BACKGROUND:

HOWARD R. LAMAR

Howard R. Lamar (1923-2023) was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory University in 1945, and his Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1951. He was born in the South, educated in the North, but a historian of the West. His dissertation, “Dakota Territory, 1861-1889” reshaped the understanding of the development of the American West. In 1949, Lamar started teaching at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. In 1970, he became the William Robertson Coe Professor of History, and in 1987, the Sterling Professor of History. He went on to serve as Dean of Yale College and President of Yale University. He taught the popular, year-long survey course, “The History of the American West” for over four decades, and mentored dozens of historians, who also became leaders in the field. As Dean he standardized tenure procedures and programs in women’s studies and environmental studies. And as President, Lamar helped to rebuild the sense of campus unity and established a closer relationship with the surrounding community of New Haven. At Yale, the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders supports research focusing on the American West. Additionally, the Lamar Series in Western History published by Yale University Press pays homage to the scholarly advancements by Lamar.

He was an influential scholar who oversaw two editions of The Readers Encyclopedia of the American West. He also wrote dozens of important monographs and articles that still have an impact on our field including Texas Crossings: The Lone Star State and the Far West,

1836–1986, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History, and Charlie Siringo’s West: An Interpretive Biography. And while he was an exceptional and prolific scholar, he is probably best remembered for how he shaped the field through his training of dozens of graduate students. Those students, as well as the myriad of colleagues he mentored, went on to reshape over and  over again the field of American Western History. “He had a way of giving you confidence and giving you ideas — and making you think somehow they came from you,” said Jay Gitlin, a professor of history at Yale, who studied with Lamar. Moreover, his capacious curiosity pushed him to mentor students who went on to be influential scholars in Native American, LatinX, Asian American, and Gender and Sexuality histories. Through his deeds and demeanor, he instilled in his graduate students, colleagues, and friends the importance of intellectual generosity and openness.

Within the WHA, Lamar presented at the second annual conference in 1962 and ran for WHA council in the same year. Over the next sixty years, he served on the program committee, WHQ Board of Editors, as Vice President, on council, and on the local arrangements committee. Lamar served as president of the WHA from 1971-1972, and he presented numerous research projects and chaired and commented on many panels. Lamar published multiple articles in the WHQ. Upon the death of Ray Allen Billington in 1981, Lamar coedited Histories of the American Frontier with Martin Ridge and David Weber. In 1985, he presented the annual banquet address at the request of WHA president Gene Gressley, and asked the audience to search for broader unifying themes of the American West. In 1992, he was the ninth recipient of the Western History Association Prize, now the Caughey Western History Prize, for a distinguished body of writing, joining the likes of Robert Utley, Wallace Stegner, Robert Athearn, and W. Turrentine Jackson. A dozen of Lamar’s former doctoral students contributed to the anthology, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, where Lamar authored the essay “Westering in the Twentieth Century.” Howard R. Lamar passed away at the age of 99 on February 22, 2023.

“Howard was an extraordinary teacher and mentor, a pathbreaking scholar, and a wise and compassionate leader,” said Yale President Peter Salovey. “His service to Yale was generous and wide-ranging, and he inspired generations of Yale students with his energetic engagement with new ideas and his deep curiosity about the world.” (Quoted from Yale Daily News, Howard R. Lamar, eminent historian and former Yale president, February 24, 2023)