William Lloyd Fox
William Lloyd Fox, professor of history emeritus at Montgomery College, in Maryland, and a longtime member of the American Historical Association, died on February 21, 1993, at the age of 71.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 26, 1921, Bill graduated from Case Western University and George Washington University, where he received his Ph.D. Fox wrote his dissertation under Wood Gray. In addition to teaching at Montgomery College, where he twice chaired the history department, Bill also lectured or taught as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, American University, and Frostburg State College. He was an inspiring teacher who made history a vivid reality for his students, many of whom are now lawyers, physicians, teachers, and government officials, who remember him fondly. Bill married one of his students, Lynn Waters.
Bill coedited with Richard Walsh, Maryland: A History, 1632–1970 (1974). He also coedited with R. A. Fisher, J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute (1965). It was fitting that, as one who played a role in the development of Montgomery College, he also wrote its history, Montgomery College: Maryland’s First Community College, 1946–1970 (1970). His Dandy of Johns Hopkins (1984), a biography of a famous neurosurgeon, was a product of Bill’s special interest in the history of medicine—an appropriate subject for the son of a physician. He was an authority on the origins of the Pure Food and Drug Act thanks to his dissertation on Harvey W. Wiley, the sponsor of the act, about whom he had many stories that he never tired of relating. By the time of his death, he had drafted the greater part of a Masonic history he was writing under contract and which his eldest son and namesake, also a historian, is now completing.
In addition to his membership in the AHA, Bill maintained membership in a number of other professional organizations, including the Maryland Conference of the American Association of University Professors in which he played an especially active role. He spoke out against the bias he saw in historical organizations against historians who teach in community colleges. Knowing that there could be no academic freedom without tenure, he also spoke out late in his life against the attacks on tenure that had become so common. Among his professional activities, to which he gave of himself so unstintingly, was his service on a number of accreditation teams.
Despite his long years in the academy, Bill had a continuing interest in public history and, indeed, spent his last years as a public historian. Moreover, he was for years a regular attendee at that unique Washington institution, the D.C. Historians’ Luncheon, which was established about 50 years ago to bring both public and academic historians together in an informal social gathering twice every year. Following in the footsteps of Wood Gray, Bill, unaided, kept it going for a full decade, after which, until his death, he played the leading role on a sponsoring committee.
Bill is survived by his wife, Lynn, three children, two grandchildren, a sister, and countless friends and colleagues, all of whom miss him greatly.
Paul J. Scheips
Historical Consultant
Joe B. Frantz
Joe B. Frantz, former Turnbull Professor of History at Texas A & M University at Corpus Christi, died in Houston on November 13, 1993, at the age of 76. Born in 1917 and raised by adoptive parents in Weatherford, Texas, he attended Weatherford College and the University of Texas at Austin where he received a doctorate in history in 1948 as a student of Eugene C. Barker and Walter Prescott Webb. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1949 until his retirement in 1986. He was the first occupant of the Walter Prescott Webb Chair of History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. He taught in Corpus Christi from 1986 until just before his death.
A prolific writer, Joe Frantz was the author of the prizewinning Gail Borden: Dairyman to a Nation (1951); The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality; Texas: A Bicentennial History (1976), with Julian E. Choate, Jr.; and The Forty Acre Follies: An Opinionated History of the University of Texas (1983). He also wrote many articles and book chapters. He was director of the Texas State Historical Association from 1966 to 1977, and served as president of Phi Alpha Theta from 1962 to 1964. He was also president of the Southern Historical Association in 1977–78 and of the Western History Association in 1978–79. During the 1960s, Joe directed the Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History Project, a key source of information about the former president.
An inspiring teacher, Joe Frantz was known to his graduate students and colleagues as “Joe B.” He could always be depended upon for a wry anecdote or a sage piece of advice based on his deep knowledge of Texas and the West. One of his students, David McComb, wrote of him that “he was a person who preferred to grin rather than scowl, banter rather than pontificate, and tell a story rather than complain.” He was especially adept at communicating with people outside the academic community. His death ended an era in the study of Texas history, but Joe’s vibrant personality remains a strong memory among his students, colleagues, and friends across Texas and within the history profession. Survivors include his widow, Betsy Chadderdon, a stepdaughter, two daughters from an earlier marriage, and four grandchildren. He was buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Lewis L. Gould
University of Texas at Austin
Oscar Janowsky
Oscar Janowsky, professor emeritus of history at the City College of the City University of New York, died recently at the age of 93. His long and distinguished career reflects the life of City College from the time of his graduation with a bachelor’s degree in 1921 until his retirement in 1966.
