The Passing of Michael Kammen

Randall Stephens

Michael Kammen

It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are reporting on the death of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen.  He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar.

H. Roger Segelken of the Cornell Chronicle writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."  He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."  (See a short biography of Kammen here.)

Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a New York Times review of Mystic Chords of Memory Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style laced with refreshing wit and a refusal to tolerate the occasional fools and scoundrels who populate this patriot's game." (Thomas Fleming, "The Past Is What Catches Up With Us," New York Times, January 12, 1992, BR11.)

On the passing of Pauline Maier

Chris Beneke

Pauline Maier passed away Monday. Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position, but hardly does justice to the person who filled it.

I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming, ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh.

Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The first two changed our understanding of pre-Revolutionary politics;  the third upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence;  the fourth provided the first full account of how the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Each was definitive, the sort of book that every early American historian needs to read at some point. Each was also a marvel of original documentary research and nonfiction storytelling.

Pauline Maier, the world-renowned scholar and teacher, also happened to be kind. She didn’t dispense saccharine praise to the minor figures who clamored for her attention. Instead, she offered genuine respect for their ideas and lots of tough, useful criticism. As a graduate student with no prior acquaintance, I invited her to comment on a conference panel. She agreed and, when the time came, cheerily directed me to think about many rudimentary things about which I should have already been thinking. A few years later, when I asked her to read part of my book manuscript—a punishingly dry and tedious tome—she agreed again, and then administered the thorough, friendly thrashing it needed.

These were the kind of things she did for people and partly explains why she published four landmark books instead of eight. Maier treated her fellow historians with the same honest consideration that she tendered her historical subjects, remaining ever open to the possibility that the lowly might possess more insight than their better appointed counterparts (as well as the possibility that they might be out of their senses). Ratification’s acknowledgements leave no doubt how much she appreciated the assistance that others offered in turn. She thanked them not merely in lists of names, or even sentences, but whole paragraphs. Word count be damned.

Maier was more irreverent in her work than big-name professors typically are. She had little use for unsubstantiated assumptions or pious orthodoxies. She had a keen eye for the workings of power and a still keener appreciation for the anxieties of those who confronted it. But Maier never succumbed to the vain illusion that doing history is the same thing as doing politics.

Professor Maier loved good argument but always approached the past with the kind of wonder and excitement that those burdened by mountains of historiography often find difficult to muster. Of course she knew the relevant scholarship inside and out. Maier just didn’t have much use for the things that we habitually say about those who lived before us. She wanted to know what they said themselves.

Scholars as celebrated as Pauline Maier are vulnerable to severe cases of self-absorption. That was not a malady from which she suffered. In addition to the innumerable kindnesses she extended to other historians, she was perpetually delighted by her children, grandchildren, and Rhode Island garden. And she loved her husband Charlie.

If, as planned, I had been able to attend her spring seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I would have seen Professor Maier one last time. But I had kids to watch at home. As much as I regret that absence, I suspect she would have told me that the time was better spent with my boys. That’s one of the reasons I’ll miss her.

History in the News Roundup

Vox Tablet, "The Dreyfus Affair Holds a Sacred Place in French History. Is There Room for Debate?" Tablet, July 11, 2013

Nearly 120 years after the Dreyfus Affair shook the world, you would think we know all there is to know about the seminal case involving a French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty and deported to prison on a small, remote island, and it was only after his family, joined by leading intellectuals of the time, rallied in protest that he was acquitted, his case becoming a cornerstone of the democratic French republic.>>>

Mark Feeney, "Edmund Morgan, 97; professor, leading historian of Colonial era," Boston Globe, July 10, 2013

A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications, Dr. Morgan strove to appeal to the interested layperson as well as fellow historians. “In writing about the past, there’s more of an aesthetic dimension than people realize,” he told the Globe. “You’re trying to see connections, patterns, to tell a story. The dispute among historians as to whether there should be narrative is misguided. All good history is narrative. History that doesn’t tell a story just hasn’t gotten far enough; people have been too lazy to tell the story.”>>>

Len Barcousky, "Historian McCullough gets bridge to call his very own," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 1, 2013

"My father's business on First Avenue was right by the Smithfield Street Bridge," the Pittsburgh native recalled in a recent phone interview. "And I remember very distinctly sixth grade at Linden School when students in an older class made wooden models of all the different kinds of bridges. They were set out on the classroom windowsills, and I was utterly fascinated.">>>

