Joyce Appleby (1929-2016)

I am very sorry to hear (via Karin Wulf's twitter feed) that the distinguished historian Joyce Appleby has passed away.  Dr. Appleby was a professor emerita at UCLA -- and the author of many challenging works on eighteenth century history.   I read her Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s  (NYU 1984)  in Rick Beeman's course on the American Revolution and it struck me then as a really persuasive argument about the emergence of capitalism in the wake of the Revolution.  (Though I might now say that those ideas were with us for a long time before, but I recognize that they began to exert themselves in forceful and new ways in the 1790s -- and really gained steam in the nineteenth century.) Later in life I benefited mightily from her Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton 1978) when I was working on law, economy, and politics in the seventeenth century in graduate school -- back in the days when I thought that I would spend my life working on the colonial era. And more recently I have enjoyed very much Inheriting the Revolution : The First Generation of Americans (Harvard 2000).  I remember fondly her support of my early work on proslavery thought in the old South and her work with the History News Network, which for many years helped historians write and distribute op-ed pieces that linked their knowledge of history with contemporary events. Joyce Appleby was a fabulous scholar and a supportive and gracious mentor to many, many newer scholars.  We should say about her, as was said of John Hope Franklin in 2009, someone noble has passed from the earth.