Obituaries.

Thomas B. Alexander, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-Columbia, died in Columbia, Missouri, on July 3, 2006. A former president of the Southern Historical Association, Alexander was an inspiring teacher, an eminent scholar, and a humane and caring human being.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 23, 1918, Alexander earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Vanderbilt University. During World War II, from 1943 to 1946, he served in the U.S. Navy. After separation from the Navy, Alexander accepted a teaching position at Clemson College. He left Clemson in 1949 to become a professor and chair of the division of social sciences at Georgia Southern College. In 1957 he began a twelve-year tenure at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Alexander joined the history faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1969, where he introduced both students and departmental faculty to the "quantification approaches to the study of history."

Alexander was one of those rare individuals who was at the same time the students' professor and scholars' scholar. Members of the profession of all shades of opinion turned to him for leadership. This was attested to by his election to the presidency of both the Southern Historical Association (1980) and the Social Science History Association.

In his scholarship, Alexander combined the best qualities of the social scientist and the humanist. His writings on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction are standard works in these fields. The work he coauthored with Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influences of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861-1865 (Nashville, 1972), received the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the SHA as the most distinguished book on southern history published during the biennium 1972-1973. His first book, Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville, 1950), was reprinted in 1968, and he wrote two additional book-length studies, Thomas A. R. Nelson of East Tennessee (Nashville, 1956) and Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Patterns in the United States House of Representatives, 1836-1860 (Nashville, 1967). Alexander's publications also included four sections of books and over twenty articles in scholarly journals.

Alexander was an active participant in professional organizations and an enthusiastic contributor in service to the institutions that employed him. He was active in state historical societies in four states and served on committees, on editorial boards, and as a program participant for the Organization of Amerian Historians, the American Historical Association, the Southern Historical Association, and the Social Science History Association.

The University of Missouri-Columbia in recognition of this service to the University and to the profession named him the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor in History from 1979 to 1982 and selected him for the Byler Distinguished Professor Award in 1985. During his career, Alexander received fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Institute of Southern History. Alexander retired at the end of the 1987-1988 academic year. He is survived by his wife of sixty-four years, Elise Alexander, three daughters, Wynne Guy, Elaine Gates, and Carol Gajek, and three grandchildren. [ARVARH E. STRICKLAND, University of Missouri-Columbia]

Malcolm LeBaron Call, who died March 22, 2006, at his home in Portland, Maine, was one of the most extraordinary and passionate university press editors of our time, an attentive and voracious reader of manuscripts who was utterly dedicated to every single book he put under contract. Malcolm was best known as a history editor--and of southern history in particular--but he could be just as much of an enthusiast for a work of folklore or politics, Roman law or literary biography, fiction or memoir.

He worked as an editor at the University of Massachusetts Press (1970-1977), the University of North Carolina Press (1977-1980), the University of Pennsylvania Press (1980-1983), and the University of Georgia Press (1983-2001), where he also served as director during the key years in the 1980s when what was once a modest regional press rose to prominence as a spirited, nationally significant publisher of southern history, radical politics, and works of serious literary merit. Born in Knowlton, Quebec, on November 19, 1937, Malcolm's early life included struts as a long-distance truck driver and as a member of the United States Air Force (he often recalled, with slight variations, sweating out the Bay of Pigs crisis in the belly of a military transport). He gained his B.A. in history at Colby College in 1965 and his M.A. in history at the University of Massachusetts, where he continued on into the Ph.D. program, working at a dissertation on Paul Robeson and the Peekskill Riots before abandoning it for his first publishing job--and true calling--as an editor of scholarly books.

A maverick and fearless publisher, Malcolm was drawn to maverick and fearless scholars and authors--if there was a scholarly applecart to be overturned, Malcolm was ready to put his publishing knowledge to work in providing the needed leverage. He was a radical at heart, entirely capable of appreciating feisty books from both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum and delighted to see them warring across adjacent catalog pages.

I worked with Malcolm for four years at the University of Georgia Press. Those four years were the most exhilarating and exhausting of my career--discussions begun in the office flowed seamlessly after hours to the bar across the street, often lasting until closing time. But those years were also the most formative of my values as a publisher. Since Malcolm's retirement from Georgia, he had dropped off the radar. But many of us in the university press community still thought about him often and swapped memories and stories (there are a lot of stories).

Malcolm was not much of a role model, but he was unfailingly a great inspiration. He continues to inspire many of us who knew him and learned from him. He is survived by two brothers and a sister; by his daughter Isabel Louise Mayer Call and his son Russell Asher Call; and by three ex-wives, Jean Brennan Call, Dariel Mayer, and Maggie Holtzberg. [DOUGLAS ARMATO, University of Minnesota Press]

Kermit L. Hall, a gifted scholar, administrator, and teacher, died tragically on August 13, 2006, at the age of sixty-one. While on vacation with his wife, Phyllis, in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Hall apparently suffered a heart attack while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. The official cause of death was drowning. He had a history of minor heart trouble.

