Eric F. Goldman
Eric F. Goldman, 73, leading authority on twentieth-century American history, professor emeritus, Princeton University, and a former aide and adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, died February 19, 1989. Dr. Goldman was probably best known for his 1952 book Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform, which won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize for “distinguished writing in American history.” He was also author of the best-selling The Crucial Decade, America 1945–55. The experience of working as special adviser to President Lyndon Johnson was recounted in The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.
Dr. Goldman grew up in Baltimore and attended The Johns Hopkins University where, he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in history by the age of 22. He served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins until 1942, when he became an assistant professor at Princeton University. For years his Princeton course on modern American history was one of the most popular at the university.
From 1959 to 1967, he was moderator of the NBC television show The Open Mind, and had written for scholarly journals and for such magazines as Time, Harper’s, National Geographic, Holiday, Life, Saturday Review, and The New York Times Magazine. During the 1950s he lectured in Europe and India under the auspices of the State Department and in 1976 became the first U.S. representative in the Canadian cultural exchange program.
President of the Society of American Historians from 1962 to 1969, he lived in Princeton since his retirement from the university faculty in 1985.
Hazel W. Hertzberg
Hazel W. Hertzberg, 70, scholar of American Indian history and professor of history and education, Teachers College, Columbia University, died October 10, 1988 while attending a conference in Rome.
Professor Hertzberg wrote several books, including The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements, and was a co-author of a book on the United Nations with her husband, Sidney, who died in 1984. She was a member of the American Historical Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the Consortium of Social Science Education. She also served as an adviser and commissioner for the National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools.
Born in Brooklyn, she received her doctorate from Columbia University and joined the faculty of Teachers College in 1963.
Survivors include a son, a daughter, and two grandchildren.
Elisabeth G. Kimball
Elisabeth G. Kimball, a professor and specialist in medieval English history, died April 20, 1988. She was a resident of Hamden, Connecticut. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, on March 24, 1900, she was educated at Mt. Holyoke College (B.A., 1921, M.A., 1925, Oxford University, B.Litt., 1927, and Yale University Ph.D., 1933).
She later served as an instructor at Wells College from 1927 to 1930 and at Wilson College from 1934 to 1935. She served as dean of Westbrook Junior College from 1939-1949 and also lectured at various times at the University of Massachusetts, Hunter College, and Rutgers.
She received an ACLS grant-in-aid in 1935 and 1951 and was a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Conference on British Studies, and the Royal Historical Society. Her research was primarily in English medieval legal history. She also worked with the social studies division of the Educational Testing Service.
Alice Kimball Smith
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Walter B. Posey
Walter B. Posey, 87, professor emeritus at Agnes Scott College and Emory University and author of books on the religion of the southern frontier, died on August 10, 1988.
Born in Smyrna, Tennessee, Professor Posey received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and his master’s and doctorate from Vanderbilt University. After teaching economics for two years at Cumberland University, he taught history at Birmingham-Southern College for eighteen years, chairing the department most of that time. In 1943 he became professor and chair of the history and political science department at Agnes Scott, and served in this position until retirement in 1970. In 1948 he received a joint professorship at Emory University, teaching in the graduate program until 1969.
Professor Posey lectured at Shrivenham University in England and for the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II and later taught in England and Germany with the Maryland Overseas Program. His visiting summer professorships spanned the nation. In retirement he continued to teach his American biography course in senior citizen programs.
A founding member of the Southern Historical Association in 1934, Professor Posey served as its president in 1958.
His books were Methodism in the Old Southwest (1933), The Presbyterian Church in the Old Southwest (1952), The Baptist Church in the Lower Mississippi Valley (1957), Religious Strife on the Southern Frontier (1965), his Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, and Frontier Missions (1966).
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Grisham Posey and by a daughter and two granddaughters.
James Harvey Young
Emory University
Frank Rossiter
Frank Rossiter, a professor at the University of Texas, Dallas and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, was remembered in a memorial service February 9, 1989 in Dallas.
Educated at Harvard (A.B. magna cum laude, 1959), the University of Pennsylvania (M.S. Ed., 1964), and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1970), Professor Rossiter came to the University of Texas at Dallas in 1975. He had taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for five years before he came.
