Obituaries, April 1988 – AHA (2024)

ISABEL ROSS ABBOTT, retired academic dean of The Western College, Oxford, Ohio (1959–66) and previously professor of history at Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois, died of leukemia December 16, 1987. She was eighty-six years old.

Professor Abbott was born in Rhode Island, received her B.A. degree from Brown University in 1922, her M.A. in education from Brown in 1923, and her Ph.D. in history from Bryn Mawr in 1937. Her field of research was fifteenth-century England. However, she was best known as a teacher of twentieth-century diplomatic history in her years at Rockford College.

After her retirement as dean of the faculty of the Western College, she taught history three more years at William Woods and Westminster Colleges in Fulton, Missouri. She then continued her interest in international relations by serving on various boards and committees fostering international education and understanding and women’s higher education.

A tireless traveler, Professor Abbott made trips to many Middle East and Asian countries after her retirement. In 1964 she made a trip around the world, spending five weeks in India on an education mission.

She is survived by one brother, several nieces and nephews, and a grand niece.

Charlotte W. Smith
University of Maryland-College Park

SAMUEL E. ALLEN, JR., associate professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College died on October 1, 1987, in Richmond, Virginia, from complications of kidney disease. He was fifty-one years old.

Born in Henrico County, Virginia, and raised in Richmond, Professor Allen was graduated magna cum laude from Morehouse College in 1956, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Russian history from Clark University in 1958 and 1969 respectively. He was the recipient of a Social Science Research Council area training fellowship and a John Hay Whitney Fellowship.

After teaching for a year at Bowdoin College, Professor Allen joined the Franklin and Marshall College faculty in 1964 as an instructor. He was promoted quickly to assistant professor and then, in 1970, to associate professor. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the Zemstvo as an agent of moral regeneration in Imperial Russia, and he continued to do research on that topic in the Soviet Union after receiving his Ph.D. He also was interested in the interaction of politics and art, which led to study and research on the Russian avant-garde. A superb teacher, Professor Allen’s courses and seminars on Russian and Soviet history, literature and revolution in Russia, Dostoevsky, and the role of the intelligentsia in Russian society were very popular, despite their demanding character.

Professor Allen was active in a wide range of campus activities from college governance to the creation of a student-faculty forum for the discussion of intellectual and social issues. He will be remembered by all who knew him as a man deeply committed to the life of mind and to the highest standards of moral and ethical behavior.

Solomon Wank
Franklin and Marshall College

EUGENE L. ASHER, died at his home in Long Beach, California, on January 22, 1988. He leaves his wife, Bonnie, and two daughters.

At the time of his death, he was executive assistant to the president and director of university relations at California State University-Long Beach. Professor Asher was a figure well known in scholarly and teaching circles since the time of his employment at California State University-Long Beach in 1959.

Born November 23, 1929, Professor Asher received his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1958. He gained considerable reputation for his book, The Resistance of Maritime Classes: The Survival of Feudalism in the France of Colbert (University of California Press, 1960). Before coming to Long Beach, he taught at the University of Wichita. He was the recipient of two SSRC grants, two ACLS research fellowships, and a Fulbright research fellowship to France.

From 1969 to 1971 Professor Asher served as visiting professor at Indiana University. Also, from 1968 to 1975, he was director of the American Historical Association’s History Education Project, a twenty-six campus consortium funded by grants from the U.S. Office of Education and several private foundations. During the same period (1972–75), he directed the Anglo-U.S. Conferences on History Teaching, held in Pasadena and the University of York, which were sponsored by the British Department of Education and Science and the U.S. State Department. He reported the results of these meetings in scholarly journals (e.g., The History Teacher, VI/3 [May,1974]).

He served on the California Social Sciences Study Committee and was an advisor to several state and local education task forces. When he returned to Long Beach from Indiana University in 1971, he was one of the cofounders of the Society for History Education, which enabled The History Teacher to be moved from Notre Dame University to California State University-Long Beach. Since that time he had been intimately involved with and instrumental in the journal’s growth to national prominence.

Eugene Asher was chair of the history department at CSULB from 1971 to 1976, at which time became Executive Assistant to the President. He served until his death on the executive board of the Society for History Education and, since its affiliation with the AHA in 1985, had represented the SHE at AHA Teaching Division meetings.

Ever envolved, Gene Asher also helped create FM88/KLON on the CSULB campus; it is now a nationally known public radio station. He was also one of the founders and directors of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. He was a man of vision and tremendous energy and was a friend to all who are concerned with the quality of history teaching at all educational levels.

