Remembering David Kyvig
11 August 2015 – Elizabeth Monroe
David Kyvig. Photo credit: The Public Historian
He was tall–but not intimidating.
He was funny–sometimes in the “bring down the house” style; sometimes just for chuckles.
He was balding–and joked about it.
He was a hard worker–which prompted others to match the pace.
He was a well-known public historian–with many publications.
He was a well-known constitutional historian–with many publications.
He always provided timely responses–for support letters, papers, committee work, articles, books.
He was a model collaborator.
He had many, many friends.
And in early March 1990 he became “Chair” (later President) of the National Council on Public History for one year, which he continued to remind us was actually 14 months.
As Chair/President, he led NCPH through a major revision of its by-laws, the resettling of the Executive Secretariat (later Executive Offices) at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) in Indianapolis, a thoroughly researched (although unsuccessful at the time) application for membership in the American Council of Learned Societies that taught us a lot about who we were, a review of NCPH’s financial position, the debut of “Public History Today” (a 33-minute video), the release of a new “Guide to Graduate Programs in Public History,” and a memorable annual meeting in Toledo hosted by Diane Britton of the University of Toledo.
Near the end of his last President’s Report in Public History News (Spring 1991, pp. 4-5) David wrote:
The acceptance of responsibility to and for one’s profession is, I believe, a mark of true and mature professionalism. Taking up professional duties makes a statement: ‘This is important in my career, in my life, in my set of values; and therefore, this is where I will invest my resources and expend my energies.’ Fortunately, as those who have shouldered the burden know, with the duties come commensurate rewards. A sense of satisfaction is gained from having participated in something larger than yourself, and something with an impact, perhaps unseen, on many lives, something that raises an individual’s efforts from the category of a job to that of a contribution to the community or society.
David Kyvig’s death last month was a loss to history scholarship, to public and federal history, and to his many friends and colleagues, for whom he was a model of amicability, civility, and wit. His influential Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the US Constitution 1976-1995 won the Bancroft Prize in 1997, but his research interests extended well beyond the fields of constitutional and political history. Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You, which he co-authored with Myron Marty, went through three editions and continues to serve as a much-appreciated guide for several generations of researchers in local history. His interest in federal history, which began with an undergraduate internship in the office of Michigan Senator Philip Hart, was followed by a postdoctoral year at the Office of Presidential Libraries in the National Archives and in 2004-05 by a senior fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. After retiring from a Distinguished Research Professorship at Northern Illinois University, David moved to Washington, DC, where, in addition to his continued research, he served as an officer of the American Historical Association’s National History Center.
Unfailingly generous and kind, David will be missed by the many historians fortunate to have known and worked with him.
Please share your thoughts and reminiscences of David Kyvig below using the comments feature. Remarks posted by September 1 will be collected and shared with his family in advance of a planned, private memorial.
~ Elizabeth Monroe, with contributions by Arnita Jones
I assigned Nearby History to my digital history students, emphasizing that historical presentation using digital tools still relies on the resources you find locally. The book, and the message, were well-received. I’m sure that David’s many contributions will live on through generations of students and public historians.
I don’t remember how I first met David, somewhere in the early 1980s, I expect. Certainly we worked together through NCPH, as he was chair/president two years after me.
It must have been soon after we met that he asked me to do one of the sequel volumes for Nearby History to be called Houses and Homes: Exploring Their History, which came out in 1987 through AASLH with Emory Kemp, Dolores Fleming, and Ruth Ann Overbeck as co-authors. Nearby History was already so important a contribution to the literature that I was honored to be asked. I think it is a tribute to David’s and Mike Marty’s vision for the series and editorial guidance throughout the publication process that Houses and Homes, completed long before we knew how to do research on the Internet, is still in print. Dolores and Ruth Ann have since passed away, but I know Emory joins me in expressing sympathy to David’s family.
Then, as acquisitions editor for Krieger Publishing to acquire public history books, I worked with him as the Nearby History series moved to Krieger.
At a much later point, David must have been an acquisitions editor himself and asked about my dissertation, suggesting I consider revising it for publication years after it was completed. He had very helpful and timely comments on the manuscript, but it was not a project I wanted to take on then or since.
I will miss seeing him, literally standing out in the crowd, at conferences but just learned that he will indeed live on as he now has a Wikipedia entry. What better legacy could a historian wish to have other than a bio in Wikipedia complete with footnotes? But today (August 12) the entry is marked as a “stub” or “too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject.” Can one provide that coverage for a person with such a varied career?
