Michael A. Morrison passed away on Sunday, May 14, 2017, at his residence in Lafayette, Indiana. A professor at Purdue University for twenty-five years, Mike was a cherished colleague, scholar, teacher, and friend.

After serving in the United States Air Force as a Sergeant during the Vietnam War era, Mike attended college in his home state of Michigan before taking up graduate study at the University of Michigan under J. Mills Thornton. It was there that he met his future wife, historian Nancy Gabin, whom he married in 1984.

From 1991 to 2016, Mike served as a professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. To say that he was a beloved teacher is beyond an understatement. Students were partial to his U.S. history survey, often warning others about the prospects of sitting in the front row. Doing so made one likely to be bumped into or jostled as he launched into one of his meandering walks in the midst of explaining the sectional crisis or some other crucial period. If they enjoyed the survey and his Jacksonian America class, they lined up in droves to take his signature course–Society, Culture, and Rock & Roll. Generations of Boilermakers who had never heard of Bob Dylan or knew anything about British punk instantly became cooler and hipper–not to mention steeped in the rich social, political, and cultural context of the mid-twentieth century. In addition to his regular teaching load, he nearly always had at least one–if not more–history honors student or freshman scholar each semester. Mike’s classroom accolades were not confined to his students. He rightfully earned nearly every teaching award possible. He was the recipient of the College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award and Purdue University’s Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award–the highest honor for teaching at the university. In 1998, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named him Indiana Professor of the Year. In 2003, Mike was inducted into Purdue’s Book of Great Teachers. The list goes on and on–but you get the picture. Students adored him, and more importantly, came to appreciate the larger world around them.

If Mike often taught about rock and roll or punk rock, his peers in the field knew him for his specialization in 19th century U. S. political history. In 1997, he published Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press). The debate over slavery in the territories, he argued, proved the central catalyst for the war. Tracing the origins of the sectional fissure from the annexation of Texas through the secession winter of 1860-61, he deftly demonstrated the ways in which politicians throughout the nation continued to harken back to the Revolution for legitimacy. Sectionalism did not flourish because of a clash of cultures, he insisted in an argument that has become a mainstay of the historiography, but rather North and South disagreed about slavery.

While Mike had one foot in the Civil War era, the other was solidly situated in the Early Republic. In 1989, he became an assistant editor of the Journal of the Early Republic before joining John L. Larson as a co-editor in 1994. For a decade, the two steered the course of field’s top journal, bringing their expertise to bear on a generation of scholars. In recognition of his contributions and stature in the field, last year Mike was named president-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). No doubt he will be deeply missed at this year’s conference in July.

Ever the teacher, Mike’s reach extended well beyond the banks of the Wabash River. He regularly served as a faculty member in summer leadership programs, and along with John Larson, directed an NEH summer seminar for university and college professors on the Early Republic at the Library Company on several occasions. He edited numerous collections on the Early Republic and contributed pieces on the Mexican War and Manifest Destiny to projects such as Virginia Tech’s Essential Civil War Curriculum project.

Although I was familiar with his work as a graduate student, I first met Mike more than eleven years ago during my AHA interview for Purdue. I remember well walking into that hotel suite in Philadelphia where I was greeted by Mike, his wife Nancy Gabin, and Robert May. It was obvious this was going to be a congenial committee, but Mike instantly set the tone: serious and professional with just enough levity to make even an AHA interview enjoyable. As we began, he offered me a bottle of water. Surely it was my nerves that made me quip something about how at the University of Richmond their bottled water was labeled “Spider Water,” but Mike ran with it, suggesting that they dared not attempt such labels at Purdue, as it would have to be called “Purdue Pee.” The ever-gracious Nancy smiled and rolled her eyes just a bit at her colleague/husband, reassuring me that I would find Mike’s humor a staple in the department. And I did. We all did.

When my husband and I arrived in Indiana later that year, Mike and Nancy proved to be the welcoming colleagues that the interview had suggested. I often stopped by his office my first few years, where he shared musings on the field or teaching, providing me with copies of his syllabi and suggestions on assignments. When I once asked about his success in teaching the U.S. survey, he quipped that it was “attributable to volume and animation.” As the Director of Undergraduate Studies (for more years than I’m sure he cared to remember), he fielded more than his share of questions from me. More often, he imparted stories about his kids, both Natty and Katie of whom he was incredibly proud, as well as his four-legged children. Both Nancy and Mike lavished love on the cats, and they graciously agreed to open their home to one of the kittens my mother had found in our barn back in Virginia. We brought the tiny gray tabby back to Indiana, and Mike quickly became devoted to Dill – short for Dylan. Not so awfully long ago, I received an email from Mike recounting some of Dill’s antics in his usual droll manner.

