Paul Boyer (1935-2012)

Through R.B. Bernstein I have just learned the sad news that Paul Boyer, the Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus at UW-Madison passed away on March 17.  I never had the pleasure of meeting Professor Boyer, but his book Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft was one of the first serious works of history I ever read.  I dimly recall having purchased a used copy in the Georgetown book store when I was in high school.  The basic premise was that Boyer and Nissenbaum mapped where the complainants and where the accused lived and they showed that the witchcraft scare had a geographic as well as class dimension to it.  Perhaps therein lie some of my interests in property -- or more appropriately geography.  I'm not sure.  It's a wonderfully accessible book and conveys some very important principles about social organization -- but it also drives home how you can learn a lot about an old event by looking at sources that have previously been neglected (including ... wills!)

Here's the weird part of this -- on Monday, which I guess was a few days after Boyer passed away, I pulled it off my shelf and flipped through it.  Sort of odd because I don't know as I'd opened that book in years.  Evidence of the supernatural?  Who knows.

The image of the House of Seven Gables is from the magnificent Historic Buildings Survey at the Library of Congress.

Comments

[Mary Bilder]

Thanks Al for posting this sad news. I was fortunate to have taken his courses as an undergraduate at Wisconsin. I was an english major and it was my first foray into history. I can still see him, lecturing in the dreadful concrete, windowless lecture rooms that the history department occupied in the wake of the Vietnam War. He taught American intellectual history, but not of ideas floating around in a universe by themselves but rather grounded and responding to social, political, and cultural context. Over twenty-five years later, I still remember Boyer's curiosity about person after person who had led a somewhat ordinary life and then confronted by some major crisis in American history or personal depression gone on to write his or her significant work.

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks for that memorial, Mary.

[Tamara Piety]

Thanks Al for posting this. I loved that book!