The discerning practice of history, research on the early modern European past (and more), and the JIH have all lost a towering presence. Theodore K. Rabb, our founding co-editor, suffered a fatal stroke in early January, just days after helping to make several formative editorial decisions. He gave us then, as he had for almost fifty years, the benefit of a profound and always forward-looking vision of historicism reinforced by a deep, practiced understanding of the historical profession as a whole. Not only will the JIH miss his wise guiding hand; his far-flung and now numerous close colleagues and mentees across the globe will, alas, forfeit the benefit of his encouragement, his skillful advice, and his ability to bring together for effective collaboration a broad range of inter- and multidisciplinary associates.
Ted and I founded the JIH in 1970, having both previously been young, protean professors at Harvard University. We shared a vision for the historical profession that has since been advanced in this journal and in our own rather dissimilar and distinctly separated scholarship. We were friends, but not close personal friends. Nonetheless, we remained extremely close professional colleagues, together refining and maturing our vision of interdisciplinarity in history and the cognate social sciences, sometimes even extending to the sciences and, in Ted’s case, deeply into fine arts and musicology. Every decision affecting the JIH was made together. I cannot imagine a better and more successful collaboration, or one that lasted so long and produced so much. Never in almost fifty years was there rancor. Occasionally, there may have been epistemological disagreements, but never to the point of upsetting our extremely integrated editorship of this journal (subsequently joined by Reed Ueda and Anne E. C. McCants). We together planned our editorial succession, soon to be achieved and announced.
This is not the place for a review of the accomplishments of our journal. But it is exactly the place to note that under our mutual direction, the JIH early pioneered studies of the application of quantification methods to historical problems, did the same for psychoanalytical studies of historical figures, welcomed contributions on population reconstitution and demographic history more broadly, published articles on domestic inventories and material culture, explored the best uses of American census data and immigration flows, and ventured into other fascinating areas somewhat farther afield.
This journal, under our joint direction and, again, enjoying concerted collaboration, organized a number of special conferences out of which came notable special issues: on global warming and climate change across history, on art and history, on the place of the opera in history (together with music and discs), on the origins and prevention of major wars, on population issues, on marriage and the family, and so on. Throughout all of this editorial analysis, promotion, forecasting, and the like, Ted—often with a puckish, wry, sense of occasion—kept up a very active teaching and advising life at Princeton and remained a busy, published scholar across several fields and a justifiably proud and devoted husband, father, and grandfather of talented offspring. Ted has sadly gone, but his legacy lives on in this journal because of his significant contributions to history writ large.
—R. I. R.
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As the newest member of the JIH editorial team, I knew Ted first and best as the author of a text that was significant for both my own graduate education and subsequent teaching. The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1976), which took a debate that began in the trenches of Marxist economic history and made it accessible to a wide variety of historians with a grounding in neither, was itself emblematic of the cause that Ted so forcefully advanced in the JIH. His goal was always to bring culture and economy together in such a way that the scholars who studied either could mutually understand the result. That work began with his first book publication, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), in which he ventured to address the old question of how English capital investments abroad differed from those of their continental peers together with what was then a very new methodology for historians, computer-assisted data analysis. His book hardly seems radical any longer, but it was a pioneering project in its time.
Not one to sit on his laurels, Ted continued to break new ground throughout his long and immensely productive career. Most recently, his attention had turned to the visual arts, as source material for both the study of history and the methodological contributions that visual analysis could make to the larger practice of historical inquiry. His collection of essays devoted to this subject—Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts—was published in 2018 by the Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship (sposs).
In Ted’s capacious intellectual house, the material world, scientific practice, political developments, and the visual arts were all welcome at the same table, as were the quantifiers and the storytellers. Indeed, they were expected to converse with each other in ways that were not only civil but also productive of new insights. They should also speak to a more general public, an audience that Ted never abandoned despite his deep erudition. His co-edited work with Byron Hollinshead, I Wish I’d Been There, Book Two: European History (New York, 2008), did its best to bring history to life for the many readers who eagerly sought its attention to historical detail but were also captivated by its lively style, and the relevance that it always sought to make clear. It was no accident that my first research submission went to the JIH; Ted’s work had held me spellbound by its prodigious and artful mixing of materials. It still does. His store of wisdom and his vision for the interdisciplinary historical enterprise will be sorely missed.
—A. E. C. M.