Obituary.

Douglas Edward Leach, professor emeritus of history at Vanderbilt University, died at the age of eighty-three at his home in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 1, 2003. He had fought leukemia for 22 years. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Doug received a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Brown University and, following military service (1942-1946), the M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His account of wartime duty as a deck officer on a destroyer escort, Now Hear This: The Memoir of a Junior Naval Officer in the Great Pacific War (Kent, Ohio, 1987), earned him the John Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History.

After teaching at Bates College for six years, Doug joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1956. He would retire thirty years later. While at Vanderbilt, he was awarded Fulbright lectureships at the Universities of Liverpool (England) and Auckland (New Zealand) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship. During 1974-75, he served as resident director of Vanderbilt-in-England and taught at the University of Leeds. He later chaired Vanderbilt's Department of History (1979-1982). Doug was designated Harvey Branscomb Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt in 1981-82.

Doug Leach's scholarship focused on the American colonies, especially those in the North, and military and other interactions among colonials, Native Americans, and Britons. His books included Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War (New York, 1958); The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607-1763 (New York, 1966); Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763 (New York, 1973); and Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677-1763 (Chapel Hill, 1986). He also authored numerous articles. Doug is survived by his wife of fifty-three years, his daughter, and his son. [SAMUEL T. MCSEVENEY, Vanderbilt University]