JOHN HERBERT BEELER, Professor Emeritus of Medieval history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, died suddenly at his home in Greensboro on April 10, 1985. He is survived by his wife, Anne, and their five children.
Professor Beeler, a native of Marion, Ohio, received both his AB and MA degrees in history from Ohio University. A retired US Army captain, he served in both World War II and the Korean Conflict.
At Cornell University, Professor Beeler studied under the renowned medievalist Carl Stephenson. There Beeler pursued his life-long interest in medieval military history. After completing his doctoral work, Professor Beeler began his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina). In his third year, he edited the famous essay by the late nineteenth-century English historian Sir Charles Oman. Oman’s “A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, AD 378-1515” had been written by Oman while an undergraduate at Oxford. The essay was expanded into a two-volume study that dominated the field of medieval military history until Professor Beeler’s revised edition of Oman in 1953.
Professor Beeler remained at UNC-Greensboro throughout his teaching career, 1950-1983. He taught generations of students and often teamed with members of other departments for interdisciplinary courses in medieval history. He was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the American Military Institute, the American Historical Association since 1954, the Conference on British Studies, and the Society for Medieval Archaeology.
Professor Beeler contributed significantly to the literature of medieval warfare. His two best known works are Warfare in England, 1066-1189 and Warfare in Feudal Europe, 730-1200. Among his publications were his contributions to A Guide to the Sources of British Military History and to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. He also penned numerous book reviews for Speculum, Military Affairs, and other journals.
A dedicated family man, Professor Beeler was a vigorous outdoorsman. He loved gardening and annually provided many members of the UNC-Greensboro history department with vegetables he had raised. He was a sportsman and a dog enthusiast.
John Marshall Carter
East Carolina University
DAVID A. BLANK died February 9, 1985 at the age of 62. He was vice principal of Central High School in Newark, New Jersey for the past eighteen years, and he had been with the Newark school system for thirty-six years. He was a member of the American Historical Association since the late ’40s. He resided in South Orange since 1947, and is survived by his wife Coty, two sons, and a daughter.
PETER CHARANIS, Voorhees Professor Emeritus of history at Rutgers University, died in his 80th year in New Brunswick, New Jersey on March 23, 1985, after a long illness.
Born on the island of Lemnos, he received his BA from Rutgers in 1931. He then pursued Byzantine studies under Alexander A. Vasiliev at the University of Wisconsin, receiving his PhD in 1935, with a dissertation on The Religious Policy of Anastasius I, 491-518, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1939 and reprinted in 1974.
From 1938 until his retirement in 1976, Professor Charanis was on the Rutgers faculty, being promoted to full professor in 1949 and Vorhees professor in 1963. He chaired the history department from 1964-66. He was awarded honorary degrees at the University of Thessalonika in 1972 and Rutgers in 1980. He was a member of the American National Committee of Byzantine Studies and of the American Historical Association; he served on the editorial staff of Byzantinoslavica, was associated with the Gennadeion and the American School of Classical studies in Athens, and was a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens.
Along with national and international recognition, one of his greatest contributions was to Rutgers, which, under his initiative and guidance, became a primary center of Byzantine studies. Professor Charanis was responsible for the Byzantine series of publications. In international conference and classroom alike, he proselytized with vigor and enthusiasm Byzantine studies which, far from being an esoteric specialty, revealed and made more intelligible the Hellenic roots of diverse cultures of the Middle East and eastern Europe.
Professor Charanis prided himself on a substantial output of articles, many of which were collected in two volumes of the Variorum series under titles Studies on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire (1972) and Social, Economic, and Political Life in the Byzantine Empire (1973). Among the longer studies should be mentioned The Monastic Properties and the State in the Byzantine Empire (1948).
For Professor Charanis history was life. Research and teaching were inseparable. At Rutgers he received the distinguished re search award and the Lindback Foundation award for distinguished teaching. Impressive as his publication record is, it was teaching on all levels that was the mainstay of his career. A warm human being, he closely identified himself with his students, aiding through encouragement his graduate students in their scholarly and professional activities. Using Rutgers as his base of operations, Professor Charanis greatly enriched the Hellenic legacy not only with a voluminous bibliography but above all by personal communication with colleagues and students who reciprocated with devotion and loyalty to his memory.