Meanwhile at the next meeting of the NCPH Council of Past Presidents, we should raise a glass to our colleague who was so focused on prohibition!
In Memoriam David E. Kyvig by Myron A. Marty
David Kyvig’s sudden death several months ago dealt a stunning blow to his family, particularly his wife Christine, a distinguished scholarly partner, and countless friends and colleagues. For me it was a profound personal and professional loss. David had a greater influence on my life and work than anyone except members of my immediate family. I respected and admired him and felt a deep kinship with him.
While David was a consummate master of ideas and words, “the largest part of his power,” –to draw upon a line in Emerson’s essay on character, “was latent.” This, wrote Emerson, is what we call Character—“a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.” David’s presence, that is to say, his character, was always commanding. His physical stature helped make him so, but his many and diverse intellectual gifts and social graces made him the more so. Commanding indeed.
My collaboration with David began 40 years ago, when a publisher to whom we had separately presented proposals for booklets designed to guide our students in researching and writing their families’ histories asked us to critique each others’ proposals. Our ideas and plans meshed almost perfectly. At the OAH meeting in 1976 we agreed to work together on a manuscript that became Your Family History: A Handbook for Research and Writing. Confirming our commitment to collaborate came when we discovered that both of us were reading and absorbing Jacques Barzun’s recently published treatise on writing, Simple and Direct.
It did not take me to long to discover my younger partner’s genius, displayed by his skills as a researcher and his exemplary writing style. He had a sensitive grasp of our intended readers’ needs in their efforts to learn.
While our first book progressed through the sale of more than 30,000 copies, we conceived plans for a comprehensive guide for researching and writing local history, which we called nearby history. In the summer of 1979 we shared a Newberry Library fellowship and an apartment in Chicago that made long days of working together possible—and much fun. By then I knew that David, twelve years my junior, was a singular figure in the company of historians.
Most of our collaboration after our Newberry summer was done through letters and phone calls, and later through e-mails–more than 500 of such communications through the years. In 1980-81, however, we had a chance for face-to-face work: I was on the staff at NEH and David was on a sabbatical leave in Washington, D.C., from the University of Akron. David joined our family on Federal holidays and occasional weekends as we met to ensure that we were progressing on course, responding appropriately to critiques of more than a dozen manuscript readers, and giving our jointly written manuscript finishing touches.
In 1982, AASLH published the result of our efforts: Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You. A second edition, under a Rowman and Littlefield imprint appeared in 2000 and a third in 2010. The AASLH, the force behind all the editions, is hoping for a fourth, and David was complicit in that hope. I have committed whatever energy I have left to help accomplish this, working with a new third author. Memories of work with David Kyvig compel me to do this.
This is my story. I look forward to reading the stories of others whose lives were touched by this remarkable man.
David’s passing reminds me of how important the support of academic historians was to public history during the formative years when a smallish cadre embarked on what many considered to be a fool’s errand: establishing an academic field to represent the various arenas of historical practice outside formal educational institutions. Not only did David contribute substantially to the development of NCPH, but, along with Myron Marty and Carol Kammen, helped us all understand and embrace the close relationship between local history and public history.
David began his teaching career at the University of Akron in September 1971. He was one of a dozen new faculty hired in a multi-year expansion to build History into a PhD granting department. Even then I recall thinking how young they all seemed. I had graduated from college, served four years in the Navy, and was working a boring job in Akron when I decided to take graduate courses in history for intellectual stimulation. Those new faculty provided the intellectual vitality I was seeking, and David most memorably. I was assigned to be his graduate teaching assistant during his first year of teaching, and my association with him fostered the thought that his just might a rewarding career. His openness to new ideas, his non-exclusiveness, and his perspective on historical scale (family, local, national and international), opened my eyes to a dynamic understanding of “history.” That year he was preparing his lectures just before class, but they were still brilliant. The students loved him as a person and as a teacher because he was so approachable, was interested in them, and cared about what he was doing. He never lost that sometimes improbable combination of brilliance and empathy. I received the Ph.D. in 1974 and began my own teaching career, first at the University of Delaware and then West Virginia University, but over the next three decades I saw David at conferences. He was easy to spot, as has been mentioned, in the mass of bobbing heads in the book exhibit hall. The years rolled by, but those essential Kyvig personality characteristics that people loved about him never changed. From the first to the last he was a big man, with a warm heart, and towering intellect. Notwithstanding his remarkable success as a professional, his memory will endure among his many friends because of who he was as a human being.
Ronald L. Lewis
Professor of History Emeritus
West Virginia University