JOHN FRANCIS BANNON, long-time chair of the history department, St. Louis University, died June 5, 1986 after a long illness in St. Louis.
Born and raised in Missouri, Father Bannon entered the Jesuit Order in 1922 and was ordained in 1935. He was recruited through the Jesuits to study “Borderlands” history at the University of California, Berkeley, under Herbert Bolton, whose biography he wrote years later. He received his PhD in 1939 and began teaching at St. Louis University as an instructor and rose through the ranks to department chair from 1943-1971. His major publication was the widely used textbook, History of the Americas, 1952 and other books include: Epitome of Western Civilization, 1942; Colonial North America, A Brief History, 1946; Latin America, A Historical Survey, with Peter M. Dunne, 1947; The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-1821, 1970; and Herbert Eugene Bolton, the Historian and the Man, 1978.
Active mainly in professional organizations devoted to Western history, Father Bannon had been chair of the Conference on Latin American History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association. He was one of the earliest academic lecturers on educational television in St. Louis and continued that activity throughout the 1950s.
Father Bannon relished teaching large lecture sections and was an extremely popular teacher both on campus and before business and civic groups.
James Hitchcock
St. Louis University
RICHARD HERMAN BAUER, retired professor of history, University of Maryland and founder of the periodical, The Maryland Historian, died on August 20, 1986 of respiratory failure in Rockville, Maryland.
Professor Bauer received his graduate training at the University of Chicago in the field of European history. He moved to the Washington area in 1935 and taught at American University during the late 1930s. From 1939-1946, he taught at Mary Washington College until he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1946. He re tired in 1970.
His history career led him to serve on the editorial boards of The Historian and The Social Studies, two nationally distributed periodicals. He was a member of the American Historical Association, the Association of University Professors, and the Foreign Policy Association. He is survived by his son, three brothers, a sister, and three grandchildren.
GILBERT A. CAHILL, professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York, Cortland, died December 11, 1985, in Cortland at the age of seventy-two.
Professor Cahill graduated from Manhattan College in 1933, earned his MA at Colgate University in 1948 and his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1954. He returned to Colgate as an assistant professor and was a member of the history department for three years, 1952-55. He went on to teach at Harpur College, and the University of Iowa, but spent most of his career at SUNY, Cortland, 1955-57 and from 1967-80.
Specializing in nineteenth-century English and Irish history, Professor Cahill was the author of The Great Reform Bill of 1832, 1968, and articles in a number of journals, including the Irish University Review, and the Journal of Popular Culture. He also served as the president of the American Committee of Irish Studies, 1962-64.
Gil was the elder statesman in our group of graduate students at the University of Iowa in the early fifties. The enthusiasm he had for his own research on British nativism was immense and he helped shape most of our projects as well. He continued this role as counselor, scholar, and teacher for another thirty years.
Norbert J. Gossman
University of Detroit
ERIC COCHRANE, professor of history, University of Chicago and leading expert on late Italian Renaissance history died in Florence on November 29, 1985, after suffering a stroke. He was fifty-nine years old.
Professor Cochrane received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University. He was a Fulbright Scholar from 1951-1953, and joined the history department of the University of Chicago in 1957.
Author of many articles and books, Professor Cochrane reached his largest audience with the 1974 publication of Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. His other publications include: Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies: 1690-1800, 1969, and Historian and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, 1981L At the time of his death, he was working on a year-long sabbatical in Florence pursuing research on a book entitled, Baroque Italy. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
JOHN WELLS DAVIDSON, emeritus senior research historian and emeritus associate editor of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, died on June 14, 1986, at his home in New Jersey. He was eighty-three years old.
A graduate of Vanderbilt University, he taught at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville and went on to serve in the Air Force during World War II. He taught at Vassar College, the University of Alabama, and the University of Maryland. He received his doctorate from Yale University in 1954.
An authority on Woodrow Wilson, Professor Davidson directed a staff in the organization and assembling of the Wilson Papers in Washington, DC. The collection was transferred in 1963 to Princeton University and played a major role in the publication of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, a sixty-five volume project.
Dr. Wells authored the Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson and wrote numerous professional articles, in addition, he belonged to the Nassau Club of Princeton and the American Historical Association, as well as other professional associations.
He is survived by a wife, two stepdaughters, a stepson, two step-children, two half sisters, and two half-brothers.
R. Maximilian Goepp III
Stepson
ESTHER V. HANSEN, author of The Attalids of Pergamon, 1947 and former Guggenheim Fellow died on February 23, 1986 at the age of eighty-seven.
Professor Hansen received her undergraduate training from Vassar College and her PhD from Cornell University in 1930. She was a professor of classical languages and literature at Elmira College from 1934-1964. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, American Philological Association, Archeological Institute of America, and the American Historical Association. She is survived by relatives in Denmark.
Kazhleen Jackson
Archivist, Cornell University
ROBERT S. LOPEZ, Sterling professor emeritus of history, Yale University, died of cancer on July 6, 1986 at his home in New Haven. He was seventy-five years old.
Professor Lopez was founder and former chair of the graduate program in medieval studies at Yale University and a specialist in medieval and Renaissance history and the civilization of Europe.
Born in Genoa, Italy, he came to the Unit ed States in 1939 to escape Fascism. He had received his undergraduate training at the University of Milan and went on to receive the PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1942. He taught at various institutions including Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Wesleyan University and Harvard University. He spent time as a foreign news editor at the Columbia Broadcasting System and as a script editor at the Office of War Information for the Voice of America.