Perhaps it’s Mike’s emails that I, and likely many of my colleagues, will miss most. He was wont to send YouTube videos on topics such as cannibalism at Jamestown as well as long diatribes on the insanity that can be academia. But he always ended his missives with his initials. “MAM.” He was a generous and compassionate soul. MAM is already deeply missed.

The world is quieter now that Tony Kaye is no longer part of it. Anthony E. Kaye passed away May 14 after a brave struggle against cancer. Among Tony’s many scholarly accomplishments was his role in the founding of the Journal of the Civil War Era, for which he served as Associate Editor and which he helped shape through his curiosity, passion, and integrity. Given Tony’s many contributions to the journal, we think it fitting to begin to offer remembrances of him here. This is not a formal obituary but an invitation for others among his many, many friends and admirers to share their own memories of him, in the comments here or on the Facebook page, or via email to us. In lieu of flowers, his family has asked friends to consider donating to the National Humanities Center or the UNC Cancer Center.

With his broad mind, broad shoulders, and booming voice, Tony was a substantial presence in the field and in almost every room—literal and intellectual—he inhabited. After working in journalism—a field he loved both to follow and to critique—Tony turned to history, studying at Columbia University’s fabled department with Barbara J. Fields and Eric Foner, among others. Afterwards, he worked at the equally fabled Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, where he helped edit Series 3, Volume 2, Land and Labor, 1866-1867, of Freedom: A Documentary Series. From there he joined the Pennsylvania State University’s History Department.

His 2007 book, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (UNC Press, 2007) was a Finalist for the 2008 Frederick Douglass Prize given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and recast arguments about resistance and community in the slave South. By paying careful attention to the material conditions of slave plantations in the Natchez region, as well as the way ex-slaves talked about their lives in reports and claims submitted after the Civil War, Tony argued that slaves had developed distinctive conceptual geographies rooted in their own relatively constrained worlds. These geographies helped construct the way that slaves saw themselves, their fellow slaves, and their place in the world. Rather than an abstract slave community, Tony sketched powerful but geographically specific slave communities that could serve both to generate common feeling among slaves in particular neighborhoods and to exclude slaves who were strangers. From these parochial views, slaves constructed a rich and meaningful imaginative politics during slavery that in turn shaped their entry into formal politics after the war. It was (with Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom) a part of the spatial turn in slavery, and (with Dylan Penningroth’s Claims of Kinfolk) of the rethinking of slave communities, and (with Steven Hahn’s Nation Under Our Feet) of the reconceptualization of slave politics.

As a graduate student, I read Tony’s book with wonder at the depth of his research and the careful nature of his claims. And, like every graduate student who has lived, I read it with some critique. In my first book, Declarations of Dependence, I drew heavily upon Tony’s view of the imaginative impact of a personalistic, geographically constrained politics and also nudged against his assumption that this view was distinctive to slaves but argued instead that similar imaginative modes shaped black and white Southern visions of politics.

Our friendship—like many of his friendships–was born in argument. We originally met when he asked me shortly after the journal’s founding to submit something (a request I declined!). And at conference bars I enjoyed watching him hold forth on the follies of historians, especially in his riffs on the “Comment and a Question” club. But we became friends when he read my footnotes. Meaningful disagreements fascinated him, not so much for the potential of resolution but for the potential of exploration.

More than any person I have ever known, Tony loved to connect historiography to broader theories of politics. He was fascinated by the New York Intellectuals and by the Old Left—I never remembered seeing him more joyful than when he discussed the Left with Andrew Zimmerman—and could talk for hours about the ways that older theories of social change and the state crept into the historiography, establishing the commonsensical (but not always carefully thought out) associations that shape much of our work. How did the anti-statism of the New Left inspire histories that frequently (but not always coherently) invoked the state at moments of decline or collapse? For Tony thinking our way out of our historiographical impasses required thinking our way through their genealogies, not to get right with any abstract standard—he was too open-minded for that—or even to pay homage, but to understand why we repeated ourselves so often, why our books followed a set of unconscious forms. Because I have published fiction, he wanted me to write about narrative forms, Hayden White, and Reconstruction historiography, and I promised to do so but I never did.

