Robert M. Mennel (1938–2024)

Robert McKisson (Bob) Mennel died at age 86 at the Edgewood Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on December 26, 2024. He taught American history at the University of New Hampshire for 35 years, starting in 1969. In 1985, he established the Honors Program at UNH and directed it for 20 years. Over the years, he had a particular focus on helping students grapple with and transcend their failures.

Photo courtesy Mennel family

Mennel was born in Toledo, Ohio, on October 18, 1938, the son of Robert W. and Jane (Rowland) Mennel. In 1948, his family moved to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, where he attended New Trier High School. He graduated from Denison University in 1960 and served in the US Marine Corps in the Pacific from 1960 to 1963. In 1969, he earned his PhD in history from Ohio State University, where he studied with Robert H. Bremner.

He worked with Bremner on the Child and the State Project at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969, developing the multivolume Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History (Harvard Univ. Press, 1970–74). He returned to the Warren Center as a fellow in 1977–78. His dissertation led to his first book, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825–1940 (Univ. Press of New England, 1973). Howard N. Rabinowitz, writing in Social Service Review, called it “the best analysis we have of the attitudes toward and the treatment of juvenile delinquents for the period surveyed” and particularly praised Mennel’s “thorough research into institutional records, private papers, state laws, and legal cases, as well as a careful perusal of the mushrooming secondary literature.” Mennel also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History from 1975 to 1980.

Mennel subsequently co-edited, with Christine L. Compston, a volume of the correspondence of Supreme Court justices Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Univ. Press of New England, 1996). Richard A. Posner wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “the letters convey a more rounded, a more coherent picture of Holmes than any of the volumes of correspondence published so far, making this the best one to read first.” He further wrote that the editors “are to be commended for their informative introduction and their useful annotations of the references in the letters to people, books and cases that the passage of time has made obscure.”

As a teacher, Mennel never forgot his own near failure to graduate from Denison, partly because he failed a required course, My Philosophy of Life. Knowing that he owed his later success to overcoming his earlier failures, he was especially devoted to his students when they were feeling discouraged. A typical note from a former student characterized Mennel’s guidance “as therapy that saved me from shame.”

In retirement, Mennel found a trove of diaries and letters in the old house that he and Bremner co-owned in Crousetown, Nova Scotia. These became the archival basis of Testimonies and Secrets: The Story of a Nova Scotia Family, 1844–1977 (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2013), which relates a social history of Nova Scotia through the lives of several generations in that house. The Canadian Historical Review called it a “valuable and rare snapshot of life in rural Nova Scotia,” as well as “an important contribution to the field of ‘life writing,’ accessible to general readers and local history buffs . . . [and] also of interest to various scholarly disciplines, including rural, social, cultural, and economic history, and the history of sexuality.”

Mennel served St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth in a number of roles, as senior warden, on the vestry, and as an usher. He lent his research expertise to the preservation of the church’s records and artifacts. During his years at the Edgewood Center nursing home, Mennel was especially valued by staff and residents alike for his genealogical skills and knowledge.

He is survived by his wife, two children, two stepchildren, and five grandchildren. His son, Timothy, is executive editor for American history and regional subjects at the University of Chicago Press. His daughter, Tina Schneider, is professor and director of the library at Ohio State University at Lima.