MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-08-12 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Eugene Weber died
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On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 03:51:37PM -0400, Ruben Safir wrote:
> Years ago there was aPBS show done with Eugene Weber and the Met called
> Western Civilization which was entirely brillant. Somehow this escaped
> me until now that he died last year.
>
> Its a real loss.
>
> Ruben
>
>
Just to make this clearer --- Read this to the end and look at the
links
Obituary: Eugen Weber, Historian and Former Dean of UCLA’s College
of Letters and Science
By
Stuart Wolpert
| 5/18/2007 3:44:30 PM
Eugen Weber
Eugen Weber, an internationally renowned historian and former dean of
UCLA's College of Letters and Science, died Thursday. He was 82.
A member of UCLA's faculty since 1956 and a prolific author, Weber wrote
about French culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries,
anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust, fascism, intellectual
history, and many other subjects. He served as dean from 1977 to 1982
and held a UCLA endowed chair in modern European history, which is now
named for him.
"Eugen Weber was a brilliant scholar with an elegant writing style,
extremely wide-ranging interests and a wonderful sense of humor," said
UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams. "He was a stimulating teacher of
Western civilization and European history and an exceptional leader of
our College of Letters and Science. Eugen was one of UCLA's giants."
"I consider Eugen Weber one of the world's great historians," said
Patricia O'Brien, executive dean of the UCLA College of Letters and
Science. "He did it all. He transformed the writing of modern French
history through his various works and his pathbreaking book on the
French peasantry. He had a distinguished career as an administrator who
then returned to his research and teaching with renewed passion. He was
tireless, not least of all in his generosity to his colleagues. Eugen
was a model of a passionately committed scholar and teacher and a superb
administrator."
Weber, whose books and articles have been translated into more than half
a dozen languages, earned many accolades for his scholarship, including
membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim
Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright
Program.
He was regarded by colleagues and students as a superb teacher of
Western civilization and European history. His 1,300-page "Modern
History of Europe," a widely used Western civilization textbook that
combines cultural, intellectual and political history, is "a phenomenal
job of synthesis and interpretation that reflects Eugen's wide and deep
learning," Weber's former history colleague, the late Hans Rogger, once
said. "It is the most lively, interesting and challenging text that
generations of students are likely to see."
Weber's scholarship included the lives of common people and the
commonplace aspects of life, including the small towns of the 19th
century.
"A lot of life," Weber said, "is about things so trivial we do not
bother to record them — only sometimes to note their absence, as
with manners."
Weber was born in Romania and emigrated to England as a teenager. He was
educated at Cambridge University and served as an officer in the British
Army during World War II.
His curiosity about rural France was aroused during a trip to Bordeaux,
a city in southwest France, in the 1960s.
"I thought I knew France when I lived in Paris," Weber said, "but in
Bordeaux, I looked around me and realized there was another France. I
realized there were a lot of Frances."
Weber's study of 19th-century rural France led to his 1976 book,
"Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France,
1870–1914," for which he was awarded American and French prizes. In
this book, Weber revised accepted notions about French nationalism by
demonstrating that nationhood and a sense of French identity came to
France much later than historians had believed, and much more slowly and
painfully.
"Building a French nation was a long struggle pitting the dominant
culture of Paris against a people of cultural, linguistic and regional
diversity," Weber said. "Well into the third quarter of the 19th
century, much of rural France communicated very nicely in dialects and
languages that had little or nothing to do with the classical tongue of
Voltaire and Charles de Gaulle."
Studying life in 19th-century rural France was difficult because the
peasants of that age were illiterate and did not leave the kinds of
documents that historians typically study. Weber relied on the only
sources of information available — proverbs, songs and records of
court proceedings — to learn about social and family relations,
religious practices, and other activities and customs of the
townspeople.
Weber found that anything having to do with "justices" was a cause of
fear to French peasants, who were overwhelmed by official documents and
for whom the legal costs of settling an inheritance, when there was one,
might amount to three-fourths of the estate. The peasants' view of the
law was contained in evening prayers, which included the line, "Deliver
us from all evil and from justice," and the proverb, "Process servers
are rascals, lawyers are lickspittles, attorneys are thieves."
In a chapter on family life, Weber wrote that marriage in rural France
was above all a business arrangement based on the bride's dowry.
"The families had the last word, and the first too, most often," he
said. "One married a family, not a woman or a man, and the families did
the marrying … If marrying into a family one knew could be an ordeal,
then marrying a stranger was decidedly worse. Where each community was a
law to itself, in-laws unfamiliar with its customs, ways and turns of
speech felt and were made to feel even more like strangers."
Weber's other books included "Varieties of Fascism," "France, Fin de
Siècle," "The Hollow Years" and "Apocalypses."
Weber said he wrote for his wife, Jacqueline, to whom he was married for
nearly 57 years and who survives him.
"She is cultivated and curious and has taste, but she is not a
specialist," he said. "Sometimes we have terrific fights. I say, 'How
can you not understand this? It's clear,' and she says, 'It is not
clear, it is convoluted.' Then I rewrite, and it's an improvement."
Of the many subjects on which Weber wrote, the one he returned to most
was France between 1870 and 1914.
"The more you know about a period, the more you want to know about it,"
he said. "I'm at home in this period. I keep going back home."
-UCLA-
http://video.google.com/s/PefnNldGf5U/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=http://v6.lscache1.googlevideo.com/videoplayback%3Fid%3D9c54fafd6289f354%26itag%3D5%26begin%3D0%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1250146192%26sparams%3Dip,ipbits,expire,id,itag%26signature%3D4BA62AC55C79EC7C45A860CC241C3CEACCD9E6D7.5B73CA491E1AB0503DCDE35E0CE357161E5851A0%26key%3Dck1&thumbnailUrl=http://0.gvt0.com/ThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dvss%26contentid%3D9c54fafd6289f354%26offsetms%3D15000%26itag%3Dw160%26hl%3Den%26sigh%3DRZh6ZOdmHXEoq6zW2RaDG8h0cGc&docid=297626140016110810&hl=en&autoplay=1&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=object_player_1
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=cD4&q=Eugene%20Weber%20Obituary&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#q=Eugene+Weber+&hl=en&emb=0&client=firefox-a
http://www.learner.org/resources/series58.html
This man was a compasionate, brighten, teacher who I aspire to be
like...
Ruben
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