Janowsky moved through the faculty ranks with the deliberate speed characteristic of his day. He began his teaching career at the college as a tutor in 1924 and was not appointed a full professor until the late 1940s. Oscar joined many other City College graduates in completing his graduate work at Columbia, earning the Ph.D. in 1933.
Oscar offered his usual clear view of a historical situation when he reminisced in 1959 that his fellow students of the 1920s had a well-earned reputation for intellectual achievement but also faced personal economic insecurity that bred intense competitiveness as well as that different, but often equally demoralizing, insecurity born of a lack of social skills. Oscar certainly displayed the intellectual strength of his generation, but his life also revealed how the personal difficulties faced by so many students of that day could be transmuted into a career marked by integrity and genuine concern for others.
Oscar’s scholarly achievements earned him an international reputation and brought honor to City College—with which he always proudly identified. In the 1930s, his books focused on Jews and Nazi anti-Semitism; in the 1940s he moved on to an interest in American Jews while pursuing an ongoing concern for the issues of nationalities and national minorities; in the 1950s, Oscar added a study of Israel’s variation of the welfare state to his already full intellectual plate. In an era of extremely heavy teaching loads, Oscar managed somehow, like many of his colleagues with City College backgrounds, to meet his responsibilities at the college fully while adding steadily to scholarship and developing a high standing in the profession at large. The work habits of a City College education were never lost, and we are in awe of what Oscar accomplished.
These accomplishments extended to Oscar’s life within the college as well. He introduced Jewish history into the curriculum, was a major sponsor of honors theses, served on many important departmental and college committees, including the history executive committee, and became the first chair of the department’s graduate committee in the early 1960s. In all of these activities, he demanded high standards of his students and colleagues and of himself as well. He was eminently fair to all, and this earned him the admiration of students and colleagues alike.
In his retirement, Oscar continued his scholarly work although ill health slowed his activities during the last decade. Oscar must have had justifiable pride in his professional life as the summation of the City College experience at its best. He was a living link between the City College of the past and the institution that today still is committed to the same objectives. Oscar Janowsky represented the best of this proud tradition. We will remember him with fondness and will continue to respect his notable legacy.
Irwin Yellowitz
City College, City University of New York
James B. Joll
James B. Joll, Stevenson Professor of International History emeritus at the London School of Economics (LSE), died July 12, 1994. Born in Bristol, England, on June 28, 1918, he studied at Oxford, where he developed a lifelong fascination for intellectual history, international affairs, and, in particular, France and Germany. Being fluent in German, he was trained during World War II to undertake clandestine missions in Nazi-occupied Europe and subsequently served as an intelligence officer in defeated Germany. In 1946 he began his academic career, first at New College, Oxford, and later as subwarden of St. Antony’s College, which was to become, with him as a major intellectual force behind it, one of the most cosmopolitan training grounds in England for historians and social scientists from all over the world. In 1967 he accepted the LSE’s prestigious Stevenson chair. The breadth of Joll’s intellectual interests explains his influence on his doctoral students, many of whom now teach in North American universities. His most recent works were studies of broad sweep on modern European history and the origins of World War I; but even in these books, Joll, the intellectual historian, invariably comes through—the scholar who wrote on international socialism and on “intellectuals in politics” like Blum, Marinetti, Rathenau, and Gramsci. He turned his attention to the losers in the historical process and examined, as he put it in The Anarchists, the “dustheap of History” as a way of accessing the spirit of a particular age. Joll will be remembered by a large number of friends and colleagues for his influential oeuvre, his humanism and tolerance, and the abiding interest he took in his students.