Edward A. Gosselin
Editor,The History Teacher

Augustus Cerillo, Jr.
President, Society for History Education

K. JACK BAUER, a naval historian and a professor of history at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, died on September 17, 1987.

Professor Bauer received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in l 948, and his graduate degrees in history from Indiana University.

He was Archivist of the United States in 1954–55, and head of the Operational History Section, Division of Naval History, Department of the Navy, and assistant to Samuel Eliot Morison for History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II, 1957–61.

He came to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 as an assistant professor and became full professor 1970. He served as the Institute archivist from 1970–77. Professor Bauer was the author or editor of thirteen books and numerous articles. His A Maritime History of the United States: The Impact of Seas and Waterways will be published by the University of South Carolina Press this year. He won the Moncada Prize of the American Military Institute in 1970, the John Lyman Award of the North American Society for Oceanic History in 1982, and the William H. Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1987. He was a trustee of the American Military Institute, a member of the Department of the Army History Advisory Committee, and chair of the Secretary of the Navy’s Advisory Committee on Naval History.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, two sons, and a daughter.

JOHN BENTON, AHA Council member, died February 25, 1988. Fifty-six years old, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959, and was professor of history in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. His research on love in the Middle Ages earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. He was also recognized for his work with image processing techniques developed for space exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A more detailed obituary will follow in the October 1988 issue of Perspectives.

DAVID J. BRANDENBURG, retired history professor at American University and former chair of its history department, died October 24, 1987, at his home in Mijas, Spain.

Professor Brandenburg joined the faculty at American University in 1948 and retired in 1982. He was chair of the history department from 1967 to 1977. He also had been a visiting professor at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, and at Washington State University in Pullman. He’d been a member of the AHA since 1958.

A specialist in France and the history of French agriculture, Professor Brandenburg received a Fulbright Fellowship and a Washington Evening Star grant to study in France in 1959, and he also studied there in 1966 and 1967. He completed a translation of the eight volumes of diaries written by Rochefoucauld-Liancourt during his travels in the United States from 1795 to 1797. He also published a number of articles on France.

He is survived by three children; his wife died in 1982.

RALPH ADAMS BROWN, distinguished teaching professor emeritus of history at State University of New York-Cortland, died April 15, 1986, in Ormond Beach, Florida. Born in 1908, Professor Brown lived a life devoted to scholarship and teaching.

After earning his doctorate at Columbia University in 1947, he began his association with the College at Cortland as teacher and sometime administrator that continued until his retirement in 1975 and after. His great skill in the classroom and in guiding students in research led the State University of New York to name him, in 1973, one of its first distinguished teaching professors.

His major areas of historical research and teaching centered on the American Revolutionary era and biographical studies of American leaders. He was author of numerious articles and reviews and a number of books. The Presidency of John Adams is the most recent.

Following retirement, he continued to teach courses part-time at Cortland along with giving visiting lectures and offering seminars at other institutions. Above all, he continued active research and, when he died, was in the final stage of revising his earlier study of the New Hampshire press during the revolutionary period.

Ralph Adams Brown was a scholar, a teacher whom students warmly remembered, and a stimulating, delightful colleague. His wife and partner in scholarship, Marian, survives him, as do a daughter and a son.

Walter Hanchett
State University of New York-Cortland

ANGIE DEBO, born in Kansas and traveled to Oklahoma in a covered wagon, scholar and innovator, died February 21, 1988, in Enid, Oklahoma. She was ninety-eight years old.

Dr. Debo received her B.A. degree from the University of Oklahoma; her M.A. from the University of Chicago; and her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. In 1934 her dissertation, Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, was published. Fifty-two years ago, Dr. Debo won the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning prize for this first book, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. She also wrote And Still the Waters Run and Prairie City. Throughout her lifetime she published nine books and wrote twenty-three book reviews for The New York Times. She established herself as a pioneering scholar of the Native American and an innovator of the area of ethnohistory.

The bulk of her scholarly effort was devoted to documenting the fate of the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma and to depicting the interaction between the culture of the indigenous groups and that of the encroaching Americans. In this regard, too, she was a pioneer, seeing native peoples as agents in addition to being victims. She taught briefly at West Texas State Teachers College, spent a year as director of the Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma, and at age fifty-seven, became curator of maps at the Oklahoma A&M Library. She retired at sixty-five. Yet throughout her life, she never received the scholarly recognition her groundbreaking work deserved.

