Richard S. Dunn (1928-2022)

I wrote almost two years ago about John M. Murrin, one of my graduate school professors, and now sadly I must do the same for Richard S. Dunn, my undergraduate advisor at the University of Pennsylvania, who died yesterday. I believe I first met Richard in 1989, before my junior year. Richard (Rick) Beeman, for whom I worked as a research assistant the previous academic year (and for whom I would continue to work until I graduated), was off to a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he suggested that I take a course with Richard. I had no idea who Richard was. Rick taught the first half of the U.S. survey course (which is where I first met him in the fall of 1987), and he was well-known to undergraduate history majors for that, as well as for his bow ties and his bubbly and engaging personality. Richard appeared to be the opposite. At the time, he looked exactly as he did in this photo: serious and perhaps somewhat stern and severe-looking, with a resemblance one couldn't help but think to the Winthrop family (of whom he wrote). He taught a course on U.S. colonial history from time-to-time, and had made a point of advising (and publishing) undergraduate research papers from seminars he led, but I had missed all that in my first two years. Rick said that Richard was significantly underappreciated by undergraduates (who were more likely to take a course covering the colonial period from the hipper Michael Zuckerman), and he was right. I remember knocking on Richard's office door one day and asking him whether he would supervise an independent reading course with me (since he wasn't teaching his colonial course that year). Perhaps Rick told him I was coming. Perhaps Richard was astonished by my audacity. Perhaps both. Whatever it was, he said yes.

So there I was in the fall of 1989, one of ten thousand undergraduates and countless history majors at a major research university, meeting every week or two with one of the preeminent historians of seventeenth-century America, just the two of us in a high-ceilinged office, off a side-corridor on the third floor of College Hall. I still remember the first book he assigned - Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost, which completely blew my mind (and which only last month I purchased for one of my sons). Next up was James B. Hedges's The Browns of Providence Plantations. And then I'm prettry sure it was Richard's own Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 and maybe also Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. I imagine there was something about Pennsylvania too, as Richard (with his wife Mary Maples Dunn) had recently finished editing the papers of William Penn. Like many twenty-year olds, I didn't know enough to realize or appreciate what I had stumbled into. But I wasn't completely clueless, and wanting to have the guidance of both Richards, I asked Richard to be my major adviser. He said yes again, even though my main interests were in the late eigteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I took just that one course with him, and yet he wrote a letter for my grad school applications. Later when I was at Princeton, Richard offered me an office and a visiting title at what was then known as the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now the McNeil Center) so that I could have a research home in Philadelphia where I was living with my future wife.

For me, Richard's distinguishing features - leaving aside his scholarship and brilliance and much else - were his generosity, modesty, and openness to others. He used his elevated position to promote not himself but the careers of others. In the academy, and in life, there is very little that is more estimable. He did this writ large through organization-building at the Phiadelphia Center, and he did it at the individual level, with graduate students, Center fellows, and colleagues, and even with undergraduate students who just knocked on his office door. I will always be grateful.