Martin Pengelly, "The Maine lesson of Gettysburg: real history is never so romantic as reel," July 2, 2013

The story goes like this: 150 years ago today, Little Round Top was the key to the Union position at the battle of Gettysburg. If the Confederates had taken the hill, they would have won the battle. If the Confederates had won the battle, they would have won the war. >>>

Will D. Campbell, 1923 - 2013

Randall Stephens

I've just heard the sad news that Will D. Campbell--activist, minister, and author--has passed away.  Many who teach southern history or American religious history will be familiar with Campbell's humorous, insightful, page-turners like Brother to a Dragonfly (1977) and Forty Acres and a Goat (1986).  I've used the latter when I've taught the modern South.

Today, the New York Times eulogizes him:

The Rev. Will D. Campbell, a renegade preacher and author who joined the civil rights struggle in the 1950s, quit organized religion and fought injustice with nonviolent protests and a storyteller’s arsenal of autobiographical tales and fictional histories, died on Monday night in Nashville. He was 88. . . .

Followers and friends called Mr. Campbell hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic, a bourbon-drinking, guitar-picking, down-home country boy who made moonshine and stomped around his Tennessee cabin in cowboy boots and denim uttering streams of sacred and profane commentary that found their way into books, articles, lectures and sermons. Read on>>>
 

To mark the passing of this remarkable individual, I include an excerpt here from historian and friend Ben Houston's interview with Campbell.  The interview appeared in 2007 in the Journal of Southern Religion, which I was then editing with Bland Whitley:

An Interview with Will D. Campbell

Robert Zieger, 1938-2013

Paul Ortiz

Robert H. Zieger, distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida, passed away on March 6, 2013.

Professor Zieger was one of the preeminent labor historians of the United States. He was a two-time recipient of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award for the best book in labor history. He was a prolific writer and authored classic works including, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007),  The CIO, 1935-1955 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

In addition Bob was a spirited and rigorous historian who introduced countless scholars, students, union members, and community organizers to the field of labor history. He edited several key volumes in southern labor history including Life and Labor in the New New South (University Press of Florida, 2012) which presented some of the best new work in the field of southern labor studies.  Bob also penned essays on baseball for Harper's magazine, on labor race, and gender for Reviews in American History, and on the lessons of the past for Historically Speaking.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 1932-2012

Randall Stephens

Like so many others, I was sad to hear that Bert Wyatt-Brown passed away over the weekend in Baltimore.  His wife Anne relayed the news on Sunday. 

Bert is best known as an accomplished writer, historian, mentor, and leader of the historical profession.

Bert on the Maine coast, 2006

He served as President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1994), St. George Tucker Society (1998-99), and Southern Historical Association (2000-2001).  He was a longtime supporter of the Historical Society and regularly wrote for Historically Speaking.  (See my interview with him here on this blog.)

He was the author over 100 scholarly articles and essays and wrote a variety of acclaimed books.  His Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Novelist Walker Percy called the book "A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past."  "Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South," wrote Harvard historian David Herbert Donald, "Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South."

True to form, Bert just completed his last book not long before his passing.  I saw him and Anne in September and he was thrilled to have completed the project.  We were emailing back and forth last week about the images to accompany the text.  Titled A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation at Home and Abroad, it will soon be rolled out by the University of Virginia Press.

Maybe most importantly, Bert taught and mentored numerous students at the University of Florida, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and Case Western Reserve University.

As one of his many grad students, I can attest to his generous, wonderful spirit.  With funds from the Milbauer chair he filled at the University of Florida, Bert would help students attend conferences like the Southern Historical Association, the Saint George Tucker Society, the American Historical Association, and others.  He provided research money to students as well.  Many a dissertation was sped along by his help and keen interest.  Bert was a great prose stylist, more than happy to help his charges eliminate passive voice, dangling particles, unidentified antecedents, you name it.  He was tireless in his big-picture, content edits to dissertations, conference, papers, and articles.  (I can't imagine that my first book would have ever seen the light of day without his heroic reading of so many of my bad drafts.) Even after Bert retired he continued to meet with new graduate students at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

Those who studied with him, knew him as a colleague, or friend will deeply miss his sense of humor, his joy for living, dinners and visits with him and Anne, and so much more.

He is survived by his wife Anne, a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren.