• Introduction
• Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles
• J. L. Bell, Independent Scholar
• Wayne Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Joshua Brown, Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Benjamin L. Carp, Tufts University
• Edward Countryman, Southern Methodist University
• Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
• Kevin Q. Doyle, Brandeis University
• Terry J. Fife, History Works, Inc.
• Mary Furner, University of California, Santa Barbara
• James Grossman, American Historical Association
• Ron Hoffman, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
• Frederick E. Hoxie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Mark H. Jones, Connecticut State Library
• Gary J. Kornblith, Oberlin College
• Allan Kulikoff, University of Georgia
• Patrick M. Leehey, Paul Revere House
• Ann M. Little, Colorado State University
• Ken Lockridge, University of Montana
• Staughton Lynd, Independent Scholar
• Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney, Australia
• Gregory Nobles, Georgia Tech
• Elaine Weber Pascu, Princeton University
• Sarah Pearsall, University of Cambridge
• William Pretzer, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution
• Mary Janzen Quinn
• Ray Raphael, Independent Scholar
• Andrew M. Schocket, Bowling Green State University
• David Waldstreicher, Temple University
• Tribute posted by Beacon Press

Alfred F. Young, 1925–2012

I knew Al briefly after his retirement, when I asked him to put me on the schedule for the early American seminar series at the Newberry Library in the winter of 1998, and then when I won a fellowship and was in residence there in the winter and spring of 1999. He was a wise and funny presence as a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry, and I was enormously grateful for his willingness to let me present at his seminar and to introduce me around.

At that time, Al had finished his brilliant and eminently teachable The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1999), and was at work on the book that became Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (2004). Cannily and courteously, he invited me and the other young feminist historians on fellowship at the Newberry that winter to read a chapter of his manuscript and advise him on his treatment of gender and the famous cross-dressing career of his subject Sampson. Kirsten Fischer, Amy Froide, and I met with him over a brown-bag lunch in a seminar room and advised him—the eminent senior scholar—on what he needed to read in order to bring his analysis of Sampson into dialogue with the gendered histories and queer interventions that had been published in the past decade. We were enormously flattered, but we also recognized that he recognized that we had something to teach him as people of another generation who were recently out of grad school. Not many men of his generation or of his interest in working men dared to write a book about an important woman, but that was what Al was all about. As I have said before: the truly great scholars never stop learning, and they embrace younger scholars to teach but also to learn from them. Al was one of the greats, and his wisdom and stubborn influence will be missed.

Ann M. Little, Colorado State University

Source: “Alfred F. Young, 1925–2012,” Historiann (blog), November 8, 2012, http://www.historiann.com/?s=Al+young. Published with permission.