In Memoriam

OAH Newsletter 35 (November 2007).
Copyright (c), Organization of American Historians.

In this issue:

Saul Benison
Phillip Shaw Paludan

Saul Benison
Saul Benison died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Baltimore, Maryland on October 5, 2006. During the last years of his life, he was afflicted with dementia. Saul was born in New York City on November 2, 1920, grew up in Brooklyn, and graduated from Queens College in 1941, where he was the recipient of the K. S. Pinson Award in History. After serving as a historian for the War Production Board (1943 to 1945), he entered Columbia University's graduate history program in 1945. By the time he received his Ph.D. in 1953, Saul had taught at the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, and Long Island University. A pioneer in the field of oral history, he was a research associate of Columbia University's Oral History Research Office from 1953 to 1961. Although he specialized in the history of medicine and science, he also prepared memoirs in American social history including one with Arthur M. Schlesinger. From 1953 to 1955, Saul served as a research associate for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, and from 1962 to 1969, he was adjunct professor in the Brandeis University department of history and was employed as historian for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

By the early 1960s, Saul was an acknowledged expert in oral history. He functioned as an advisor on oral history for numerous groups and institutions including the American Archives of Art, the American Institute of Physica, and the National Library of Medicine. His Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science: An Oral History Memoir appeared in 1967. The reviewer for Isis called it "a remarkable achievement" and the reviewer for the American Historical Review proclaimed that Benison "has clearly produced a new kind of historical document that is at once the memoir of an important scientific figure and the creation of a historian-interviewer who has framed all the questions and set the historical problems." In 1968 Saul received the American Association for Medical History's William H. Welch Medal for distinguished achievement in medical historiography.

Saul joined the University of Cincinnati's department of history in 1969 as a full professor. He planned to continue his analysis of the history of Poliomyelitis by doing an extensive oral history memoir of Albert Sabin. Saul conducted numerous interviews with Sabin, including a video interview in 1979, but the long awaited memoir never saw its way into print. While working on the Sabin project, Saul began collaborating with Clifford Barger and Elin L. Wolfe on a multivolume biography of the noted physiologist Walter B. Cannon. The first volume appeared in 1987 as Walter B. Cannon: The Life and Times of a Young Scientist. Saul and Clifford Barger toiled on the companion volume until Barger died in 1996. Soon thereafter Wolfe took an ever increasing role in the project due to Saul's declining health. Walter B. Cannon, Science in Society appeared in 2000.

A true New Yorker, Saul did not learn to drive until after he moved to Cincinnati. Although he took driver's education twice because he wanted to be sure of his skills, riding with Saul in his early driving days could be a scary experience. Saul had a well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile extraordinaire. He amassed an extensive history library and a spectacular history of medicine library that have now been absorbed by the University of Cincinnati's library system. Anyone who met Saul quickly discovered that he loved to tell anecdotes and was a connoisseur of jokes. He told stories skillfully and, as a colleague put it, with a little cheshire-cat grin on his face.

Saul retired from the University of Cincinnati in 1990. While there, he became famous for his willingness to offer a wide range of courses. Although Saul never married, he was in many ways a family man. As his colleagues-- especially his junior colleagues--can attest, Saul gave away innumerable books, paid for many a meal, and remembered birthdays. And, as he neared retirment, Saul gave up a merit raise so his younger colleagues' base salaries could be augmented. Graduate students had good reason to give him the nickname "Uncle Saul." While he was a kind person by nature, Saul's special sensitivity to graduate students and younger faculty also reflected the fact that he came of age as a historian at a time when--like today--many a talented historian had to struggle constantly to cobble together a range of appointments merely to survive. He never forgot how hard the early years of a historian's career can be. The faculty and students of the University of Cincinnati benefited greatly from that sensitivity just as the history profession benefited from Saul's pioneering work.

-- John K. Alexander
University of Cincinnati

Phillip Shaw Paludan
Regarded as one of the world's foremost constitutional, Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln scholars, Phillip Shaw Paludan, sixty-nine, died on August 1, 2007, at his home in Springfield, Illinois. His life exemplified that of a teacher and scholar extraordinaire. He was generous and supportive of others, particularly younger scholars. He was witty and always fun to be around.

Phillip Shaw Paludan was born January 26, 1938, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Paludan earned his B.A. and M.A. from Occidental College in California and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1968. His doctoral dissertation, "Law and Equal Rights: The Civil War Encounter--A Study of Legal Minds in the Civil War Era," was under the directorship of Harold Hyman. He began his teaching career at the University of Kansas and his teaching adventures took him beyond Kansas when he took visiting professorships at University College in Dublin, Ireland, and at Rutgers University in Camden. Coming to the University of Illinois, Springfield, from the University of Kansas, Paludan was selected as the Naomi Lynn Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies in 2001. Trained as a legal and constitutional historian, Paludan excelled in several genres, including local and community studies, social history, and violence.

His many honors include numerous teaching awards and the very prestigious Lincoln Prize in 1995 for his book, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, which was also a History Book Club Selection and a Book of the Month Club Selection.

Among his many other publications is the standard study of the northern homefront during the Civil War, "A People's Contest": The Union and Civil War (1988).  He also wrote A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law and Equality in the Civil War Era (1975), and the Pulitzer nominated Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (1981), a History Book Club Selection and a MacMillan Library of World History Selection. Victims is an amazing book, full of empathy and historical imagination. Paludan took the reader into the heads of Civil War soldiers by using accounts by modern soldiers as well as Civil War soldiers. As in all his scholarship, he found universal truth.

Paludan's other awards include the Barondess/Lincoln Award from the New York City Civil War Round Table, and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard Law School.

His published articles are too numerous to list here; one of his earliest essays, "The Civil War as a Crisis of Law and Order," in the American Historical Review is a seminal work which still influences Civil War scholars, and his latest, "'Dictator Lincoln': Surveying Lincoln and the Constitution," is in the OAH Magazine of History.

Phil Paludan met his wife Marty at Kansas University in 1984, and they married in 1990. He is survived by Marty, by two daughters, Karin Sorey and Kirsten Paludan, by four step children, Jim Hammond, Brett Hammond, Jill Donatelli and Cody Hammond, and five step grandchildren. According to the Journal-World (Lawrence, Kansas, August 4, 2007), his daughter Karin said that her father taught her to keep an open mind, that he liked Lincoln because Lincoln strove to understand people with different opinions.

Renowned as a teacher and scholar, Phil Paludan was even more well thought of as a man of integrity and willingness to help others' students and colleagues alike. As Chancellor Richard Ringeisen told the State Journal Register (Springfield, IL, August 3, 2007), "Phil is just the kind of person you'd like to talk with, so we miss him in the sense of his being such a distinguished professor, but also (because) he was such a kind, warm individual."

--Vernon Burton
 University of Illinois

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