicago.
He assumed the position of director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library under the auspices of the National Archives in 1969 and was transferred to Washington in 1971 to serve as acting archivist of the United States for one year before becoming the assistant for presidential libraries in 1980.
Dr. O’Neill’s publications include, Episode in American History and World War II: An Account of Its Documents. He was a fellow of the American Society of Archivists and he is survived by his wife Dorothy Collings, three sons, two daughters, and one grandchild.
GAINES POST, seminal scholar of medieval civil and canon law, political thought, and representative institutions, died a week be fore Christmas 1986, at the age of eighty four, in his hometown of Haskell, Texas.
Dr. Post received his BA from the University of Texas in 1924. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University under Charles Homer Haskins, obtaining his MA in 1925 and PhD in 1931. In 1935, he started his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin, where he rose through the ranks to professor until 1964 when he left for a position at Princeton University. He continued on at Princeton until his retirement in 1970.
Professor Post was twice a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Research Fellow, and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. He also was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. He served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Medieval Canon Law. As a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, he received its highest award, the Haskins Medal for his Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, in 1966. In 1972 he was honored by his colleagues, former students included, with a Festschrift of some 1200 pages, entitled Post Scripta.
One by one the generations of scholars pass away, but the strong tradition of historical scholarship, of which Gaines Post is a vital part, lives on. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and four grandchildren.
Donald E. Queller
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Gaines Post, Jr.
Claremont McKenna College
EDWARD ROSEN, world-renowned authority on Copernicus and early modern science, died of heart failure on March 28, 1985. He was seventy years old.
Professor Rosen was graduated from The City College of New York in 1926 and began teaching classics and history. At the same time, he attended Columbia University and received his MA and PhD.
During World War II he served with the US Army Air Corps from 1943-45. After the war he joined the faculty of the newly established doctoral program in history at the City University Graduate Center and served as a founding member of the program in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He formally retired in 1977 but continued to serve the program in various counseling and teaching capacities.
In his sixty years of teaching, research, and writing, Dr. Rosen received many honors and recognition. In 1968 he was the History of Science Society’s Pfizer Medalist, one of the highest awards bestowed in the field in the United States. In 1973 the Copernicus Society of America also presented a medal to Professor Rosen and he was cited as “international dean of Copernican scholars; fastidious student of Renaissance astronomy; and arbiter for the highest standards of historical accuracy.” He was also recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Science Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Of his more than ten books and three hundred articles, he is best known for the following: Three Copernican Treatises, 1939; Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, 1965; Kepler’s Somnium, 1967; and Three Imperial Mathematicians, 1986. He successfully undertook the Polish to English translation and analysis of the Complete Works of Nicholas Copernicus, under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Science, vol. 1, 1972; vol. 2, 1978; and vol. 3, 1985. At the time of his death, Dr. Rosen was working on a biography of Copernicus and had completed fourteen of the projected chapters. His research associate and co-author Dr. Erna Hilfstein plans to complete the project.
Frank D. Grand
The City College of New York
JOHN M. SHERWOOD, professor of history at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, died of cancer on June 24, 1986.
Born in Brooklyn, he received his PhD from Columbia University in 1967. He served on the faculty at Queen’s University since 1964. He was above all else a dedicated and innovative professor to his students, and as the history department executive, he was one of the major designers of the undergraduate history curriculum at Queen’s University. He continually developed new courses as his interests moved from political through intellectual to social and technological history.
Besides his biography of George Mandel, published by Stanford University Press in 1970, he published a number of articles most notably, “England, Marx, Malthus, and the Machine,” 1985, American Historical Review.
He died before completing some projected ambitious scholarly writing projects in the history of technology and technocracy. In his last year he returned to the history department as deputy chair and led an extensive review of the undergraduate program. He was uncomplaining and private in his illness and was a powerful force in the lives of his colleagues and students to the last.
He is survived by his wife Joan, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, who is presently teaching at Queen’s University. Professor Sherwood’s students have initiated a book prize to his memory.