His fields of research and teaching were American intellectual and cultural history, particularly the role that music, and the arts more generally have played in American society and culture.
A. William Salomone
A. William Salomone, 73, professor emeritus of history, University of Rochester, died January 24, 1989 in Philadelphia. Born in Guardiagrele (Abruzzi), Italy, he came to the United States 60 years ago, graduated from La Salle College and received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in modern Italian history, Professor Salomone taught at New York University for 15 years, before going to Rochester as a Wilson Professor of European History, where he taught for 20 years. He retired in 1982. During his New York years, he often taught at Columbia University and served on dissertation committees in Italian history.
He was the author of several books, including Italian Democracy in the Making. Originally a dissertation, it won the AHA Herbert Baxter Adams prize in 1946. A classic in its field, it established his reputation as a promising scholar. It was later revised and published as Italy in the Giolittian Era, 1960.
In the last years of his life, while struggling against partial blindness, illness and cancer, he transformed his strongly-held interest in historiographic issues into invaluable summations of the work of major historians for the International Dictionary of World Historians.
In one of his last articles “Momenti di storia, frammenti di ricordi con Salvemini tra Stati Uniti e Italia,” Revista Archivio Trimestrale, July-December, 1982, Salomone reminisced about his own intellectual maturation, shaped in part, by his personal interchanges with Gaetano Salvemini and a meeting with Benedetto Croce. In October, 1988, ill and in pain, he delivered a lecture in Molfetta, Salvemini’s hometown, on the work and contribution of their native son. It was his last public appearance.
Decorated as a knight-officer in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, he was widely in demand as a guest lecturer, organizer of numerous conferences, including a highly successful centennial of the Italian Risorgimento in 1961, and an international conference devoted to Giacomo Matteotti on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Italian Socialist leader, both at Columbia University.
He is survived by his wife, Lina, his daughter and son-in-law, Illia Salomone and Tim Smith, two grandchildren, three brothers, two sisters and their families.
Joel Blatt
University of Connecticut, Stamford
Sandi E. Cooper
College of Staten Island, CUNY
Dorothy Stimson
Dorothy Stimson, 97, of Owls Head, Maine, died September 19, 1988. A longtime professor at Goucher College and the author of Scientists and Amateurs: A History of the Royal Society, 1948, she served as the History of Science Society president from 1953 to 1956.
Earlie Endris Thorpe
Earlie Endris Thorpe, 64, recently retired professor of history, North Carolina Central University, died January 30, 1989. Dr. Thorpe, author of nine books, joined the faculty at NCCU in 1962. Chair of its department of history and social science department for 10 years, he also was a visiting professor of history at Duke and Harvard Universities. Professor Thorpe was regarded as a pioneer in several fields of history, including the intellectual history of Afro-Americans.
Born in Durham, he later attended North Carolina College (now NCCU) for a year, then served three years in the army during World War II. After the war, he studied at the University of Florence, Italy, then returned to North Carolina where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He received his doctoral degree from Ohio State University.
He was general editor of a 10-booklet series of the black experience in America, published by American Education Publications, Middleton, Connecticut. The topics of his books included a slave psycho-history of the south, slave religion and C.J. Jung; and a critique of the philosophy of history.
A member and associate minister of Mount Gilead Baptist Church, he was ordained as a minister on April 4, 1976. He also served as a member of the North Carolina Bicentennial Commission and among his associate memberships were the State Historical Advisory Commission, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; the American Historical Association, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He is survived by his wife, Marthe V. Branch Thorpe, two daughters, three brothers, and four grandsons. Memorials may be made to the E.E. Thorpe Scholarship Fund in the history department at North Carolina Central University.
Barbara Tuchman
Barbara Tuchman, 77, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, died on February 6, 1989. Ms. Tuchman’s fourth book, The Guns of August, a study of the background and beginning of World War I, made her a celebrity after its publication in 1962. The book received critical praise and a sturdy niche on the best-seller lists. It also won a Pulitizer Prize.
She won her second Pulitzer Prize for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, a biography of Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell. Her other books include The Zimmermann Telegram, The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, and Practicing History, a selection of short writings.
