Thanks to Phil Curtin
Cross cultural trade and world history. These were phrases that seemed irresistible when I was browsing in the University of Minnesota bookstore many years ago. I bought the book that, like all Cambridge University Press books, seemed ridiculously overpriced, and still have my heavily marked up copy.
Then, when I was at the University of Hawaii, the author, Philip Curtin, came to visit for a semester and I had the opportunity to go to the seminars he gave. Wow. You’d never have guessed from his behavior that he had already been President of the American Historical Association, had every grant going, and a huge reputation for his work establishing the hitherto neglected field of African history and on the Atlantic slave trade.
I found myself chatting over dinner with him and his wife Ann about shared experiences of West Africa, whether or not Wiltshire was more heavily burdened with history than most places, and how the plantation experience in Hawaii compared to that in the Caribbean.
He was always ready to talk, always open to suggestion, while insisting on clarity of ideas and a very solid base in research, preferably quantitative. In Hawaii he was working on yet another book, Death By Migration, in which he showed that European troops stationed in the tropics in the nineteenth century died at twice the rate of soldiers at home, teasing out all kinds of consequences.
I last saw him at a world history conference in Austin, Texas where he was as vigorous as ever. This weekend Philip Curtin died. You can read more about him here. His was the kind of history I greatly admire, sweeping in conception, meticulous in execution, cutting through special interests to try to get clear about the past, and always aware about its connection with the present. It was a huge privilege to have known him even briefly.
A great tribute, Rachel. I am in particular agreement with the following, from the page that you reference:
“The discipline of history has broadened enormously in the postwar decades, but historians have not,” Philip Curtin declared in his presidential address to the AHA, lamenting the increasingly narrow specializations of too many historians who thus remained ignorant of developments in fields outside their own. He himself was an exception, almost singlehandedly (but along with his many students, surely) defying the trend toward ever-narrowing subspecializations for more than 50 years…”
This is a major reason that I did not myself continue in an academic track. Just too confining and too few Renaissance Men & Women fall by the way.
The person for me who falls into a similar category is the historian Peter Brown, whose breadth and depth of knowledge and plain humanness is extraordinary. I was fortunate to get to know him in Egypt a number of years ago. We went to the Fayuum one weekend with colleagues to look at the Graeco-roman sites and upon seeing them – a scholar who had spent years reading the greek and latin texts from the area – he exclaimed “Aha! So THIS is how they lived! Not so bad, after all!” With a broad grin on his face.
Some links to his work –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brown_(historian)
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/83/21A14/index.xml?section=topstories
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Society-Peter-Brown/dp/0231061013
Such persons are really treasures.
Our tastes run the same way Diana! I had the good luck to get to know Peter Brown when I was at Princeton. In fact, I have a quote from him on my profile page on Facebook.