Ernest W. McDonnell
Rutgers University
ROBERT NELSON CROSSLEY died suddenly on November 30, 1984 at his home. He was 60 years old. Professor Crossley taught modern European history at Saint Olaf since coming to Northfield in 1959 from Skidmore College (1958-59) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (1959-58).
Born in Toledo, Ohio, he joined the army after finishing high school and served in Europe during the Second World War. He was awarded the purple heart for wounds received in the Battle of the Bulge. When the war was over, he attended Oberlin College (BA 1948) and the University of Michigan (AM 1952; PhD 1960), where he studied with Albert Hyma, who first introduced him to Luther scholarship.
Professor Crossley’s own wartime experience combined with historical study well fitted him to investigate Martin Luther’s role in the Peasants’ War of 1524-25. Over the years he wrote articles and book reviews on the subject, and in 1974 he published Luther and the Peasants’ War: Luther’s Actions and Reactions (Exposition University Book), his full considered reflections on Luther’s religious and political views in relation to the Reformation movement.
A member of the Saint Olaf College history department for over twenty-five years, Professor Crossley taught courses on the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Second World War. He served as department chair in 1978-79. He was also a long-time member of the American Historical Association. An enthusiastic traveler, he was looking forward to visiting Greece with a student group when death overtook him.
Professor Crossley lived a good span of life, but for those of us who will miss him, his life was not nearly long enough.
Robert Nichols
St. Olaf Callege
JAMES D. ESSIG, thirty-three, assistant professor of history at Western Maryland College, died in Westminster, Maryland on June 30, 1985. He was a graduate of Bucknell University and received his PhD in American history from Yale University. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1979 he received the Brewer Prize, awarded by the American Society of Church History, for his study The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770-1808, which was published in 1982.
Professor Essig came to Western Maryland in 1980 and immediately proved to be a very effective teacher, not only of the survey course but also of such stylish and well researched offerings as “Victorian America,” “America’s Women,” and “Indian-White Relations.” His was a close involvement with nearly every aspect of the life of the college. A member of several college committees, adviser to the Master of Liberal Arts pro gram, the founder of our Phi Alpha Theta chapter, Jim was able to make significant contributions to the intellectual life of our campus.
For those who followed Jim’s struggle against cancer during the past year, one quickly realized that here was an individual who had even finer qualities than those seen previously. His desire to continue to teach, to write and to play a part in our community made us realize that in the space of a few years much can be accomplished in this world. We will miss him.
Survivors besides his wife, Janet, and hi parents, include a son and a daughter.
C.P. Darcy
Western Maryland College
ERIC FISCHER, 1898-1985, geographer, historian, researcher, author, and, above all, teacher, was both part of and a commentator on the “sea change” migration of intellectuals from World War II Europe. He was born in Vienna of a line of teachers, and died May 20, 1985 leaving the legacy of teaching yet unbroken.
In the United States, Eric Fischer taught army personnel in training for the European occupation during the War, then joined OSS and later the State Department as a geographer. He was offered a position with the Geographic Research Institute at the University of Virginia. In 1950 he accepted a post as Professor of Geography at New York University. At the time of the Korean War, he moved back to Washington, DC, where he settled into a career as a geographer for the Army Map Service. In the evenings he taught at George Washington and Catholic Universities. After he retired from the government in 1965, he was Professor of Geography at Coppin State College in Baltimore until the mandatory state retirement age of 70. He then taught at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Just as Eric Fischer’s teaching interests had deep roots and broad span, so too his intellectual interests. He was educated at the University of Vienna, where he obtained both his PhD and a teacher’s certificate for history and geography at the secondary level. For the teacher’s license, he wrote a thesis on the Mt. Pelee volcanic system.
His primary professor in history was Alfred F. Pribram, who had good contact among American historians (he was a visiting professor at Harvard), which proved helpful when Eric Fischer immigrated to the United States.