V. R. Berghahn
Brown University
Patricia Miller King
Patricia Miller King died in Boston on May 3, 1994. She had been director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College since 1973; the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation endowed her position in 1993.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in July 1937, King earned an A.B. in history, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Radcliffe in 1959, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970, with a dissertation on Hugh d’Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, 1130–1164. While a graduate student, she worked at the Women’s Archives, an earlier and more modest incarnation of the Schlesinger Library.
During King’s tenure as director, the library’s published and unpublished holdings grew many times over, while research use increased more than 30-fold. She spearheaded a $3.4 million renovation of the 1908 Radcliffe College Library building and led and cajoled the staff into the computer age. Her tenure also saw federal and foundation grants to process collections, micropublications, lecture series, exhibitions of works by women artists, and a series of oral history projects.
Well known for her boundless energy and dedication, King knew how to make the most of unexpected opportunities. She recognized the genius behind the late Judith Sedwick’s portraits of interviewees from the Black Women Oral History Project; the portraits ultimately joined the well-traveled exhibition, Women of Courage. She persuaded Radcliffe to host the second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1974, which attracted 2,000 students and scholars to Cambridge. She made the Schlesinger Library known nationwide and then worldwide: after attending the first International Symposium of Women’s Libraries, in Istanbul, in 1991, she planned the second such conference. More than 200 librarians, archivists, and “documentalists” from 44 countries met at Radcliffe, without Pat King, in June.
Under King’s leadership, the library earned the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of American Archivists in 1990. She herself was named one of “70 Women Who Have Made a Difference in the World of Books” by the Women’s National Book Association in 1987. At the time of her illness she was a member of the Harvard University Library Council and the AHA’s Research Division, a trustee of the Boston Heart Foundation, a corporation member of School Volunteers for Boston, and an associate editor of American National Biography. Between 1989 and 1992, she chaired the board of the National Council for Research on Women; she had served on the membership committees of the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Among her numerous articles was the entry on Sonja Henie for Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980), no doubt inspired by her figure-skating daughters. She also lectured widely, giving her last major presentation, “Oral History Methods and Theory,” at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in August 1993, about the time she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Characteristically, she fought back, choosing heroic, risky treatment, a gamble she lost. The widow of Dr. Samuel W. Stein, she is survived by her mother and brother, four children, three grandchildren, and a library staff that still longs for her knowledgeable and dedicated leadership, and the foresight that prompted her to endow a director’s fund, which the Radcliffe trustees have named in her honor.
Eva Moseley
Schlesinger Library
Michael J. McTighe
Michael J. McTighe, associate professor of religion at Gettysburg College, died of cancer on February 4, 1993, at the age of 44.
Born in Tacoma, Washington, McTighe earned his academic degrees at Brown University (A.B. 1970), Yale University (M.Div. 1973), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1983). At Chicago he wrote his dissertation on Protestants and public culture in antebellum Cleveland under the direction of Martin Marty.
McTighe taught on temporary or part-time appointments at various institutions, including Cleveland State University, John Carroll University, Hiram University, Baldwin-Wallace College, and Oberlin College, before joining the faculty at Gettysburg in 1986. At Gettysburg he developed courses on American religious history, contributed to the college’s first-year colloquy program, and made a lasting impression as a quietly charismatic teacher and campus leader. In 1993 he was posthumously recognized by the college with its Lindback Award for distinguished teaching.
McTighe published articles on aspects of Protestant benevolence, religious diversity, and philanthropy in antebellum Cleveland, and contributed several entries to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. He also wrote an essay-review of volume one of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. for Pennsylvania History. Before his death, he had completed the final draft of his monograph, “A Measure of Success”: Protestants and Public Culture in Antebellum Cleveland, which was published in 1994 by the State University of New York Press.
He is survived by his wife, Carolyn L. Carter, and his son, Edward Carter McTighe.
Michael J. Birkner
Gettysburg College
Monsignor Joseph N. Moody
Monsignor Joseph N. Moody, professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America and a founding member of the Society for French Historical Studies, died in Statesboro, Georgia, on March 2, 1994. He was 89 years old.
A New York City native, he received his A.B. from St. Joseph’s Seminary in 1925 and his Ph.D. from Fordham University in 1934. His graduate major was classical history and literature, but he later switched to modern European history, doing postdoctoral work at Columbia University under Carlton J. Hayes.
