Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Halsted, John

John Burt Halsted, the Winkley Professor of History emeritus, died on Wednesday, February 25th, 2015, almost two decades after retiring from active service at the College.

He was born on September 17, 1926, the son of Henry M. Halsted, an American businessman who was posted in Antwerp, Belgium.  Determined to ensure that John would be a “natural born citizen of the U.S.” and uncertain about exactly what that entailed, John’s mother, Katherine Holmes Halsted, had the birthing bed draped with an American flag and its legs firmly planted in containers of soil brought from New Jersey. The preparations were unnecessary but tell us about the high ambitions that greeted John’s arrival. 

The Halsteds stayed in Antwerp until John was five when his father took the family back to the United States and a series of new homes—in Washington, D.C., Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Englewood, New Jersey.  John attended the Deerfield Academy and the Dwight-Englewood School, followed by Wesleyan University, where his studies were interrupted by service as a communications officer in the Navy. John returned to Wesleyan following his discharge from the Navy and graduated in 1948 with the highest honors in history and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.  After completing a master’s degree at Wesleyan the following year, John entered the graduate program in history at Columbia University. 

John had acquired a taste for nineteenth-century literature and political philosophy while at Wesleyan, and Columbia was a logical place to extend his studies.  The University lived and breathed ideas, had an undergraduate curriculum organized around their history, and was home to such wide-ranging thinkers as Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Hofstadter.  There was probably no better place to study intellectual history.  John concentrated on nineteenth-century Britain and France, completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the social and political views of the English essayist, Walter Bagehot, in 1954.

John began teaching well before completing his thesis, spurred on, perhaps, by his marriage in 1949 to Betty Nilsen, the lovely woman who would be his life-long companion.  In 1950, only a year after entering the graduate program at Columbia, John took a full-time instructorship at the Stevens Institute of Technology, just across the Hudson from New York City. There, John taught young engineers history and literature as well as English composition.  After two years in this position, John accepted an instructorship at Amherst. 

The record of John’s teaching during the next forty-five years traces the history of Amherst’s curriculum.  Although John was posted to the History Department, his primary duty was to assist in the large general education courses in the humanities and history that were required of all students under the “new” or Kennedy curriculum. He did well enough under this system to gain tenure in 1960 but did not look back on the era with enthusiasm.  He was skeptical about the educative value of compulsion and unsympathetic to the design of the general education courses in history. Unlike their counterparts in English and Science, History 1 and 2 were didactic rather than exploratory. John wanted to join his students in defining and asking good questions and not simply convey fixed bodies of information.  The short-lived “Problems of Inquiry” curriculum of the late 1960s and early 70s was more to John’s taste, as were the various first-year seminars that in turn succeeded it. To each of these programs, John contributed good and sturdy courses.

Perhaps the most striking feature of John’s teaching was how much of it was collaborative, even after the large general education courses passed away.  Nearly all of the members of the History Department active between the 1950s and 1980s taught with John on one or more occasions, often in various versions of the Department’s “Introduction to History” class. But he also taught with at least a dozen faculty members from other disciplines, both in freshman seminars and in upper-level colloquia.  John enjoyed working with others, liked to learn new things, and took joy in discussing books and ideas with colleagues, old and young. 

Collaborating with John was a pleasure.  He drew out the best in his coworkers—holding back when he might easily have dominated, gently steering conversation along productive lines, and showing enthusiasm for ideas that may have been new to his colleagues but which were surely old hat to him. He loved literature and wove novels and poems into most of his history classes.  He was well-read in the philosophical and political writings of the nineteenth century but also ventured into works on economics and biology.  John enjoyed crossing borders and appreciated thinkers who did so. Perhaps his favorite class was a seminar built around the writings of Alexander de Tocqueville.  Tocqueville’s liberal politics and lucid prose appealed to John, as did his deep insights into the interrelatedness of events, but perhaps even more to his liking was Tocqueville’s discerning distinctions among the interests and values of his subjects. John himself was much more the splitter than the lumper.  He was drawn to the work of teasing out differences and took delight in helping others appreciate the varieties and valences of concepts such as tolerance, liberalism, and evolution. 

John’s scholarship reflected his teaching.  He was principally concerned with placing better resources into the hands of historians.  To this end, he edited three valuable collections: Romanticism: Problems in Definition, Explanation and Evaluation, a volume in the well-respected D.C. Heath series on “Problems in European Civilization: ” Romanticism: A Collection of Documents, which appeared in the Harper & Row series, “A Documentary History of Western Civilization;” and December 2, 1851: Contemporary Writings on the Coup d’État of Louis Napoleon, published by Doubleday/Anchor. 

The Amherst that greeted John when he arrived in the fall of 1952 was in many respects still of the nineteenth century.  In an interview with the late Doug Wilson, John recounted how surprised he and Betty were to find visiting cards awaiting them upon their arrival in town.  He and other faculty were still expected to deliver eight-minute talks at the College’s mandatory chapel services and to gather for monthly dinners at the Faculty Club.  Much of this was quaint; some of it helped build a sense of community.  The College, however, was also paternalistic and occasionally vicious.  President King had expected faculty members to seek his advice before embarking on a lengthy trip or a new marriage. Powerful barons on the faculty expected deference from junior colleagues. Tenure was an utterly mysterious process. Antisemitism blighted hiring decisions and a full range of other prejudices could be found not far beneath the College’s idyllic surface.

John, who both studied the idea of toleration and applied it in his life, was a member of that post-war generation that gradually brought Amherst into the twentieth century--in part through the formal process of faculty legislation, but more often by setting examples of civility and good citizenship.  His influence was felt most strongly within the History Department, where he did much to heal what had been a badly fractured faculty. John exemplified reasonableness in meetings and was a generous mentor to untenured colleagues long before the College acknowledged the need for such a role. In recognition of John’s commitment to our students and the comity that he helped bring to the History Department, a student reading room was named in his honor upon John’s retirement. 

John’s influence on the College may also be seen in the durability of the courses that he helped develop for our first-year seminar program.  In 1978, following the adoption of the Introduction to Liberal Studies proposal for freshman year, John sat down with two biologists to work out the syllabus for a course on the history of evolutionary thought. The particulars of that course, “Evolution and Intellectual Revolution,” have themselves evolved over the decades, but the basic design remains very close to that which John and his collaborators worked out. Since the class was first taught, it has enrolled thirty present and former members of our faculty as instructors and served as an introduction to Amherst for many hundreds of first-year students.  After helping to launch “Ev and Rev,” John turned his attention to another first-year seminar that has remained a perennial in our offerings, “Romanticism and the Enlightenment.” As in all of his teaching, John’s goal was to encourage exploration unfettered by disciplinary boundaries and to stimulate doubt.  These inclinations made him a master of the seminar and a favorite thesis advisor among history majors, scores of whom he helped guide to honors degrees.

John’s nickname among his fraternity brothers at Wesleyan was “the Duke,” and it is easy to see why.  A bit formal and reserved among strangers, John exemplified generosity and good humor among friends and co-workers.  He gave freely of his time and attention, was courtly in his manners, and was quick to appreciate irony, not least when the joke was on him.  “Cheers” is how he often signed his letters. Coming from John, the word sounded entirely authentic. Cheers to you, John.

Respectfully submitted,   

Frank Couvares    
John Servos (chair)    
Patrick Williamson