Four weeks before she died, however, Governor Henry Bellman of Oklahoma delivered to Dr. Debo the American Historical Association’s 1987 Award for Scholarly Distinction. She had previously been honored in this regard at the 1987 AHA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Her portrait hangs in the state capitol in Oklahoma—the only woman and the only historian. The Governor also ordered flags to fly at half-mast on Wednesday, February 24, the day of her funeral. She has no surviving relatives.

SYDNEY N. FISHER, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, died December 10, 1987, in Columbus, Ohio. He was eighty-one years old.

Professor Fisher, born in Warsaw, New York, received his B.A. degree from Oberlin College in 1928, with a major in economics; in 1932 Oberlin awarded him an M.A. degree in history. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois, where he specialized in Middle East history. He pursued post-doctoral studies at Princeton and the University of Brussels under grants from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Professor Fisher’s teaching career began at Robert College in Istanbul immediately after his undergraduate days at Oberlin. With the exception of one year at Denison and short terms at several other universities, Professor Fisher spent most of his teaching years at The Ohio State University. He began at Ohio State as an instructor in 1937 and rose to full professor in 1955. In addition to teaching, Professor Fisher served in numerous administrative capacities at Ohio State.

In addition to his text book, The Middle East: A History, he published many books and articles. Among his more important books were The Foreign Relations of Turkey, 1481–1512; Evolution of the Middle East: Revolt, Reform, and Change; and Social Forces in the Middle East. During the academic year 1952–53, Professor Fisher served as director of publications of the Middle East Institute and editor of the Middle East Journal.

HANS W. GATZKE, professor emeritus of history at Yale University died of cancer, October 11, 1987. He was seventy-one years old.

Born in Duelken, Germany, Professor Gatzke earned his B.A. degree from Williams College in 1938; his M.A., 1939, and Ph.D., 1947, from Harvard University. He was an instructor at Williams College in 1942. He went from assistant professor to professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in 1947 to 1964. He went to Yale as professor of history in 1964. Concurrently, he held many distinguished fellowships, memberships, and committee seats, including being a member of the Committee on the George Louis Beer Prize of the AHA. Professor Gatzke also endowed the Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History, offered by the AHA biennially, the credit for which he wished to remain anonymous during his lifetime.

Professor Gatzke was an AHA member for over forty years. He was the author of numerous scholarly works, the most recent being Germany and the United States: A Special Relationship?. He retired from Yale in 1986.

LORENZO J. GREENE, a retired professor at Lincoln University, who was an authority on the history of blacks in America, died January 24, 1988. He was eighty-eight years old.

Professor Greene was a graduate of Howard University and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942. He was an early leader in the civil rights movement in Missouri, having worked to desegregate hotels in St. Louis and housing in Jefferson City.

President Hoover named him to the Commission on Negro Housing in 1931, and in the late 1950s he campaigned for the establishment of the Missouri Human Rights Commission.

Professor Greene was on the faculty at Lincoln University for thirty-nine years, and was chair of the social science department. He retired in 1972. He wrote numerous books and articles on topics ranging from blacks in colonial America to the Civil War to desegregation of public schools in Missouri. He is survived by his wife, Thomasina, a son, and a sister.

MARTIN I.J, GRIFFIN, JR., dean of undergraduate studies at Yale University, died January 10, 1988 of an apparent heart attack. He was fifty-four years old.

Professor Griffin was born in Philadelphia and graduated in 1955 from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D., in 1963, at Yale. He also studied at the University of London on a Fulbright fellowship. He counseled Yale students from 1956 to 1958 and was appointed as an instructor in history in 1960, followed by stints as associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in history from 1967 to 1972. He became dean of Saybrook in 1968 to 1971 and then joined the dean’s office of Yale College as assistant dean as well as associate dean of undergraduate affairs.

His interest was in British history and the intellectual development of Europe. He was known for the elegance of his writing and his thorough knowledge of Yale and its mores, from his thirty years experience as a student, adviser, teacher, and administrator.

DONALD R. HAYNES, director of the Virginia Historical Society since 1986, died January 30, 1988, at age fifty-three in Richmond, Virginia. From 1972 to 1986, he had been Virginia state librarian. He had also served on the state Review Board of Landmarks.

ALF ANDREW HEGGOY, professor of history, the University of Georgia, died December 18, 1987, in Athens. He was forty-nine years old.

Professor Heggoy was born in Algeria, the son of Norwegian Methodist missionaries. After schooling in Algeria, Norway, France, and the United States, he received his undergraduate education at Randolph-Macon College. He received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 1963 and joined the department of history at the University of Georgia in 1965.