Both Eric Fischer’s dissertation, “Graf Stadion as a Minister of Finance” (part of which was published in the prestigious Zeitschrift fur Volkswirtschaft und Sozialpolitik (1924) as “The Reconstruction of the Austrian Finances after the Napoleonic Wars”) and the biography, written with Pribram, of Carl Glave Kolbielski (1937) generated an interest in state insurance and welfare schemes.
In the inter-war period, Eric Fischer also wrote articles on pedagogy, particularly on German efforts to provide secondary education for workers, parallel to the Vienna Arbeiter Mittelschule; geography, a field report on his trip to Spitzbergen (1928); an article on the remnants of nomadism in the Balkans (1930), and texts for use in geography and history classes (1922, 1937).
In 1938 Austria fell to the Nazis. It took two years until Eric Fischer’s quota number for an American visa was reached. These two years were spent in Palestine, where he learned enough Hebrew to publish three articles, two of which combined his geographical and historical interests,
In 1941, with an American visa finally in hand, he and his wife and daughter were accommodated on an ancient Egyptian ship carrying cotton to New York. On the deck of the ship, Eric Fischer set up a table and drafted his first English-language book, The Passing of the European Age: A Study of the Transfer of Western Civilization and Its Renewal in Other Continents. Published by Harvard University Press in 1943, with a foreword by the Harvard historian Sidney B. Fay, the book received an excellent review by Arnold Wolfers of Yale on the front page of the New York Times book review section, paving the way for Fischer’s acceptance as an American geographer. He was shortly nominated, and accepted, as a member of the Association of American Geographers. He also became, in 1941, a member of the American Historical Association.
In the 1950s, Fischer wrote a series of chapters on Europe and principles of political geography for four major textbooks (1957). Of these, perhaps the most original was “The Passing of Central Europe” in The Changing World, edited by W. Gordon East and E.A. Moodie, In 1967, together with Robert D. Campbell, Fischer produced A Question of Place: The Development of Geographic Thought, a source book that was still being favorably commented on in reviews ten years later.
In 1980 Fischer produced his last book, Minorities and Minority Problems, part reference compilation, country by country, and part extended essay on the types and development of minority problems throughout history and around the globe.
Michael M.J. Fischer
Rice University
HERBERT FOSTER, a colleague and friend, died November 29, 1984. A graduate of Lincoln University, he earned a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in social science from Syracuse University, and in 1981 a PhD from Rutgers University. For the past fourteen years, he taught American and Afro-Ameri can history at the College of Staten Island as an associate professor.
Herbert Foster was one of a handful of historians actively researching Afro-Ameri can communities in New Jersey. Specifically, he investigated the internal and external factors influencing the development of Atlantic City’s black community at the turn of the century. Using census records, oral interviews, city directories, municipal records and other sources, he sought to reconstruct and analyze the evolution of black Atlantic City. Professor Foster’s work was important, among other reasons, because of his commitment to social history and his desire to reveal the story of anonymous Americans.
Afro-Americans are a significant and influential element of many of the cities in New Jersey. Professor Foster’s research revealed the antecedents of one of these modern communities and provided a framework for analyzing the present status of black communities in Atlantic City and other urban areas. His insights have been and will remain in valuable to those interested in New Jersey, Afro-American, or urban history.
Herbert Foster will be missed by many for his insights as a historian, his meticulousness as a researcher, and most of all for his sincerity and warmth as a friend.
Spencer Crew
Smithsonian Institution
CHARLES GIBSON, after a long illness, died on August 22, 1985 in Plattsburg, New York, not far from the summer home of his boyhood on Lake Champlain.
A distinguished scholar of Latin American history, who was President of the American Historical Association in 1977, his writing and teaching did much to shape a whole field of study. He wrote with elegant precision and economy, using meticulous scholarship to address questions of large significance. In such early work as The Inca Concept of Sovereignty and the Spanish Administration of Peru (Austin, 1948) and Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1952; second edition, Stanford, 1967) he expanded a framework taken from institutional history to incorporate culture as a whole, and the clash of civilizations became the central theme of The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, a History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, 1964).