Father Moody was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1929 and soon became renowned as one of the best preachers in the archdiocese. Additional responsibilities included teaching at Cathedral College and the College of New Rochelle, where he founded a labor school and acted as its first dean.
During this time, he started speaking out against the “vicious new” anti-Semitism. With strong backing from Cardinal Hayes of New York, he wrote an important pamphlet debunking anti-Semitic canards. He also gave a nationally broadcast speech attacking anti-Semitism at Madison Square Garden before Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a large audience. For his efforts, B’nai B’rith honored him with its 1938 Human Rights Award. When war finally came, Father Moody, a naval reserve chaplain, was assigned to the Pacific theater, where he served with distinction on both the USS Massachusetts and the USS Yorktown. Later, he received both a naval and a presidential citation.
After 1945, he taught successively at Notre Dame College, in Staten Island, N.Y., Ladycliff College, in Highland Falls, N.Y., and Catholic University, where he became a full professor in 1965. He retired in 1975, but he loved teaching so much that he continued offering courses at Catholic for an additional year. Then he moved on to teach at the College of New Rochelle, Boston College, St. John’s Seminary, in Brighton, Mass., and, finally, Georgia Southern University. Countless students over the years remember him as a vibrant teacher who won their enduring affection and inspired them to a love for both history and rigorous scholarship.
Father Moody published a variety of books and pamphlets, including Church and State: Catholic Social and Political Movements, 1789–1950 (1953); The Church as Enemy: Anticlericalism in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (1968); and French Education since Napoleon (1978). He also contributed seminal articles to major historical journals and a steady stream of book reviews.
A member of several professional associations, he was especially active in the Association of New York State European Historians, serving as president in 1960 and 1977; the Society for French Historical Studies, serving as vice president twice and president once (1969); and the American Catholic Historical Association, serving as president in 1978. Editorial commitments included acting as consulting editor for Church History, modern European history editor for The New Catholic Encyclopedia, and from 1965 until his death, associate editor of the Catholic Historical Review.
Father Moody continued to participate in history conferences even after his health began to decline. At the bicentennial conference on the French Revolution, in Washington, D.C., in 1989—his last conference—the Society for French Historical Studies awarded him a distinguished service medal.
Father Moody had a great many friends in the profession, all of whom fondly recall his enduring human qualities. A full list of these qualities could be given here, but perhaps the most important were his unfailing cheerfulness and his genuine concern for the careers of young historians. Father Moody will be greatly missed.
James Friguglietti
Montana State University at Billings
Sandra Horvath-Peterson
Georgetown University
Herbert S. Schell
Dean Emeritus Herbert S. Schell was born on April 12, 1899, and died on April 4, 1994. He served briefly in the army in 1918 before entering academic life. He received his A.B. from Muhlenberg College in 1920 where he was elected to Phi Delta Kappa, and he received his M.A. from Columbia University in 1923. In 1925 he joined the faculty at the University of South Dakota. In 1928–29 he took a leave of absence to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. From 1936 to 1964 he served as director and dean of the graduate school. Following retirement in 1968, he continued to serve as the university archivist. He pioneered in the collection of materials for South Dakota history and is best known for his definitive History of South Dakota. His history of Clay County, South Dakota, won an award for merit from the American Association for State and Local History. He received the Will G. Robinson Award for service to South Dakota history and was inducted into the Western Heritage Hall of Fame. Schell was known as a devoted teacher and a congenial and respected colleague.
R. Alton Lee
University of South Dakota
Louis Snyder
Louis Snyder, professor emeritus of history at the City College of the City University of New York, died in December 1993 at the age of 86. We once again mourn the passing of a renowned colleague. In recent years, we have lost Oscar Janowsky, Michael Kraus, and Joseph Wisan. So does an era in the history of City College steadily and surely close.