Trained in nineteenth-century French history, he became a specialist in French colonialism, especially in North Africa. In addition to contributing numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, he authored The African Policies of Gabriel Hanotaux, 1972, and Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1972. With Robert Crout he produced The Historical Dictionary of Algeria, 1981; with John Haar he wrote The Military in Imperial History: The French Connection, 1984. He edited four volumes of the Proceedings of the French Colonial Historical Society, 1976–79, and Through Foreign Eyes: European Attitudes Toward North Africa, 1982. He brought out The French Conquest of Algiers, 1830: An Algerian Oral Tradition in 1986. At the time of his death, he was working on a social and intellectual history of Algeria since independence.

He received grants in support of his research from the U.S. Army Research Office, the Institute of International Education, and the American Philosophical Society. He was president of the French Colonial Historical Society, 1976–78 and 1980–82.

A dedicated and inspiring teacher, he received the Joseph H. Parks Award for distinguished teaching in 1974 and the Outstanding Honors Teacher award in 1972 and 1974. Since 1985 he served as coordinator of instruction in the history department.

He was a warm friend and a generous colleague and will be greatly missed. He is survived by his wife, Julie, two sons, and a daughter.

Lester D. Stephens
The University of Georgia

JANET WILSON JAMES, 1920–1987, had perhaps a double meaning when she entitled her evocative memoir, written in 1981, “Recollections of a Veteran in Women’s History.” She was certainly a veteran scholar in the field, author of the first, and for many years the only, Harvard dissertation in women’s history (1954), but her life, too, made her a veteran of twentieth-century women’s history.

Arriving in graduate school with qualifications equal to the best of that extraordinary generation of the 1940s, writing the pathbreaking dissertation Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. expected of his students, she then embarked on what everyone, including herself, saw as a secondary career. After teaching four years, she retired to have children with no clear idea of how her scholarly life would develop thereafter. In the 1960s, however, the opportunity to join Edward James as assistant, then as associate editor of the monumental Notable American Women project, and at the same time, to direct the Schlesinger Library brought her back into the scholarly world. Her work was outstanding; her contribution to the establishment of women’s history, incalculable.

Despite such a record, Professor James began all over again her path to tenure. She started as an instructor and worked ten years to attain the full professorship she had deserved from the beginning.

Professor James, despite the obstacles, never grew bitter and went about her work with enthusiasm, communicating the standards that were intrinsic to her personality, as well as her love of historical discovery and her seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of American social history. Trained in the old school, she was always open to new ideas, and in her own words soon “joined the new generation.”

Her generosity of spirit and willingness to help beginners inspired students and colleagues alike. No historian I can think of had fewer pretensions; and because she looked such an austere New England lady, her openness and wry sense of humor were always a little startling.

As Barbara Sicherman said at a memorial service, “she … had a keen sense of what can only be called wonder, a quality that is perhaps essential to the best historical work, as well as to friendship. Compounded of curiosity and awe—curiosity about all that was human, awe at the mystery of achievement in the face of difficulties—this sense of wonder seemed to give Janet a capacity for perpetual renewal. …”

She died too young. There is no one left quite like her, and our sense of loss does not go away. One can only think what a wonderful legacy.

Anne Firer Scott
Duke University

WARREN F. KUEHL died in Sarasota, Florida, at age sixty-three, on December 15, 1987, after a short illness. A native of Bettendorf, Iowa, he received his B.A. from Rollins College in 1949 and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1954. His career took him from Ohio University to Rockeford College and Mississippi State University and ultimately to the University of Akron where he was chair of the history department from 1964 to 1971 and founder-director of the Center for Peace Studies until his retirement in 1986.

These facts do not reveal the diversity of his interests or the leadership he displayed in so many areas. His publications tell more about this aspect of his life. He was an influential bibliographer who inspired the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Guide to American Foreign Relations and compiled two editions of Dissertations in History. He was a leading member of the Council for Peace Research in History and founder of the Society for Internationalists. He was executive secretary and later president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Both formally and informally he helped to shape the direction SHAFR followed over the years.

The unifying theme in his scholarship and in his civic activities was the study of internationalism and international organization in American history, with particular emphasis on conflict resolution through peaceful means. His biography of Hamilton Holt, and his prizewinning Seeking World Order reflect these lifelong concerns. Rollins College awarded him an LHD in recognition of his achievements. The second volume of his history of America’s role in international organizations will appear in 1988.