He saw no conflict, however, between such broad vision and the precise historical investigation to which he remained committed, a dedication that led to extensive and influential work as a bibliographer (including The Colonial Period in Latin American History, published by the Service Center for Teachers of History of the AHA, 1948, and revised edition, 1970; Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1946-1955, published with E.V. Niemeyer, 1958; his contributions to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, 1952-70; his contributions to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, 1958-75; his contributions to Latin America, a Guide to the Historical Literature, 1971, and his chapter in The Past Before Us, edited by Michael Kammen, 1980, and his part in the publication of numerous volumes of documents (of which The Spanish Tradition in America, 1966, is the best known). The syntheses developed in Spain in America, 1966, and The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New, 1971, reflect this extraordinary command of the literature.
Historical scholarship was for Charles Gibson a way of life, one that included devoted and sometimes exhausting service to the AHA, the major organizations of Latin American Studies, and to the life of the universities where he worked—from Yale, where he received his bachelor’s degree and PhD; to the University of Iowa, where he taught from 1949 to 1965, serving as Chairman of the History Department in his last two years there; and to the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1965 until his retirement and where he served as the Irving A. Leonard Distinguished University Professor and also where he was named in 1977 the Henry A. Russel lecturer, the University’s highest honor. For two decades he held important positions on the Hispanic American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the American Historical Review.
LOUIS GREENBERG, 52, a professor of history at the University of Maryland in College Park since 1964 and a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, died of cardiac arrest July 29, 1985. He lived in Columbia, Maryland.
Professor Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn College and received his doctorate in modern European history from Harvard University. He moved to the Washington area in the early 60s. His books include Sisters of Liberty.
Professor Greenberg was a member of the American Historical Association, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society for French Historical Studies, which presented him with the William Koren Jr. Prize.
Survivors include a daughter, Alison Greenberg of Columbia and his mother, sister, and former wife Margaret.
HERBERT G. GUTMAN, a distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of City University of New York and the historian of immigrants, workers, and slaves, died July 21, 1985, following a heart attack. He was 57 years old.
A believer in ordinary people, Professor Gutman’s essays “Work, Culture and Society in Industrialized America,” concentrated on the working class. Published in 1976, Professor Gutman considered such topics as black coal miners and the United Mine Workers of America, locomotive manufacturers in Paterson, New Jersey, and labor discontent in the Gilded Age.
He published two major studies of slavery in America: Slavery and the Numbers Game in 1975 and The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 in 1976. Professor Gutman’s work was widely praised for its originality, its challenge to conventional ideas, and its insistence that the people he studied were as proper a subject for historians as generals, presidents, and industrial leaders.
He also oversaw the American Social History Project, associated with the Graduate Center, that was re-evaluating American history to stress the roles that working-class people played in the building of the country.
Born in New York City, Professor Gutman graduated from Queens College. He received a master’s degree in history from Columbia University and a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin. He then taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University, and the University of Rochester. In 1975 he joined the faculty at the Graduate Center. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Historical Association.
In the last year he had been studying under a Guggenheim Fellowship and was engaged in a special teaching assignment at four black colleges for the United Negro College Fund.
He is survived by his mother, Asne; wife, Judith Mara, and two daughters. He lived in Nyack, New York.
HAROLD E. HAZELTON, the history department of Manhattan College mourns the death on May 4, 1985 of a distinguished member.
For over twenty-five years, Professor Hazelton enriched the life of the entire college community as a fine history teacher, a brave and generous colleague, and as a learned and gifted man. He was a life-time member of the American Historical Association.
George L. Mahoney
Manhattan College
ELMER L. KAYSER, 89, a Professor Emeritus of European history at George Washington University and the man who is credited with bestowing upon the school’s athletic teams the nickname of “The Colonials,” died of cardiac arrest April 28, 1985 in Rockville, Maryland.
A life-long resident of Washington, he took a bachelor’s and master’s degree from George Washington University and a PhD from Columbia University.