He retired from the Yale faculty in 1981 after thirty-five years of holding teaching and administrative posts. He is survived by his wife, a brother, two sons, and a grand daughter.
JOHN MENDELSOHN, archivist at the National Archives and specialist in captured German documents, died of respiratory failure on April 19, 1986 in Silver Spring, Mary land. He was fifty-seven years old.
Professor Mendelsohn was raised in Germany and moved to the United States in 1952 where he served in the Air Force from 1952-1960. He graduated with a doctorate from the University of Maryland and began teaching at Augusta Military Academy in Virginia. In 1970, he joined the National Archives staff, becoming an assistant branch chief. He was nearing completion of an eighteen-volume facsimile series of documents gathered by US intelligence in World War IL In 1982 he published an eighteen-volume documentary series on the Holocaust.
He was a member of the American Historical Association and Society of American Archivists. He is survived by his wife, two children, and one brother.
CHRISTOS C. PATSAVOS, professor of history and senior member of the department at the University of Miami, died on December 14, 1985, in Coral Gables, Florida, He was sixty-eight years old.
Born in Greece, Professor Patsavos was awarded degrees in theology and philosophy from the University of Athens in 1944. He immigrated to the United States, and received an MA in philosophy from the University of Toledo in 1949 and received an MA and PhD in classical studies at the University of Michigan, the latter in 1957. His major work, The Unification of the Greeks under Macedonian Hegemony, was published in 1966. In the 1970s he published a memoir of Archbishop Makarios, first president of the Republic of Cyprus.
A popular teacher on campus, he was also active for many years in the Greek church and community of Miami. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
Robert Zaller
University of Miami
ARNOLD M. PAUL, long-time American Historical Association member died on July 8, 1986 in Los Angeles, California. He had been on the faculties of Rutgers University, the Michigan State University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before attaining a law degree from the Stanford Law School. He remained an active member of both the California and New York State bars.
Professor Paul was co-winner of the Beveridge Award in 1959 for his doctoral dissertation written at the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote numerous articles and reviews some of which were published in the American Historical Review.
He published Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law: Attitudes of Bar and Bench, 1960 and edited Black Americans and the Supreme Court since Emancipation, for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Morris Schonbach
California Stale University, Northridge
SHUMPEI OKAMOTO, professor of history at Temple University, died on December 15, 1985 after a brief hospitalization. He was fifty-three years old.
Having received his BA in economics from Aoyama Gakuin in 1954, Professor Okamoto came to the United States and received a BA from Anderson College in 1959 and his MA and PhD from Columbia University, the latter in 1969,
A prolific scholar and translator, Dr. Okamoto wrote, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War, 1970, and coedited Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931-1941, 1973, a collaborative study, with Dr. Dorothy Borg. The Japanese edition received the prestigious Mainichi Special Book Prize in 1972. He contributed to The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, 1980, coedited with Dr. Akira Iriye and co-translated Konoe Fumimaro by Oka Yoshitake, 1983. At the time of his death, he was working on a five-volume translation of selected essays from the major Japanese study, Japan’s Road to the Pacific War, 1976-, edited by Professor James William Morley.
Professor Okamoto’s scholarship greatly enhanced our understanding of the Japanese perspective on Japan’s foreign relations and policy processes. His judgment, craftsmanship, and intellectual generosity of which we were the beneficiaries will not lightly pass from memory.
David Titus
Wesleyan University
Samuel Chu
The Ohio State University
BASIL RAUCH, professor emeritus of hjs tory at Barnard College, died July 19, 1986 in New Haven at the age of seventy-seven.
Professor Rauch wrote, The History of the New Deal: 1933-38; Roosevelt from Munich to Pearl Harbor, and American Interest in Cuba: 1848-1855 and edited Franklin D. Roosevelt: Selected Speeches, Messages, Press Conferences, and Letters. He co-authored the two-volume work Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America, with Dumas Malone.
Dr. Rauch was on the Barnard faculty from 1941-1974 with a brief three year service in the US Naval Reserve at the United States Naval Academy. He was chair of Barnard’s American Civilization Program. He is survived by his wife, a sister, and two brothers.
JAMES ALLEN VANN, III, professor of history at Emory University, died on May 4, 1986, in Atlanta after a short illness. He was forty-six years old.
Professor Vann graduated summa cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1961 and became a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna in the fall of 1961. He served as an intelligence officer with the US Army before enrolling at Harvard University where he received his doctorate in 1970. He started his teaching career at the University of Michigan and in the fifteen years there received awards for both teaching and service. In 1985 he joined the faculty of Emory University. He served on the faculty of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales from 1983-84 and in 1985 was named an American Associate of The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as The Knights of Malta.
Dr. Vann published The Swabian Kreis: Institutional Growth in the Holy Roman Empire, 1648-1715, 1975, The Making of a State: Württemberg, 1593-1793, 1984. A German translation of this work is forthcoming. His other major work was a co-edited project entitled The Old Reich: Essays on German Political Institutions, 1495-1806, 1974.
He served on the editorial boards of Germanic Studies, 1978-1985, Central European History, 1979-1985, and The Journal of Modern History, 1985 as well as serving positions on several scholarly organizations. He is survived by his parents, two brothers, and a sister.
Russell Major
Emory University