Last fall I missed the passing of one of my favorite college professors, James C. Davis. I landed in his freshman seminar, "Researching Philadelphia," in the fall of 1984 and that was, quite frankly, a transformative experience for me. He took us around the city to see sites that were so often overlooked -- like nineteenth century workers' housing -- and others that were quite popular, like City Hall and Fairmont Park. This made me realize that there was much to study and some unorthodox ways to do it. It was my first introduction to social history and I ended up writing a history of a block of Philadelphia -- which had been part of the DuBois' study "The Philadelphia Negro" and by the early 1980s was quite affluent. That paper, which used census records to detail the changing demographics and affluence of the block, set me on the road to other quantitative and social history projects.
Dr, Davis was a thoughtful and patient professor and looking back on the several courses I took with him I feel like he dramatically shaped my approach to history and even my desire to do more with it. I read Montaillou, a study of a French village based on Inquisition records, in his class and that remains one of my favorite works of history, not just because of the method of using court records to tell a story that goes well beyond the legal questions that motivated the trials in the first place. It was after I left his charge that I expanded my interested in intellectual history. I'm very sorry that I didn't have the chance to talk with him in recent years; I would love to have had his counsel on my recent efforts to combine social and intellectual history.
Given everything that was going on in my life last fall I missed the news of his passing.
The illustration is of Davis' book The Human Story, published by Harper Collins in 2005.
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