In Memoriam

In Memoriam: Isaac Alteras (1937-2022)

 

QUEENS COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

It is with sadness that the History department announces the passing of emeritus Professor Isaac Alteras, who died recently after a long illness. Isaac was an esteemed member of our department and an internationally recognized historian of US and Israeli foreign policy. He joined the History program at Queens in 1967 as a lecturer and worked his way up to full Professor. He was also formerly director of Jewish Studies and active in the MALS program.

After getting his BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Isaac became a true product of CUNY. In 1965 he earned his MA at Queens with a thesis on Jewish physicians in Spain and southern France in the 13th and 14th centuries. He then transitioned to more recent history, writing a dissertation at the Graduate Center on post-World War I Germany and the Geneva disarmament conference. He was best known for his book Eisenhower and Israel: US-Israeli Relations, 1953-1960 (University of Florida Press, 1993). Over the years, many students passed through his courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Cold War, and other topics in modern Middle Eastern, Jewish, and European history. Isaac loved to talk current events and always brought a certain flair to our department. We will miss him.

Isaac was buried at a private ceremony in Elmont, NY. Condolences can be sent to his family at ialteras@aol.com

In Memoriam: Satadru Sen (1969-2018)

 

QUEENS COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

It is with a profound sense of loss that the Queens College history department remembers Professor Satadru Sen, who passed away on October 8, 2018. An expert in South Asian history, he joined our faculty in 2006. His scholarship was his passion; through it he sought to expose the inequities and hypocrisies wrought by colonial regimes in South Asia and in the Indian Ocean world. His research ranged from the institutionalization of discipline and punishment to the global celebrity of a cricketer-turned-politician and its implications for understanding the experiences of subjects in imperial contexts.

Sen’s five single-authored monographs include Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Oxford University Press, 2000); Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester University Press, 2005); Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1860-1945 (Anthem Press, 2005); Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders (Routledge, 2010); and Restoring the Nation to the World: Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Modern India (Routledge, 2015). In addition to these he also published two collections of essays and a co-edited volume as well as various scholarly articles and his blog.

We will dearly miss Satadru’s dedication to promising students, his penchant for activism of an intellectual stripe, and his sense of humor, however mordant.

He is survived by his wife Amanda, his daughters Mira and Leila, scores of fellow historians, and thousands of edified readers.

In Memoriam: Leo Hershkowitz

(1925-2017)

QUEENS COLLEGE PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY

Professor Hershkowitz passed away at the age of 92 after five decades of scholarship, teaching, and service to Queens College. His dedication and contributions to the history of New York City were recognized by his obituary in the New York Times.

Books by Leo Hershkowitz

In Memoriam: David Syrett (1939-2004)

QUEENS COLLEGE DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

In a lifetime of research, writing, and teaching, with 15 monographs (five published posthumously) and over 90 journal articles on American and British naval, maritime and military history, Professor Syrett is considered the most active author in naval history of his generation.

He approached historical scholarship as both a discipline and as a serious discourse about things that mattered. In his first article-length publication, “Town-meeting Politics in Massachusetts, 1776-1786”, William and Mary Quarterly, XXI/3 (1964), where he sought to explain the workings of Massachusetts political institutions, he concluded that this was largely based on the difference between form and actuality. On the one hand there was the concept of the town meeting in which most adult males were permitted to vote and questions were decided by a kind of rule that approached democracy; on the other hand, the town meeting as a device was neither better nor worse a form of government than the men who controlled it, and as he argued, almost always characterized by the willingness of its officials to break or ignore the rules by which they professed to live.   

His first book-length publication was Shipping and the American War (1970) –re-published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Press. As the only defeat suffered by Britain in a series of wars with France, which began with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and ended with the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1814, the American Revolutionary War was almost a unique experience.  David argued that it was a war that posed unprecedented strategic, administrative and logistical problems for Britain, despite its naval strength, in having to maintain and lead a great army and a large naval force miles away from home, given the logistics of the 18th century. David further delved into these issues in his following two monographs, The Royal Navy in American Waters (1989) and The Royal Navy in European Waters (1994). Assessing the importance of the Royal Navy’s failure to stop American blockade runners in allowing Yankee rebels easy access to European arms and munitions, Syrett  found that the problems confronting British naval power were much more complex than just blockading the American coast. Turning to politics and the human factor in his quest for an answer Syrett concluded that the military leaders, Admiral Lord Richard Howe and his brother General Sir William Howe, ultimately lacked the ruthlessness and determination necessary to fight a war of annihilation.