He leaves behind his wife Olga of Sarasota, Florida, and his two sons. He also leaves behind a legion of friends and admirers whose lives he had touched over the years.

Lawrence S. Kaplan
Kent State University

JOHN F. McGOVERN, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, died on September 24, 1987 of cancer. He was fifty-four years old.

A native of Jersey City, Professor McGovern completed his undergraduate degree at Fordham University in 1959. He studied medieval economic history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of Robert L. Reynolds and received his doctorate in 1967. While completing his dissertation, Professor McGovern taught at Loyola College in Montreal.

In 1967 he joined the history faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1979. He held a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and a summer fellowship at the American Numismatic Society as a graduate student. In 1974–75 he received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support his research at Cambridge University on the economic doctrines of medieval lawyers. While in Cambridge he was elected an associate of Clare Hall, with which he maintained a continuing relationship for the remainder of his life.

Professor McGovern wrote numerious articles and papers on subjects ranging from Anglo-Saxon land tenures to Dante studies, but his academic interests during the last fifteen years of his career centered on the development of capitalistic ideas, the work ethic, and private interest doctrine among legal writers in the period after 1250.

He is survived by his son, a brother, and three sisters.

The history department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has established a John F. McGovern Fund in his memory to support prizes for outstanding undergraduate students of history.

James A. Brundage
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

RICHARD SCHLATTER, university professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University, died October 22, 1987, at the age of seventy-five. A prominent scholar in the field of seventeenth-century British history, he was also a gifted administrator with a rare talent for directing important academic enterprises.

A native of Fostoria, Ohio, Professor Schlatter graduated from Harvard College in 1934, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and took his D. Phil. degree at Oxford University in I 938. His dissertation, The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders, 1660–1688 (1940, 1971) reflected an interest that he was to pursue in later publications, including editions of Richard Baxter and Puritan Politics (1957) and Hobbes’s Thucydides (1975). His major work was Private Property: The History of an Idea (1951). For the Conference on British Studies he edited Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writings Since 1966 (1984).

He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1945 after teaching for several years at Harvard. He was provost, or chief academic officer, at Rutgers from 1962 to 1972 and served briefly as acting president. During that decade, the university nearly doubled in size, new schools and colleges were established, and the quality of the faculty was greatly enhanced. As an administrator, Schlatter was the antithesis of the academic bureaucrat. He was efficient, accessible, and self-effacing, and his quick decisions reflected his assured scholarly judgement.

His organizing ability was not exhibited at Rutgers alone. As general editor of the Ford Humanities Project on humanistic scholarship, he guided the production of ten volumes of influential essays. He was the executive director of the XIVth International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in San Francisco in 1975. After retiring from Rutgers in l 982, he spent three years as executive associate of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a devoted member of the Century Association of New York City.

He is survived by his widow, two children, and two grandchildren.

Richard P. McCormick
Rutgers University

GLENN EDWARD TYLER, professor emeritus of the history of science and of the Renaissance-Reformation period at Idaho State University, died August 26, 1987 in Pocatello, Idaho, following an extended illness resulting from a cancerous brain tumor. He was seventy-seven years old.

After receiving a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1932, Professor Tyler pursued a career in banking and continued his education by taking night classes at the American Institute of Banking in Minneapolis. However, by the time he entered the army in 1943, he had decided to return to school for graduate study in history. His extensive reading had convinced him that since history included every field of human endeavor, it was a discipline which would allow him the opportunity to follow all his varied interests.

When he was discharged from the army late in 1945, he returned to the University of Minnesota where he was awarded an M.A. in history in 1947 and the Ph.D. in 1951. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the influence of Calvinism on the development of science in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He remained a lifelong student both of the natural sciences and of the theological tradition of John Calvin.

After holding a series of research and teaching positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota, he accepted a post in 1955 at the rapidly growing Idaho State College where he became part of a small history department. He taught all of the courses outside of the field of American history.

In 1962 Professor Tyler became department chair. Under his leadership the history department experienced rapid growth. While he retired in 1975, he had continued to be active in department affairs and was very generous in helping younger colleagues pursue their research and teaching interests.

He developed a tremendous love of reading during his early years. His reading habit led him to build a vast personal library that is legendary in Pocatello. This entire collection, thought to comprise about 22,000 volumes and manuscripts, was bequeathed by Professor Tyler to the Eli M. Oboler Library of Idaho State University. Particularly noteworthy in this collection are materials dealing with the history of science and with the Reformation period, especially Calvinism and Puritanism.

