University of California: In Memoriam, March 1976
Clinton Newton Howard, History: Los Angeles
| 1902-1973 | |
| Professor Emeritus |
Clinton Newton Howard died August 28, 1973 after a long but determined struggle against Parkinson's disease. He leaves his wife Solvejg Nelson and two children, Clinton Nelson and Rio Cecily, all, like himself, professional historians.
Clinton Howard came to UCLA in January 1934, fresh from a doctorate in Anglo-American history at the University's Berkeley campus, where he had worked under Professors William A. Morris and Herbert E. Bolton. Those who knew him only in his later years, especially during his illness, will be interested to learn how dynamic, positive, and effective he was as a young teacher-scholar at the beginning of his career. Full of conviction and confidence, by his voice and stride alike he revealed a committed and inner-directed man, impatient with red tape and triviality, pettiness and opportunism. Yet he had humility as a scholar and believer--he was a convinced Anglican--and his integrity and humanity were inborn and inbred.
He was an Anglophile in the best sense. Born into the family of an Episcopalian rector, he grew up in Washington and Oregon and was graduated from the University of Oregon in 1925. He went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, delighting in it. His admiration for English life and institutions was great, but not uncritical. It stemmed from a consciousness of the English roots of American life and culture. He was interested in England itself, its success in constitutional government and its moderate and continuously evolving social and cultural life.
There were two periods in Howard's academic career. In the earlier one he was an extraordinarily forceful lecturer, a driving yet solicitous and helpful teacher. His lectures were superb and drew large enrollments. In keeping with his breadth of interest he took over the teaching of ancient history, the then rather small department having no specialist in that field. He later was to push to bring a specialist into the department to give it added strength and balance. In this period he produced all his published writings--some four articles on the British presence in West Florida in the 1760s and a monograph, his
In the second period his emphasis in teaching shifted to the graduate level, and a growing interest in England itself came to the front. From the dynamics of undergraduate lecturing he moved to mastery of the seminar, where he demanded, probed, stimulated, and drew out even the inarticulate student. He could be ruthless with shoddy work, yet considerate and encouraging of students experiencing the pressures of graduate study and self-doubt. The first member of the faculty to use the Clark Library in a regular and sustained way, he met his seminar in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century British history weekly at the Library, affording his students unusual opportunity to learn the use of research materials.
He did not neglect his own research. He had in the early period begun work, in collaboration with a UCLA colleague in political science, Thomas I. Cook, on the Whig state in eighteenth-century Britain and its seventeenth-century origins. His interest ramified subsequently to the influence of Britain's mercantile empire in the eighteenth century on the social structure at home with its economic and political arrangements and bearing on Whig supremacy. He focused on identification of English merchants in the Caribbean trade, their business and family connections, their movement into landed society, and their political connections, particularly with the Rockingham Whigs. Unfortunately, he had written only a few chapters before his illness slowed him down and then stopped his writing.
As with the Clark Library, so with the department and college: his concern for growth and breadth at UCLA led him to become one of the prime movers in establishing the Near Eastern Center and in bringing to the campus its first director, the distinguished late Professor Gustave von Grunebaum. Meanwhile, his devotion to the study of British history received recognition in the award of a Fulbright visiting professorship at the University of Nottingham in 1950-51, and his association with Oxford continued with honorary admission to membership in the Senior Common Room of Exeter College, his college at Oxford.
Like so many fine teachers, Clinton Howard's contribution and influence live on not so much in his writings as in what he did for the growth of UCLA and in the students he taught, especially his graduate students, whom he touched with an energizing spark and to whom he opened wide vistas of intellectual life.
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=hb9k4009c7&brand=calisphere
Title: 1976, University of California: In Memoriam
By: University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: March 1976
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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