His professional life was centered around George Washington University. He held numerous academic and administrative posts at the school and received some of its highest honors. In 1962, the university conferred on him an honorary doctorate of laws. He was one of the first to receive the George Washington Award, which was established in 1976 to recognize those who make the university a better place to be. In 1984 GWU established the Elmer Louis Kayser professorship in history.
Professor Kayser was appointed an instructor in history when he graduated in 1917. He served briefly in the Army during World War I and then went back to the university. From 1918-27, he served as secretary of GWU in addition to teaching. From 1930-62, he was dean of university students, and he was dean emeritus at his death. He became a full professor of history and had been a professor emeritus since his retirement from teaching in 1967.
From 1962 until his death, he was the historian of the university. He published two volumes on the subject, Bricks Without Straw, 1970, and A Medical Center, 1973, which recounts the development of medical education at the school. For more than twenty-five years, he was vice chair of the board of what is now Mount Vernon College. That school gave him an honorary doctorate in 1975. He also was a governor of the National Cathedral School for Girls.
Professor Kayser was a member of the Cosmos Club, the National Press Club, and the American Historical Association-since 1921. He was also treasurer of the AHA from 1957 to 1974.
PEARL KIBRE, a leading authority on medieval studies and a history professor at the City University of New York for thirty four years. died July 17, 1985 at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.
Although she retired in 1971 from the faculties of Hunter College and the City University Graduate Center, Professor Kibre maintained an office in the Graduate Center’s history department, continuing her research and writing and advice to graduate students up until her death. She joined Hunter in 1937 and the Graduate School Faculty in 1964. She was the author of numerous articles and books, one of which, Hippocrates Latinus, was just published this year by Fordham University Press. Another recent book, Studies in Medieval Science, was published in 1984 by Hambledon Press of London.
Other books include Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris and Oxford, published in 1961 and 1962; The Nations in the Medieval Universities, first published in 1948 and re printed in 1962; and The Library, of Pico della Mirandola, first printed in 1936 and reprinted in 1966. She was co-author with Lynn Thorndike of A Catalogue of Incipits of Medieval Scientific Writings in Latin, first printed in 1938 and revised in 1963.
Professor Kibre received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD in medieval history and the history of science from Columbia University in 1936. At Columbia she studied under Professor Thorndike, with whom she continued an academic association until his death in 1965. She was a fellow and former president of the Medieval Academy of America and was active in a number of scholarly organizations including the American Historical Association. She was named a corresponding member of l’Academie d’histoire des sciences in 1959, was a former president of the Medieval Club of New York, and served as chair of the Columbia University Seminar on the History of Legal and Political Thought in 1972-73. She was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950-51.
Professor Kibre is survived by a brother, Walter Kibre of Burbank, California, and other family members in California. Her late sister, Adele Kibre, was also a medieval scholar.
JAMES STANLEY McINTOSH, active in education and motion pictures and executive director from 1955 to 1974 of Teaching Film Custodians, Inc., a New York State educational institution established in cooperation with the Motion Picture Association of America, died August 14, 1985 at 77.
Mr. McIntosh was a graduate of Eastern Illinois and Northwestern Universities and a member of Phi Delta Kappa and Sigma Tau Delta honorary scholastic societies. Formerly a teacher and principal in Evanston, Illinois public schools, he taught at Northwestern University, University of Iowa, Indiana University, American University, and was Assistant Superintendent of the Cook County public schools in Chicago, Illinois. During World War II, Mr. McIntosh was Regional Director of the United States Office of Education War Training film program headquartered in Chicago. Following the war, he was an Associate in Research and Production with Encyclopaedia Britannica Films.
In 1947, Mr. McIntosh joined the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in Washington, DC and later became director of its Educational Services and Community Relations, while residing in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1955 he became Executive Director of Teaching Film Custodians, Inc., a nonprofit educational film production and distribution organization based in New York City, developed by MPAA. Mr. McIntosh collaborated with Paul Ward of the American Historical Association, making possible experimental excerpts of the following feature motion pictures for studies in history and the humanities: Becket, The Emperor and the General, Juarez, and Martin Luther. He was instrumental in guiding the merger of TFC into Indiana University in 1973 and was subsequently a consultant to IU. Mr. McIntosh was the founding president of the Council on International Nontheatrical Events (CINE) and an honorary member of its Board of Directors.