A specialist in United States constitutional and legal history, Hall held academic positions at Vanderbilt University, Wayne State University, and the University of Florida. During his eleven years at Florida, Hall supervised graduate students and produced some of his most important scholarly work. Over the course of his career, he authored six books and edited or coedited twenty-two, including The Politics of Justice: Lower Federal Judicial Selection and the Second Party System, 1829-61 (Lincoln, Neb., 1979), A Comprehensive Bibliography of American Constitutional and Legal History, 1896-1979 (Millwood, N.Y., 1984), The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York, 1989), and the award-winning The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (1992; 2nd ed., New York, 2005). Much of his own scholarship and that of his graduate students focused on the American South, and he was the founding co-editor of Studies in the Legal History of the South, a book series for the University of Georgia Press.

In 1992 Hall began a rapid ascent in higher education administration that included appointments at the University of Tulsa, the Ohio State University, and North Carolina State University. He served as president of Utah State University from 2001 to 2004. In February 2005 he became the seventeenth president of the State University of New York at Albany, where he promptly scored points for canceling a lavish inauguration and creating a student scholarship fund with the $100,000 saved. During the 1990s he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the five-member Assassination Records Review Board, which reviewed and released documents pertaining to the death of President John F. Kennedy. In recent years, Hall assumed the role of public intellectual and frequently provided expert commentary to the national media about the U.S. Supreme Court.

A talented teacher and graduate seminar leader, Hall continued to teach throughout his administrative career. He was scheduled to offer a course at Albany this fall on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Intelligent, articulate, and demanding in the classroom, Hall always set high standards for his students, and he was a model of professionalism in all that he accomplished.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Hall was born August 31, 1944. He earned degrees in history from the University of Akron (B.A., 1966), Syracuse University (M.A., 1967), and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1972), as well as a Master of Studies in Law from Yale University (1980). He was a first-generation college student, a Vietnam-era U.S Army veteran, and an avid deep-sea fisherman. He is survived by his wile of thirty-six years and a sister. [TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER, Rhodes College]

Matthew Neil Hodgson, who directed the University of North Carolina Press for twenty-two years, died June 16, 2006, after a long illness. During his tenure as director, UNC Press books won many distinguished awards including three Bancroft prizes, a Francis Parkman prize, and the 1983 Pulitzer prize in history.

Hodgson came to UNC Press in 1970 after working for sixteen years as a college traveler with Appleton-Century-Crofts and thirteen years as college traveler, regional sales director, field editor, and then resident senior editor at Houghton Mifflin. From 1968 until 1970 he was on the staff of the University Press of Kentucky. He was a formidable presence in university press publishing for nearly three decades. Hodgson served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and was elected its president in 1978-1979.

In the late 1970s, along with Herbert S. Bailey Jr., then director of Princeton University Press, and Jack Goellner, then director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, Hodgson was instrumental in the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). He served seven terms as chairman of the AAUP's Government and Foundation Relations Committee and was a consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Higher Education and the Arts, the NEH, and the NHPRC.

Born in Washington, D.C., on June 28, 1926, and raised in Tennessee, Hodgson served in the Naval Reserve during World War II and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1949 with degrees in Latin and history. He also was founding editor of the university's undergraduate humor magazine, Tarnation. His career in publishing brought him back to Chapel Hill in 1970 to lead the UNC Press.

As director of the press he published a wide-ranging list of important scholarly and regional authors that included the acclaimed southern chef Bill Neal, whose 1985 book Southern Cooking brought famous food critic Craig Claiborne to Chapel Hill; PBS's (and Colonial Williamsburg's) woodwright, Roy Underhill; Howard E. Smither, who wrote the four-volume A History of the Oratorio; Annemarie Schimmel, author of The Mystical Dimensions of Islam; and the prize-winning Civil War historians Harry W. Pfanz and Gary W. Gallagher, among others.

Hodgson also published many award-winning reference works, including The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the first regional encyclopedia and the American Library Association's best reference book of 1989; North Carolina Architecture, which won the 1991 American Institute of Architects Citation for Excellence and which, in the words of a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review (on March 10, 1991), "comes closer than any work before it to being a model history of the architecture of an American state"; as well as the multivolume Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, which the American Reference Books Annual noted was unmatched "in comparable scope and quality" by any other state. Under Hodgson's direction, the press also published The Black Abolitionist Papers, a five-volume documentary edition that expanded the scholarly understanding of abolitionism in the U.S., Canada, and the British Isles.

When Hodgson retired in 1992, the Charlotte Observer noted that Hodgson's career as press director began "with a distinguished history and a $600,000 debt." At the end of his career, he had solidified the finances of UNC Press and reestablished its scholarly excellence. He left the press with a $4 million endowment and a Pulitzer prize in history, for The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, by Rhys Isaac. Along the way, the New York Times Book Review (on October 18, 1981) characterized UNC Press under Hodgson's leadership as "a publisher of national importance."

Hodgson's love of sporting clays and fly-fishing was legendary. Less well known were his superb fly-tying skills. They were written up in Sports Afield in a 1982 article by Jim Dean. Hodgson, a member of the Century Association, the New York club emphasizing the arts and letters, is survived by his widow, Patricia Hodgson of Chapel Hill; his son, Edward Telfair Hodgson of Greensboro, North Carolina; and his daughter, Laura Hodgson DeVivo, her husband, Matthew, and their two children, all of Raleigh. [KATE TORREY, University of North Carolina Press]