James M. Stayer
Queen’s University
DONALD WAYNE SUTHERLAND, Carver professor of history and law, University of Iowa, died of a heart attack at the University on September 9, 1986. He was fifty-five years old.
Professor Sutherland received his BA with highest honors from Swarthmore College in 1952. He entered Oriel College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from South Dakota in 1953 and received the DPhil degree in 1957. After service in the US Army in Germany, he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1958.
In addition to numerous articles and book reviews in learned journals and a distinguished contribution to the S.E. Thorne festschrift, Professor Sutherland authored Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I, 1278–1294, 1963 and The Assize of Novel Disseisin, 1973. He was the editor of two volumes for the Selden Society, The Eyre of Northhamptonshire, 3–4 Edward III, 1229–1330, 1983.
In addition, Professor Sutherland was awarded grants from such institutions as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Ameri can Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was elected Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Medieval Academy of America. He was labeled by the Yale Law Journal as “the best English legal historian since F.W. Maitland.” At the time of his death he was working on the eyres of Nottinghamshire and Derby shire for the Selden Society. He is survived by his wife, a son, and three daughters.
G. P. Cuttino
Emory University
ALFRED VAGTS, long-time member of the AHA and German-American historian, died on June 19, 1986. He was ninety-three years old.
Alfred Vagts served in the German army during World War I and published a volume of expressionistic anti-war poetry. He was until 1933 a member of the Institute for Foreign Policy in Hamburg, Germany. In that year he emigrated to the United States and in 1936 was deprived of his German citizenship on account of his lecture on National Socialist historiography, given at Tufts University. He held positions at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and during World War II, at the Board of Economic Warfare.
Among the books he authored, the most notable was the two-volume history of German-American relations from 1870–1914, A History of Militarism, and studies of the armed forces and diplomacy.
Until shortly before his death, he continued to write and publish on such topics as the balance of power and political caricatures. With his father-in-law, Charles A. Beard, he was a member of the Committee on Historiography established by the Social Science Research Council and co-author of its report, Theory and Practice in Historical Study, 1946. He is survived by a son and two granddaughters.
CLIFFORD P. WESTERMEIER, professor emeritus of history, University of Colorado, died November 13, 1986, in Boulder. He was seventy-six years old.
Professor Westermeier trained originally as an artist at the Pratt Institute and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, Paris, but his lifelong interest in the imagery of Western America led him to take a PhD in history at the University of Colorado in 1946. He specialized in the study of cowboys and the rodeo.
He published four books and numerous articles in his specialty on topics ranging from cowboy volunteers in Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to cowboy sensuality. His last book, Colorado’s First Portrait: Scenes by Early Artists, brought together his abiding enthusiasms: the West and its artistic portrayal.
Professor Westermeier taught fine arts at the University of Buffalo, and history at St. Louis University, Loretto Heights College, and the University of Arkansas. He returned to the University of Colorado in 1964 to teach the history of Colorado and the American Southwest. He retired in 1978. His wife Therese Stengal died in March 1986 and he is survived by a brother and nieces and nephews.
Ralph Mann
University of Colorado
RICHARD J. WRIGHT, SR., maritime historian and director of the Institute for Great Lakes Research, Bowling Green State University, died September 17, 1986 as was reported to the AHA by the Institute’s newsletter, The Lake Log Chips.
Born in Akron, Ohio, Professor Wright earned his MA in in 1963 from the University of Akron and his PhD in 1968 from Kent State University. He then joined the faculty of Bowling Green State University as an assistant professor. Soon thereafter, he founded the University’s Center for Archival Collections and was its head until the Institute for Great Lake Research became an independent branch of the Jerome Library in 1983.
Professor Wright belonged to many marine groups on the Great Lakes and through out the world. The Marine Historical Society of Detroit honored him as Great Lakes Historian of the, Year, 1978. He was currently serving as chair of the Lyman Book Awards committee for the North American Society for Oceanic History and was a member of the board of directors of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History, an organization he helped to found. He wrote many articles on Great Lakes history, and for several years edited the Maumee Valley Historical Society’s Northwest Ohio Quarterly.