David went on to write a biography of Lord Howe (2007) where he analyzed Howe’s special relationship to Benjamin Franklin and his attempt in 1774 to negotiate an end to the constitutional deadlock between Britain and its American colonies.  In his attempt to find a compromise between “no taxation without representation” and “the overriding supremacy of Parliament,” Howe “showed at worst a great degree of political arrogance and at best a supreme confidence in the ability of two men of good will to work out any problem no matter how difficult” (39). Returning to the American Revolutionary War once again later in his career, David edited the private papers of another of its admirals, in The Rodney Papers: Selections from the Correspondence of Admiral Lord Rodney, vols. 1 & 2 (2005, 2007). Very different from Howe, who was liked by sailors and officers alike, Rodney was overbearing, avaricious and difficult, yet talented as well as an original thinker and one of the great admirals of the 18th century.

A consistent theme in David’s work was the impact of the political and administrative networks of British elite families on the military and naval conflicts of the 18th century. This is shown in The Lost War (1975), co-edited with Marion Balderston. The volume is a two-way correspondence between British officers and the political boss of the Tory party, the Earl of Denbigh, who in his desire to get reliable information set up what amounted to a private news gathering organization for naval, military and political events at the time of the American Revolution.  Intermixed with discussions about promotions –displaying the power of patronage and kinship among elite social networks– were first-hand accounts of some of the great events of the age, making Denbigh one of the best informed men in England.

Another important theme in David’s scholarship was how British state administration conducted successful maritime conflicts in the 18th century. In Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years War (2008), he challenged the traditional view of the British government as an irrational, incompetent, corrupt and negligent institution by revealing how an efficient naval and supplies administration ensured naval strategic mobility over both France and Spain, making the Seven Year War the most successful one in British history. As early as 1970, David had already edited the private papers on The Siege and Capture of Havana, part of the Seven Years War, published by the British Navy Records Society. With that volume he became the first scholar from America to publish in the Navy Records Society.  

An expert on both the British Navy during the American Revolution and the naval warfare of World War II, he became increasingly aware of the importance of reliable information and its timely use by different actors and arms of the state, as well as of the importance of a well-run state finance and fiscal system in allowing a navy to win or lose a war, whether this was in the 1700s or in the 1940s. As a specialist in both the 18th and 20th centuries, he related the logistics of war to institutional politics and the networks of power in an original manner: his work was anything but dull!

A research historian to his core, David turned to another important naval battle, the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. Unwilling to readily accept the mystique of Ultra –the cryptologic collections made available for the first time in the 1970s– for the battle of the Atlantic, David turned instead to an exhaustive research analysis by going through copious primary sources and thousands of decoded transcripts of communications between the German forces (over 49,000 messages sent from the German submarines to their HQ) that enabled the Allies to locate the U-boats and proceed to destroy them in The Defeat of the German U-Boats: The Battle of the Atlantic (South Carolina University Press, 1st ed. 1994; 2nd ed. 2010). He was able to document when and how governments on both sides of the Atlantic actually understood the value of such intelligence and coordinated in the best way and most timely fashion to make the best use of it. The result was a victory that turned the tide of war decidedly in favor of the Allies. David understood that getting information and using it were two different things and concentrated his research and analysis on this distinction. He followed his monograph with numerous articles on the Battle published in academic journals and with two volumes of edited documents, The Battle of the Atlantic and Signals Intelligence: U-Boat Situations and Trends, 1941-1945 (1998) and The Battle of the Atlantic and Signals Intelligence: U-Boat  Tracking papers, 1941-1947 (2002).

Ten years after David’s death, his only book-length study on army history, The Eyes of the Desert Rat: British Long-Range Reconnaissance Operations in the North African Desert, 1940-1943 was published in 2014 by Helion Press. Through meticulous research in primary sources over many years, for which David had almost a legendary reputation for persistence, this book analyzes how a relatively small number of dedicated men developed techniques for crossing the depths of ten unmapped and seemingly impassable great deserts of Egypt and Libya by motor vehicle. Considered a virtual primer on how to operate, survive and achieve victory in desert warfare, the book tells the epic story of the soldiers who fought in the British Army’s North African campaign of 1940-43 and for whom doing the extraordinary was commonplace.

