Travis Beal Jacobs (1936–2025)

Travis Beal Jacobs, Fletcher D. Proctor Professor emeritus of American History at Middlebury College, died on September 16, 2025.

Photo courtesy Jacobs family

Travis was born in New York City on April 22, 1936, the son of Albert C. and Loretta Beal Jacobs. His father’s career as a law professor took the family from Alexandria, Virginia, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to New York City, where at Columbia University Albert was professor of law, then provost under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Albert later became the chancellor of the University of Denver and then president of Trinity College, Hartford. Travis attended Deerfield Academy and Princeton University, graduating in 1958. Initially, he planned to attend Columbia Law School, but at the last minute, he decided to pursue a PhD in American history at Columbia under William E. Leuchtenburg. In 1965, he joined the faculty at Middlebury College.

Travis became a legendary figure at Middlebury, teaching thousands of undergraduates over 43 years, especially in his popular two-semester lecture course on 20th-century US history. He brought the past to life through his lively lectures and adept use of audio recordings and film clips (well before the advent of PowerPoint presentations). He had high expectations of his students, which helped ensure that they came to his seminars well prepared and ready to engage with the assigned materials. He was a vigorous proponent of students doing original research and was an advocate of a required senior thesis for all history majors. He was a meticulous editor of student writing, and he helped transform tentative writers into confident crafters of essays and longer papers. I was one of those Middlebury undergraduates whose love for the study of history grew because of Travis’s tutelage.

Travis was also an exemplary departmental chair. During his 17 years as chair, he helped make the history department one of the most respected and largest on campus. He retired from the Middlebury faculty in 2008.

Throughout his career, he was an active scholar with wide-ranging interests. With Beatrice Berle, he co-edited Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), the diaries of Adolf A. Berle, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brain trusters. Next came America and the Winter War, 1939–1940 (Garland, 1981), based on his dissertation, an analysis of the Roosevelt administration’s response to the Russo-Finnish War. Inspired by his father’s experiences, he wrote Eisenhower at Columbia (Transaction Publishers, 2001), an examination of Eisenhower’s first civilian leadership post after his military career. He also edited the Middlebury College General Catalogue: Bicentennial Edition (2000), a who’s who of the college. In his last years, he was at work on a study of Robert T. Stafford, a former governor, US congressman, and US senator from Vermont.

Travis received several Earhart Foundation Fellowships, taught in Tunis on a Fulbright fellowship, served on the Presidential Studies Quarterly editorial board, and attended many Salzburg Seminars in American Studies. A tireless advocate for public history, he served as the president of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Middlebury during a capital campaign that led to the creation of the Paris Fletcher Community Center. He was a strong supporter of its research center, with its valuable Vermont history collections, which he enthusiastically encouraged Middlebury undergraduates to mine for their research projects. He also skillfully curated the immensely successful Charles S. Grant Memorial Lectureship in American History, which starting in 1966 brought dozens of the leading interpreters of the American past to Middlebury for public lectures.

Travis was known for his friendly demeanor and good cheer; his dedication to Middlebury College and higher education (as well as his healthy skepticism about administrative decision-making); his mentorship of younger colleagues in the history department; his support of former students as they made their way through life; his enjoyment of Chappaquiddick Island of Edgartown, Massachusetts, and Chazy Lake in the Adirondacks; and his love for his family, especially his two sons, T. Beal Jr. and Holmes, and his three grandchildren.