He is survived by his wife, Maxine French McIntosh of Sarasota, Florida; two daughters; two sons; a brother, and eight grandchildren.
ELLIOTT PERKINS, professor of history emeritus at Harvard, died of a heart attack at his Cambridge home on March 4, 1985. Son of a prominent businessman and lawyer, he was born on March 15, 1901, in Westwood, Massachusetts.
Entering Harvard in 1919, he received his AB (1923), AM (1928), and PhD (1936). Elliott Perkins wrote his doctoral dissertation, The Electoral System of England in the Time of Sir Robert Walpole, under the direction of W.C. Abbott. Professor Perkins was not a prolific scholar, however. One of his few articles was a study of his maternal grandfather, Charles Francis Adams, whom he had known in his youth.
It was teaching that Elliott Perkins most enjoyed and that won him the affection and esteem of several generations of students. He combined the qualities of an eighteenth-century English gentleman with a natural warmth and sense of humor that put his classes at ease. Stern in manner when circumstances warranted, he remained a man of kindness and understanding.
He dedicated his entire adult life to serving Harvard. After a brief stint as an assistant dean, he became a resident tutor in Lowell House and in 1940 was appointed its master, a position he held for twenty-three years. The graduate seminar on Georgian England that he conducted in the master’s residence was marked not only by the penetrating comments he made on his students’ papers but also the frequent puffs of smoke that rose from his pipe. In the history department, Elliott Perkins held the title of lecturer from 1940 to 1963, when he was promoted to the rank of professor.
His well-attended lecture class, “English History from 1660 to the Present,” was enlivened by his wry wit and dramatic demonstration of how to load, aim, and fire a musket. Compelled by failing health to retire in 1969, “Perk,” as he was fondly known, left an indelible mark on his many students, who esteemed him as teacher and friend.
In 1937 he married Mary Frances Baker Wilbraham, who survives him.
James Friguglietti
Eastern Montana College
ELWYN B. ROBINSON, University Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Dakota and a noted historian of the state, died on March 24, 1985 in Grand Forks. He was 79.
In 1924 he enrolled at Oberlin College, majored in English, and graduated with an AB degree. During 1928-30, he taught in a consolidated township school at New Lyme, Ohio. His teaching activities spanned a variety of subjects. As the only male teacher, he held the title of principal. He also coached baseball and basketball.
After his initial teaching experience, Professor Robinson enrolled at Western Reserve University in 1931. He specialized in American history, which he studied under the direction of Arthur C. Cole. He earned the MA degree in 1932 and the PhD in 1936, the latter with a dissertation on “The Public Press of Philadelphia during the Civil War.”
In the late summer of 1935, Professor Robinson was offered a teaching post at the University of North Dakota. In 1945, at age of 40, he began to pursue an interest in the history of his adopted state, an interest that was to ultimately lead to his greatest scholarly contributions. At about this time, he began to teach a course on the history of the western frontier.
Between 1947-49, he wrote and presented a series of radio talks on the “Heroes of the Dakota” over the university’s station, KFJM. Soon the series was heard on commercial radio throughout the state and printed in two columns by the university press. As a result, during the late ’40s, Professor Robin son became determined to write a comprehensive history of the state.
The single most significant event influencing the writing of a book on North Dakota was a public address delivered by Professor Robinson on November 6, 1958. Its title was “The Themes of North Dakota History.” The address received statewide publicity. A revised version was published in North Dakota History (Vol. 26, Winter 1959, pp. 5-24).
In the fall of 1966, Professor Robinson’s 600-page book, History of North Dakota, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. It received the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History. Over the years, his efforts in teaching and research came to be widely recognized. In 1959 he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He was promoted to the special rank of University Professor in 1967. In May 1984 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the university’s Alumni Association.