The great lucky break of my intellectual life was a gift of Tony’s love of argument. One day he called and asked me to set up a conference on Reconstruction at the Penn State Richards Civil War Era Center, a conference that aimed to open up historiographic debate in a field that at once burgeoned with good work and also felt tied to frameworks from Eric Foner’s monumental Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, a book he feared was becoming more admired than engaged with. He thought it would be a good idea if I shared the duties with someone who could keep me intellectually honest. He had someone in mind, and I knew whom he was thinking about before he answered: our mutual friend Kate Masur. And so with his sometimes-gentle, sometimes-pointed prodding, Kate and I put together a conference that became our co-edited book The World the Civil War Made, a book that was a product of and tribute to his faith that historiographic inquiry mattered, that we demonstrate our interest in grand works like Foner’s not by paying homage but by paying attention. And Tony, with his eye for people, brought me and Kate together with Bill Blair, who has become a dear friend and mentor and patron to both of us.

The last night of the conference, exhausted and triumphant behind the Nittany Lion Inn, we shared his bourbon after last call, talking about historiography and novelists, about Edward P. Jones and Madison Smartt Bell, and about the way that history and fiction developed in tension and in tandem, acting upon similar, often unacknowledged cultural impulses but denying their common origins, forms, and influences. The next morning, Melissa asked him what he was doing at the conference, and he replied, “Having conversations I could not have anywhere else in the world.” After that, my memories of Tony blur: the two of us sneaking away from the SCWH in Baltimore to go to dinner alone in a restaurant that he announced “would be ruinously expensive,” talking novels and film again in his living room on a different visit to Penn State, chatting about Methodism on the ski lift at Banff in summer 2015. There was always too much talking, and there was never enough time for talking.

In the late spring of 2016, he told me about his condition. We talked and emailed about Cuba, his beloved daughters and his beloved Melissa, California, North Carolina, and about the elephant in the room.

And we talked a great deal about his book. After publishing Joining Places, Tony published a crucial Journal of Southern History essay about Second Slavery, a set of ideas developed by Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske and others that connected 19^th century slavery in Cuba and Brazil to a shifting Atlantic economy and that differentiated it from prior slaveries in terms of capital investment, labor organization, technological development, and financial flows. They understood U.S. slavery as a part of this transformed world, but Tony tied the pieces together in a way no one else had. Since then several U.S. historians of slavery and capitalism have followed these connections, and Tony might well have written a book that contributed to that developing field.

But he had his eyes set on Nat Turner. For years, as he toiled through archives and plotted places on maps, I understood Tony’s Nat Turner project as an extension of Joining Places, as a study of the way that the material and imaginative constructions of neighborhood in Virginia (enslaved and white) shaped Turner’s uprising. Unless I misremember, Tony thought so, too.

In the last year, however, I had the privilege to see chapters and notes from Tony’s manuscript that showed me his mind in motion. He had arrived at an extraordinarily different, and difficult, view of the history, and he had become inflamed with its possibilities. Tony, a secular Jew, had become obsessed with Turner’s Methodism. Turner, seeing himself a prophet, had behaved under a prophetic logic that History ill prepared us to understand but that had shaped the world we study. Instead of looking for secular explanations, Tony wondered what it would mean to place Turner among the prophets, to read other prophets’ lives into the gaps in Turner’s self-narration. In the process Tony read deeply in Methodist practices, theological debates, Biblical accounts of warfare, and the lives of the prophets.

In the process Tony sketched a different Turner, a fearful man as much as a firebrand, a man who tested God, a man who saw his revolt less as an ideological revolution than as a battle, a man who hoped to see a promise of his future and lived with the awareness that he would never see such a promise. A man who doubted and who yet acted. It is, I believe, a new portrait of Turner. And perhaps even a new way of writing historical causation, or of avoiding certain errors in writing historical causation.

Last fall, as his prospects faded, Tony asked if I would take on the work of guiding his raw chapters and notes to completion. Since then, we met in New York and in North Carolina and talked about his hopes for the book and for History. Many people have offered to help, and I plan to take you all up on those offers in the years to come. I consider it an honor to be part of a work of true imagination and depth.

And a pleasure to have heard his voice, reduced in volume but still electric with humor, alive to the possibility in each of our sentences. In my last email to him, I copied out a part of James Dickey’s “The Bee.” “Dead coaches live in the air, son   live/In the ear/Like fathers and urge and urge. They want you better/Than you are. When needed, they rise and curse you they scream/ When something must be saved.”

Though silenced, Tony’s voice lives. We look forward to hearing your memories of a man we will miss, now and always.