Historically Speaking

Like so many others, I was sad to hear that Bertram Wyatt-Brown passed away on November 5, 2012, in Baltimore where he lived with his wife Anne.

Bert was an accomplished writer, historian, mentor, and leader of the historical profession.

He served as president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1994), St. George Tucker Society (1998–99), and Southern Historical Association (2000–2001). He was a longtime supporter of the Historical Society and regularly wrote for Historically Speaking.

He was the author of over 100 scholarly articles and essays and wrote several acclaimed books. His Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Novelist Walker Percy called the book “A remarkable achievement—a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past.” Harvard historian David Herbert Donald wrote: “Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South, Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South.”

In addition Bert published books on southern literary history, slavery and abolitionism, southern culture, and life in antebellum America.

True to form, Bert just completed his last book not long before his passing. I saw him and Anne in September and he was thrilled to have completed the project. We were emailing back and forth last week about the images to accompany the text. Titled A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation at Home and Abroad, it will soon be published by the University of Virginia Press.

Bert taught and mentored numerous students at the University of Florida, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and Case Western Reserve University.

As one of his many graduate students, I can attest to his generous, wonderful spirit. With funds from the Milbauer Chair he filled at the University of Florida, Bert would help students attend conferences. He provided research money to students as well. Many a dissertation was sped along by his help and keen interest. Bert was a great prose stylist, more than happy to help his charges eliminate passive voice, dangling particles, unidentified antecedents, and more. He was tireless in making big-picture, content edits to dissertations, conference, papers, and articles. “Write your dissertation as if it were a book,” I recall him saying. (I can’t imagine that my first book would have ever seen the light of day without his heroic reading of so many of my bad drafts.) Even after Bert retired he continued to meet with new graduate students at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

Those who studied with him or knew him as a colleague or friend will deeply miss his sense of humor, his joy for living, dinners and visits with him and Anne, and so much more.

He is survived by his wife Anne, a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren.

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Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Photo by Randall Stephens.

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