After his retirement in 1970, Professor Robinson was active in a variety of article writing projects on the Great Plains and North Dakota. He is survived by his two sons, Stephen W. and Gordon F.
WARREN I. SUSMAN, of Rutgers University, a historian known as a bold and creative chronicler of American popular culture, died on April 20, 1985 of a heart attack in Minneapolis, where he was attending the Organization of American Historians annual meeting. He was 58.
Professor Susman had taught at Rutgers for twenty-five years. During his career there, he received the Lindbeck Award for distinguished teaching, was twice named man of the year by the student newspaper, and served as chair of the history department from 1973-79.
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University, Professor Susman received his master’s and PhD from the University of Wisconsin. He taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon for several years, and joined the faculty at Rutgers in 1960. What he liked to call his “pieces” appeared in various academic journals and were widely commented upon. With the publication of Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century in 1985, the measure of Warren Susman’s insight into our intellectual and cultural life became more apparent than ever.
Professor Susman’s lectures and essays have been collected in a book, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. He was also the author of The Reconstruction of an American College, known widely at college as the Susman Report. The report, published in 1968, sparked important discussions of undergraduate education at large state universities.
Professor Susman was a long-time member of the American Historical Association as well as the Organization of American His torians. He was the Vice-President of the Teaching Division of the AHA from 1977-79. A memorial fund has been established in his honor at Rutgers University and, in part, will help support a lecture fund. Donations may be sent to Susman Memorial Fund, History Department, Van Dyck Hall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. He is survived by his wife, Beatrice, and a sister.
CHARI.ES HOLT TAYLOR, 1899-1984, Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History emeritus at Harvard, died on December 18, 1984, in Newton, Pennsylvania.
Born in Bedford, Virginia, he was educated at Washington and Lee University, receiving an AB in 1919 and an AM in 1920. At Harvard, Professor Taylor earned an AM in 1922 and a PhD five years later. He prepared his doctoral dissertation, “The Relation between Roman Cadasters and Frankish Polyptychs: A Study of the Tax Assessment of Tenants in the Later Roman Empire,” under the direction of the celebrated medievalist Charles Homer Haskins.
Professor Taylor spent his entire teaching career at Harvard. Beginning as an instructor in 1925, he rose to the rank of assistant professor in 1927 and that of associate professor in 1934. In I942 he was named Henry Charles Lea Professor, the position that he held until he retired in 1965. Besides a year long course in his specialty, French medieval history, Taylor also developed and taught the Social Science I course “Introduction to the Development of Western Civilization. Professor Taylor honored his mentor Haskins by editing Anniversary Essays in Medieval History (1929), a festschrift to which he contributed a study of the Census de Rebus in the capitularies. With his friend and fellow Harvard PhD, Joseph R. Strayer, he published Studies in Early French Taxation (1939), containing his essay “Assemblies and Towns and War Subsidy, 1318-1319.”
During World War II, Taylor served as a captain in the US Army and was awarded the Legion of Merit. His other honors included a Doctor of Literature degree bestowed by Washington and Lee in 1948, as well as election of Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a longtime member of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Historical Association. He is survived by his widow, Fidelia, whom he married in 1925, and two children, Joanna and Oliver.
James Friguglietti
Eastern Montana College
JOHN W. WARD, a historian who was president of Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1971-79, died in Manhattan August 3, 1985. He was 62 and lived in Westport, Connecticut.
At the time of his death, John (Bill) Ward was president of the American Council of Learned Societies. He took this post in 1982 after leaving Amherst. He was born in Boston. After graduating from Harvard in 1945, he received his master’s and PhD at the University of Minnesota.
From 1952 until he moved to Amherst in 1964, Professor Ward taught at Princeton University. At Amherst, he taught history and American studies and served as chair of the history department before being named president. He drew public attention in May 1972 when he and his wife were among about 500 people arrested for blocking the entrance to the nearby Westover Air Force Base in an antiwar protest.
Professor Ward was the author of Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, and Red, White, and Blue: Man, Books and Ideas in American Culture. He also wrote for the New York Times Book Review. ·
Professor Ward is survived by his wife, Barbara, three sons, and a sister.