Louis Snyder was born on July 4, 1907. From early on, his interests focused on Europe, particularly the subjects of nationalism and race. He received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1932. Quite aware of the threat from Hitler, he wrote his first book in 1932 under a pseudonym to expose the danger the Nazis posed for modern civilization. He also recognized the connection between Germany’s past and Hitler’s rise to power, and he explored this topic in his second book in 1935. By 1939, he had moved to a study of race and modern ethnic theories, writing Race, A History of Modern Ethnic Theories. His conclusions still need repetition. As Louis Snyder put it 55 years ago: there is but one species, homo sapiens; there are no pure ethnic groups; there are no superior or inferior peoples, but within every people there is a range of individuals; and there are differences among various peoples, but these are by no means as great as those between individuals of the same ethnic group.
Louis Snyder continued to write books—many of them—and numerous articles of all types as well as countless reviews. He edited several multivolume series of books for the classroom and a more popular readership. He also lectured widely in the United States and Europe. Hans Kohn, the eminent historian of nationalism and a colleague of Snyder in the 1950s, said, with his characteristic understatement, that Louis was “a man of astonishing industry and working capacity.” One is hard-pressed even to count the total number of Snyder’s published works. Perhaps as a first memorial to Snyder, someone will compile a complete bibliography of his incredible legacy of published work. Yet Snyder did not only write prodigiously. His work also received much positive comment. In fact, for many outside of City College, he was the best known historian on our faculty. As with the other illustrious historians of his generation at City College, he remained at the college for his entire professional life. Thus his accomplishments and his reputation redounded continuously to the good of this institution.
Despite his constant and expansive record of publication, Snyder moved slowly through the professorial ranks as was common in his generation. He began teaching part time at the college in 1933, full time in 1935 as an instructor, and only achieved the associate and full professor ranks in 1949 and 1953 respectively. He later became a major participant in the doctoral program at the Graduate Center while continuing to do most of his teaching at the college. During these many years, he took only one sabbatical leave, and that was in 1965–66. How he accomplished so much within the constraints of a full-time teaching load escapes the grasp of more ordinary folk.
Louis Snyder retired in 1977, but he continued to pursue a busy schedule of writing and editing to the very end of his life. With the constant personal support of his wife of 57 years, Ida Mae, Louis Snyder produced a body of work that will live on even as he passes. It is a testament to his energy, intellect, and humanity. Louis Snyder combined his worldwide reputation with personal decency, a notable respect for all within the department, whatever their rank, and a desire for harmony and cooperation among peers to further scholarship and teaching. Those of us who have had the privilege to be his colleague during some part of his long career at City College will always treasure the man and his memory.
Irwin Yellowitz
City College, City University of New York
Leo F. Solt
Leo F. Solt, former professor of history and dean of the Graduate School at Indiana University, died at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, on April 18, 1994, after an extended illness. A scholar of early modern England, he was 72 years old.
Born in Waterloo, Iowa, he graduated from Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa, before joining the U.S. Navy in 1943. He served as an officer on the aircraft carrier Bataan in the Pacific theater during the last years of World War II. He received his M.A. in history from the University of Iowa in 1948 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955, the year he joined the Indiana University faculty. He had previously taught for three years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Solt was acting chair of the Indiana history department in 1962–63, and he became chair in 1965. He also directed the West European studies program. He became dean of the graduate school at the university in 1978, serving in that post until 1987. As dean he was instrumental in establishing the M.A. degree in public history offered at Indiana University’s Indianapolis campus. Active in graduate education associations, he served as president of the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools in 1984–85 and was a member of the Mellon Fellowship national selection committee.
Solt published two books, Saints in Arms: Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell’s Army (1959) and Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509–1640 (1990). He finished a third, Church and State during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1649, in the week before his death. He also wrote numerous scholarly articles, including “History of Britain, 1603–1714” for the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He also held the Guggenheim and other national fellowships.
In 1975, Solt served as vice president for research of the American Historical Association. During his tenure in the department and the graduate school, he was instrumental in bringing the Journal of American History, the national office of the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Review to Indiana University. He was president of the Midwest Conference on British Studies from 1968 to 1970.
During his career at Indiana, Solt supervised several graduate students and taught legions of undergraduates. In 1992, he received a student award for the outstanding teacher among retiring faculty members. A prize fund in the history department at Indiana University has been set up in his honor. The graduate faculty of the university will award the Leo F. Solt Distinguished Graduate Service Award annually. He is survived by his wife, Mary Ellen, and two daughters.
Sheila M. Cooper
Indiana University