Obituaries.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Emory University, died in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 2, 2007, from complications relating to surgery and her long battle with multiple sclerosis. Betsey was sixty-five years old.

A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, and Harvard University (where she studied under Franklin Ford and David Landes), Betsey began her distinguished career as a scholar of French history before turning her redoubtable intellect to the history and literature of the American South and women's history. From 1973 until 1980 she was a member of the University of Rochester's history department. In 1980 she left Rochester for State University of New York at Binghamton, and in 1986 she was invited by Emory University to establish and direct its new Institute for Women's Studies program, which she did with terrific energy, focus, and determination until 1991.

Betsey was a prolific and versatile scholar. She delivered almost 250 invited lectures and authored scores of articles on a truly impressive variety of topics. As comfortable talking meaningfully about literature and religion as she was about history and political economy, Betsey's store of knowledge was frighteningly deep, a product of a genuine, insistent curiosity about the world. She served on many editorial boards, consulted for a wide range of organizations, and was deeply involved in the religious and social life of her community, serving her church, The Immaculate Heart of Mary in Atlanta, especially.

Although of fiercely independent mind, Betsey was extraordinarily collaborative. In addition to her famous partnership with her husband, Eugene Genovese, which produced two landmark studies--The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Cambridge, Eng., 2005) and Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983)--she coauthored or coedited several books, most notably with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Theda Perdue, Elizabeth H. Turner, David Burner, and Forrest McDonald, among others.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was best known in southern history circles for her magnificent study Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), which received the C. Hugh Holman Prize of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians, and was named an outstanding book of the year by the Augustus Meyer Foundation for the Study of Human Rights. But Betsey had multiple audiences. Her first book, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1976), remains highly regarded among historians of eighteenth-century France. She was also a preeminent thinker among women's studies scholars and a public intellectual of the first order. Her "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How the Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women (New York, 1996) especially generated enormous interest outside of the academy. Betsey's achievements were honored at the highest levels. Most conspicuously, President George W. Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal in 2003.

Betsey demanded nothing less than excellence from her graduate students. Committed to all of her students, she took a particular interest in guiding the careers of African American scholars. Although it was more than forty, no one knows precisely how many graduate students she directed. Betsey did not keep a list. She nurtured and tended her students' development throughout their careers, and that sort of mentorship was never reducible, in her mind, to an enumeration.

Refined, gracious, and compassionate, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was, more than anything, an impeccable lady whose cumulative acts of kindness will resonate for many years in many hearts. She is survived by her beloved husband of thirty-seven years, Eugene Genovese, her sister, Rebecca MacMillan Fox, her brother, Edward Whiting Fox Jr., and five nieces and nephews. [MARK SMITH, University of South Carolina]

"Time's wing-ed chariot" returned George Brown Tindall to the Olympian peaks from which he descended on February 26, 1921. For eighty-five years he wandered among mere mortals, dispensing wisdom from "Clio's Decalogue" to his students and colleagues, and setting an example of excellence that all who knew him aspired to attain. Among his Ten Commandments were these: "Thou shalt smite the Philistines hip and thigh with thy first sentence"; "Thou shalt not ... pass judgment upon mankind, nor yet pardon any man or woman for anything"; and of course "Thou shalt not covet thy source's prose, imagery, or purple passage, nor anything that is thy source's, for lo, thou canst say it better thyself." With unfailing wit and elegance, the gentlemanly George Tindall cast a spell on two generations of young scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and along with his friends C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin he shaped for many years the writing of southern history. A Kenan professor emeritus, he died on December 2, 2006, in Chapel Hill.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, and the first in his family to obtain a college degree, George Brown Tindall graduated from Furman University in 1942, majoring in English. During World War II he served in the South Pacific as a cryptographer for the Air Force, rising to the rank of second lieutenant. In 1946 he married Carliss Blossom McGarrity, a Furman classmate, who remained his life partner and soul mate for sixty years. Tindall earned an M.A. (1948) and a Ph.D. (1951) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying under Fletcher Green, and he wrote a dissertation that the University of South Carolina Press published as South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 in 1952. After teaching at Louisiana State University, Eastern Kentucky State University, and the University of Mississippi, Professor Tindall returned to the University of North Carolina in 1958, where he remained until his retirement in 1990.

One of Dr. Tindall's most impressive achievements was the publication of Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 in 1967, a part of Louisiana State University's monumental History of the South series. He also authored a popular textbook, America: A Narrative History, which is currently in its sixth printing. He was a contributor to and a major editor of the 1,656-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill, 1989). His other books include The Disruption of the Solid South (Athens, Ga., 1972), The Persistent Tradition in New South Politics (Baton Rouge, 1975), and Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethnics (Athens, Ga., 1995). He also published more than forty articles in scholarly journals and books.

Tindall served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1973, and at the association's annual meeting for years before and after his presidency he and Blossom shared their good cheer and wisdom with his twenty-six doctoral students and his myriad professional admirers. He will be remembered for his gentle nature, his commitment to civil rights for black Americans, and his quirky sense of humor. Although he routinely wore a green eyeshade while writing, he did send one former student a photograph of himself typing away while wearing an Arkansas Razorbacks "Hog Hat."

Blossom Tindall of Chapel Hill survives her husband, as do their two children, Blair Tindall, of Santa Monica, California, and Bruce Tindall, of San Diego, California, and one grandchild. Anyone wishing to make a memorial contribution in honor of Dr. Tindall may send it to the George Brown Tindall Endowed Lectureship and Scholarship Fund, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, SC 29613. [ELIZABETH JACOWAY, Newport, Arkansas]