University of California: In Memoriam, 1996

Edward Bradford Burns, History: Los Angeles

	1933-1995
	Professor Emeritus

Anyone who knew Brad Burns was surely struck by his enthusiasm. This was his most enduring and endearing quality and the one that he brought to bear on just about all he did. Whether teaching or pursuing research, administering programs or serving professional organizations, training graduate assistants or debating political issues, hunting for rare books or decorating his home with craftsman furniture, attending the opera or entertaining guests, or conversing with students, colleagues, and friends, his enthusiasm seemed boundless. He was a person who cared about what he was doing and about those with whom he interacted. His lectures and speeches, always well prepared and well crafted, displayed a passion too often lacking in academe today. He was effective in drawing students into his field of Latin American history and sought to rally others to his point of view. Perhaps because of the Iowan populist traditions from which he sprang, he remained a defender of the downtrodden of the world and did not shirk from what he saw as his political responsibility to speak out. He was indeed an engagC rather than an ivory-tower intellectual. Clearly, his professional and personal lives reflected the wide range of his interests and the balance of enthusiasms that they spawned.

Brad was a prolific writer and a magnetic speaker. His more than ten books, articles, chapters, prefaces, reviews, and opinion pieces, as well as his hundreds of oral presentations, were aimed at a variety of academic and public audiences. From his first book on Latin American history, The Unwritten Alliance: Rio-Branco and Brazilian-American Relations (1966), for which he received the Bolton Prize, to his last, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858 (1991), he tackled an unusual breadth of topics. While maintaining a general focus on Latin America, his primary concentration shifted over the years between

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Brazil and Central America, driven in part by the historical questions he hoped to fathom and in part by the dramatic impact of contemporary political events. He also explored the uses of film and photographs as historical documents. Repeatedly, however, he was attracted to such themes as nationalism, dependency, folk and popular culture, imperialism, and proverty. He also remained basically an intellectual historian, who approached his subjects, whether political, economic, or social, from that underlying point of view.

Brad's academic achievements were widely recognized in the United States by means of Carnegie, Rotary, NDEA, Cordell Hull, Ford, Rockefeller, Doherty, Fulbright, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation fellowships. He received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, a Hubert Herring Memorial Award from the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, and an Award for Distinguished Scholarly Reporting in a Non-Academic Periodical from the Latin American Studies Association, and was named an Honorary Associate of Immaculate Heart College Center and a Distinguished Visitor by Oberlin College.

Abroad, the Brazilian government conferred upon him the Order of Rio Branco in 1966, and he was elected one of only two corresponding members of the Institute Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in 1969. At times his polemical writings brought him further national recognition--even notoriety. Even before the publication of his book At War with Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia (1987), a brief article on the Sandinistas led to a public condemnation from President Reagan and an appearance on “Nightline,” thus giving him, as Brad himself put it, his very own “fifteen minutes of fame,” in the well-known phrase of Andy Warhol.

His institutional contributions were also prodigious. Brad enjoyed working hard and felt a strong commitment to program-building at UCLA and more broadly to the fields of history and Latin American studies. After completing his education (B.A., University of Iowa, 1954; M.A., Tulane University, 1955; Ph.D., Columbia University, 1964) and following two years of teaching at Rutgers University and SUNY at Buffalo, he came to the UCLA history department as an assistant professor in 1964. Other than a brief interlude at Columbia (1967-1969), he spent the remainder of his career at UCLA, retiring as a full professor in 1993. From the outset he was known as a gifted lecturer, and his courses grew steadily in popularity among undergraduate students, many of whom he inspired to major in history. His lower division surveys typically

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drew 300-400 students and his specialized course on Brazil about 200. At the graduate level, at least five students each year benefited from their apprenticeships as his teaching assistants, and by the summer of 1995 dozens had completed Ph.D. dissertations under his direction. His university committee service ranged from Chicano studies to the Film and Television Archive, but his participation in Latin American Center programs was as continuous as it was productive. From 1979 to 1983, he served as the first dean of the Honors Division in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. Off campus his tireless efforts to promote teaching and research in Latin American Studies and history were highlighted by his presidencies of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies in 1973-1974 and of the Pacific Coast branch of the American Historical Association in 1993-1994.

Brad remained involved with people and projects until the very end. His book Kinship with the Land: Regionalist Thought in Iowa, in 1894-1942, a history of his home state, was accepted for publication by the University of Iowa Press only in his final months and was issued in winter 1996. He also guided his last five graduate students through the completion of their dissertations in the spring and summer of 1995. In the fall, though very ill with terminal liver cancer, he was able to make one final trip--a Mississippi River steamboat excursion, accompanied solely by his 85-year-old mother, Wanda A. Schwandke Burns. As he had wished, Brad died peacefully at home--on December 19, 1995. He is survived by his mother; his sister, Karen Burns Kenny; and his longtime friend and companion, David Aguayo.

Always exuberant but seldom sentimental, Brad was a constant friend and colleague. He enriched the lives of those around him, yet he remained a private person. He was tolerant of the conflicting opinions of others though rarely swayed by them. He was a romantic, even to the point of being quixotic, but at the same time he remained coolheaded with a firm sense of immediate reality. A dreamer, he was very much his own man, cerebral and reserved, who undoubtedly nurtured other enthusiasms that were his alone. We shall miss him.

About this text
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0z09n6nn&brand=calisphere
Title: 1996, University of California: In Memoriam
By:  University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: 1996
Contributing Institution:  University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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