In 1975 the history department honored Professor Tyler by naming its newly formed student history society for him. He also left several completed manuscripts that will be published posthumously.

He is survived by a sister and brother and the members of the ISU history department and their families who were his family in Pocatello.

Those wishing to honor Professor Tyler are asked to make a donation to the Idaho State University Foundation, indicating that the contribution is to go to the Glenn E. Tyler Book Fund.

J.B. Owens
Idaho State University

C. WILLIAM VOGEL, professor of history emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, died August 20, 1987. He was born in Cincinnati, May 19, 1906. He received the B.A. and M.A. in history in 1926 and 1928 from the University of Cincinnati. In 1940 he was awarded the Ph.D. by Harvard. He began teaching in 1930 and, aside from a year at Miami of Ohio in 1935, spent his entire professional life in Cincinnati.

He first worked in German history, then the history of England. For almost forty years he unselfishly served the students and faculty of his alma mater. When his career opened, the University of Cincinnati was a small municipal institution. The department of history had less than half a dozen members. When he retired, the university had almost 40,000 students, history had over thirty members, and the university had become part of the Ohio higher education system.

Professor Vogel was a gifted writer. His doctoral dissertation, a two-volume study of conservative opposition to Bismarck’s policies in Germany, won the coveted Bowdoin Prize at Harvard (1940). His essay, “Leopold Emery: Man Against the Stars in Their Course,” written as a memorial to his friend and former chair, Reginald C. McGrane, was a classic of its genre. But he chose to devote his life to teaching.

To Professor Vogel, history was a great story. His undergraduate lectures sparkled with anecdotes and wry humor. His relations with graduate students were positive. Even when he was critical, he maintained a compassionate and judicious attitude. Recognition came with the Dolly M. Cohen Award for distinguished teaching from students and faculty in 1967.

Even in his last years, Professor Vogel remained humane and committed to sound education. He once mused whether a career such as his would remain possible. A clear answer is still missing, but it is to be hoped that the values shaping Professor Vogel’s career and life can be a part of the future at the University of Cincinnati. If they cannot, it will be a lesser place.

Daniel R. Beaver
University of Cincinnati

GEORGE WOLFSKILL, sixty-six, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Arlington died at his home August 4, 1987.

A graduate of St. Louis University, Baylor University, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952, Professor Wolfskill taught at Baylor and William Jewell College before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington (then Arlington State College) in 1955. He also served as visiting lecturer and later visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1957, 1958, 1963, and 1967.

A specialist in twentieth-century U.S. history, Wolfskill was the author of The Revolt of the Conservatives (1962); All But the People: Franklin Roosevelt and His Critics with John A. Hudson (1969) and Happy Days Are Here Again! (1974). At the time of his death, he was working on a fourth book, A Land Worth Saving: The New Deal and the South.

A student and longtime friend of Walter Prescott Webb, Professor Wolfskill was instrumental in establishing the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington and was co-editor and/or contributor to five of the twenty-two volumes of the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture series as well as the author of “Retrospective: Walter Prescott Webb and the Great Plains Then and Now” for Reviews in American History (July 1984).

Professor Wolfskill’s excellence as a teacher as well as a scholar were recognized by his receipt of the statewide Minnie Stephens Piper Foundation Award as one of the ten “Professors of the Year” in 1959 and the Amoco Foundation “Excellence in Teaching Award” in 1976.

Although he retired from full-time teaching in 1982, Professor Wolfskill continued to take an active interest in university affairs, taught one course a semester in the history department and served as academic advisor to the athletic department.

A George Wolfskill Graduate Student Scholarship in History Fund is being established at the university in his honor. Inquiries concerning the fund may be directed to the Chair, Department of History, Box 19529 UTA Station, Arlington, TX 76019.

Sandra L. Myres
University of Texas at Arlington

Obituaries, April 1988 – AHA (2024)

References

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Mrs. Angelic Larkin

Last Updated:

Views: 6770

Rating: 4.7 / 5 (67 voted)

Reviews: 90% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Mrs. Angelic Larkin

Birthday: 1992-06-28

Address: Apt. 413 8275 Mueller Overpass, South Magnolia, IA 99527-6023

Phone: +6824704719725

Job: District Real-Estate Facilitator

Hobby: Letterboxing, Vacation, Poi, Homebrewing, Mountain biking, Slacklining, Cabaret

Introduction: My name is Mrs. Angelic Larkin, I am a cute, charming, funny, determined, inexpensive, joyous, cheerful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.