Born in New York, Ms. Tuchman did not choose the leisurely life, but pursued the historian’s craft. Possessing neither academic title nor graduate degree, she found the writing life difficult due not out of a lack of credentials but due to gender. “If a man is a writer,” she once said, “everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say, ‘This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it’s not professional.'”
She received her B.A. in 1933 from Radcliffe College, where she concentrated on history and literature. She took an unpaid job with the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations and in the following year, went to Tokyo to help produce up an economic handbook of the Pacific area. While there, she wrote for two journals, Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs. In 1936 she went to work for The Nation, soon afterward, she went to Valencia and Madrid to report on the Spanish Civil War.
By 1939 she returned to New York, and the next year married Dr. Lester Reginald Tuchman, a New York internist. Her first book was Bible and Sword, about the British colonial experience in Israel, and her second book appearing two years later, was The Zimmermann Telegram about a message sent from Berlin to a German diplomat in Mexico in 1917.
A person who could command respect, Ms. Tuchman had a firm sense of her vocation as historian. She understood the first task of any good writer was to obtain and hold the reader’s interest by not getting bogged down in unimportant details of research.
Ms. Tuchman is survived by her husband, who is an professor emeritus of clinical medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; a sister, three daughters, and four grandchildren.
Martin Yanuck
Martin Yanuck, Asian Studies professor, will be remembered as a gifted scholar and teacher. As chair of the history department and director of the International Studies Program of Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, he contributed greatly to the growth of Asian studies in the state and helped create the momentum that has recently led to the creation of two centers for Asian studies in Georgia.
He was a founding and active member of the Council of the Asian Studies Consortium of Georgia, and a frequent participant in scholarly meetings both as a panel organizer and presenter. His book reviews for the Journal of Asian Studies and his other scholarly publications were always appreciated for their balance, fairness, and good humor.
The many teacher-training workshops he conducted helped disseminate knowledge of Asian studies where it counted: among the region’s public school teachers. In recent years, he made a major contribution to the growth of the new field of Asian studies in world history.
At his death, he was preparing the ground for a series of Sino-American Conferences on world history to be held in China and the United States. Perhaps because his own fields of specialization were the history of Islam in India and communal politics, he was particularly sensitive to the forces that divide mankind. He saw Indian history in particular, and Asian studies in general, as vehicles capable of helping to both dispell the ignorance and prejudice that sustains such divisions. He promoted the mutual understanding which alone can end them.
Marc Jason Gilbert
North Georgia College
Richard D. Younger
Richard D. Younger, 67, a professor of history on the faculty of the University of Houston since 1954, died on November 4, 1988. A native of Wisconsin, he earned his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor William Hesseltine in history at the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He also earned a law degree from Marquette University in 1948. Professor Younger was a specialist in Civil War history and American legal history. He was the author of The People’s Panel: The Grand Jury in the United States, 1634–1941 (1963). An able and conscientious teacher, he received several teaching awards and largely shaped the Ph.D. program in history at the University of Houston. He was a founder of the Phi Alpha Theta chapter at that institution and was a Life Member of the Southern Historical Association.
John Ettling
Chair, History Department
University of Houston
Stanley Zucker
Stanley Zucker, professor of history, Southern Illinois University, died November 8, 1988 after a short struggle with cancer. Born in New York on April 19, 1936, he received his B.A. from the City College of New York in 1958. Following a tour of duty with the United States Army in Germany, Professor Zucker began graduate study in German history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received his M.A. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1968 under the guidance of Theodore S. Hamerow. His dissertation on the German National Liberal politician Ludwig Bamberger appeared in print in 1975 from the University of Pittsburgh press under the title Ludwig Bamberger: German Liberal Politician and Social Critic.
In addition to several articles on Bamberger and other aspects of early political activity in nineteenth-century Germany, Dr. Zucker became very interested in women’s history. Before his death he published a series of articles on women in politics and had completed, but not yet published, a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled “Kathinka Zitz-Halein and Female Civic Activism in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany.” He was also working on a translation of the 1848 diary of Marie Pinder. Professor Zucker’s historical writing was always based on thorough research and meticulous use of archival materials. In 1967 Professor Zucker began teaching in the history department of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1974 and to professor in 1985.
He is survived by his wife Barbara and two sons, Jeffrey and Jonathan.
James F. Harris
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park