Obituaries. (Historical News and Notices).

Public historian Jerry W. DeVine passed away on December 13, 2001. Jerry grew up in Alabama and attended Jacksonville State College, where he received his B.A. in secondary education and M.A. in history. For ten years he taught in various public schools in Alabama and Georgia before entering the doctoral program at Auburn University, where he studied under J. Wayne Flynt. Jerry taught history at several colleges over the years, including Tuskegee Institute (1978-79), Albany State College (1990-94), and Darton College (2001). But it was in the region's museums devoted to agricultural history that Jerry DeVine made his mark, serving the Georgia Agrirama in Tifton, Georgia; the Westville Museum in Lumpkin, Georgia; and the Alabama Agricultural Museum Board in Dothan, Alabama.

Jerry was particularly adept at researching the details of the agricultural economy and social development of the Georgia and Alabama wiregrass region, and he shared some of his results through articles in the Journal of Southwest Georgia History and the Dictionary of Georgia Biography and also presented papers at a number of conferences. While he was executive director of Thronateeska Heritage Foundation, Jerry edited a volume of the Journal of Southwest Georgia History and served on its editorial board for a decade (1989-99). But the most important venue for Jerry was the historical museum. As a professionally trained historian, Jerry brought high standards to facilities in south Georgia and Alabama and improved the quality of history that the public found at these institutions. A public historian who shared his insights about the past with a wide variety of audiences in the Southeast, Jerry DeVine will be missed by his colleagues, his students, and the greater public. [LEE W. FORMWALT, Organization of American Historians]

Francis Bullitt Lowry (always "Chuck" to his friends and colleagues), professor at the University of North Texas, died at the age of 65 on January 17, 2002, at Denton, Texas. A native of Kentucky, Dr. Lowry received his B.A. from Transylvania University in Lexington. He earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Duke University. He was an assistant professor at Converse College from 1960 to 1964 before joining the University of North Texas faculty as an associate professor in 1964. Dr. Lowry was a specialist on the 1918 Armistice that ended World War I, as well as on twentieth-century European military history. He was also very active in the direction of graduate students. During his thirty-seven years at the University of North Texas, he directed forty-two M.A. theses and fourteen Ph.D. dissertations. Dr. Lowry's books included Armistice 1918 (Kent, Ohio, 1996) and The Causes and Consequences of World War I (Taipei, Taiwan, 1996). He was a committed member of Denton County's various historical preservation groups and wrote A Brief History of Denton County, Texas (Denton, Tex., 1976). At the time of his death, he was serving as the European History Section's representative on the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association.