For David three things were consistent in his life: his love for the sea, for historical research and for stating his conclusions, whether in a classroom or in print, in an accessible, succinct and direct manner.

His untimely death led his wife Professor Elena Frangakis-Syrett to the sad but necessary duty of ensuring the publication of five of his manuscripts; 10 years after her donation of David’s books to the College’s Rosenthal Library in 2007, she has taken on the task of adding to the Navy Records collection, used by scholars worldwide, to mark this anniversary.

Battle of the Nile, August 1798, by Whitcombe, from the collection of David Syrett

In Memoriam: Mark Simon

QUEENS COLLEGE ADJUNCT LECTURER

The History Department mourns the passing of Mark Simon, a historian of European and Asian societies, who died on August 5 after a brave struggle against brain cancer. At Queens College since 2008, Mark held the position of assistant adjunct professor of History where he taught courses including the History of Science, Islamic Civilizations, South Asia, and Modern Europe from 1815 to the Present. He was truly beloved by his students and was one of the most popular instructors in the department, winning the college-wide teaching prize and mentoring and personally helping many over the years. His intellectual brilliance not only allowed him to teach courses across a huge range of subjects, but to create new courses that had never been taught before, including Women in the History of Science and the History of Australia.

Mark grew up in Whitestone, Queens in the 1960s. After being awarded a Baccalaureate Degree in Liberal Arts at Queens College, he went on to earn a Master of Arts Degree in Modern European History from New York University and later attended doctoral courses in European and Asian History at the CUNY Graduate Center and Columbia University. Mark worked on Wall Street before leaving to devote himself full time to his true passion: teaching. Since 2002, Mark worked as an adjunct professor and lecturer at various colleges and universities located in and around New York City, including the College of Mount St. Vincent, St. John’s University, Wagner College, and SUNY Maritime College. He was also founder and CEO of the New York Tutor Company which offered tutoring services in New York City.

Mark Simon was a true and passionate historian who deeply impacted the department and utterly transformed the lives of hundreds of students. His passing has been devastating to all who were fortunate to know him and who were personally helped by a deep empathy that came out of his own personal struggles. He was an irreplaceable presence and a truly unique, kind, and remarkable colleague, friend, and teacher. He will be sorely missed by all.

A Mark Simon Scholarship has been created to honor the memory of Mark Simon by rewarding an academically successful sophomore or junior who has had to face significant difficulties (e,g. economic, medical, physical, political) in achieving academic success.

Completed applications should be e-mail to Professor Sarah Covington (sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu) by December 31, 2020.

The application can be downloaded here.

Donations for the Scholarship can be sent to the Queens College Foundation, earmarked for Account # 36033

In Memoriam: Jon Peterson (1935-2023)

The History Department mourns the passing of our colleague Professor Jon Peterson, who died of cancer on July 1. Jon retired from Queens in 2005 after a nearly forty-year career. He was a specialist in US urban history, best known for his award-winning book The Birth of City Planning in the United States 1840-1917 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He was also a beloved teacher whose courses included the history of New York City and the history of the borough of Queens. Born in Ohio, Jon came to Queens College in 1966 after earning a BA at Swarthmore College, an MA at Ohio State, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. At Queens, he was a key member of the History department who served as chair from 1991 and 1995, as well as many other committees. He also performed an unsung but vital service to the college during the renovation of Powdermaker Hall in the early 2000s. When the original blueprints called for a more corporate layout, Jon applied his architectural expertise and, as former chair Frank Warren put it, “in his quiet and efficient way” humanized the plans to make them more academically friendly. That sense of humaneness and decency is how those of us who knew him will remember Jon.

In Memoriam: John M. O’Brien

Professor John O’Brien received his PhD from the University of Southern California. He teaches courses in ancient and medieval European history. He is the author of Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy (Routledge, 1994) and numerous articles in scholarly journals on social and religious history. He has published on Jews and heretics in medieval Europe and has written for the Encyclopedia Judaica. Professor O’Brien has been the recipient of three Presidential Awards for Excellence in Teaching at Queens College and has received an award from the National Conference on Christians and Jews for his lectures on Antisemitism.