Obituary

Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007)

Roy Rosenzweig died of cancer in October 2007 having lived an extraordinary life as a historian and activist and as someone whose work involved people from a very diverse array of civic groups. His passing was followed by an impressive outpouring of sentiment from colleagues and comrades around the US and abroad. A website, thanksroy.org, includes messages from many admirers and reports on very well-attended memorial services at George Mason University, where he taught, at the American Historical Association meetings in Washington, and at the Organization of American Historians convention in New York. Roy exerted a unique presence as an activist historian and beloved contributor in all of these arenas.

Although he was a member of an accomplished generation of historians, one that has made its mark on the American history profession, it is impossible to think of anyone in his cohort whose loss would be so deeply felt and so widely grieved.

As Jim O'Brien wrote in the Radical History Review, to which Roy was a long-time contributor, 'Roy was an unusual bundle of restless intellect and personal warmth'. In all of the fields in which he worked – labour and urban history, oral and public history and most recently digital history – Roy collaborated with hundreds of people and 'on a personal level practised the kind of collective, democratic cooperation that he wanted for the whole society'.

During his student days at Columbia University, Roy opposed the US war in Vietnam and became a conscientious objector and counsellor to military draftees. After his graduation he studied for two years at Cambridge University where he learned of the History Workshop and its activities. He then entered graduate school at Harvard University where some of the history faculty enjoyed a reputation of making life miserable for graduate students.

Roy's peers at Harvard remember him as a supportive presence, one who turned his gift for humour against abusive professors and helped keep his peers sane. His wit and subversive sensibility later found an entertaining outlet in the Radical History Review's humour column, 'The Abusable Past', which he produced with Jean-Christophe Agnew, under the pen name R. J. Ambrose.

His dissertation was published in 1984 by Cambridge University Press as Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. It was the first volume in the new social history of the working class to give full attention to the role of amusement and entertainment in plebeian cultural and social life. After working for a short while at the Polytechnic Institute at Worcester, he joined the faculty at George Mason University.

At the same time, Roy was collaborating with Betsy Blackmar on a history of Central Park. The book resulting from their effort, The People and the Park: History of Central Park (Cornell University Press, 1992), reflected Roy's early interest in the popular uses of public space, as well as his fascination with the ways in which class forces shaped public policy and the use of urban space.

This passion for people's history was also manifested in two other influential projects. In the early 1980s Roy collaborated with Susan Porter Benson and Steve Brier on a special issue of Radical History Review devoted to the various efforts being made in the United States to democratize historical practice – similar to, though not as well co-ordinated as, those efforts taking place in Britain within the History Workshop orbit. I was thrilled to be able to contribute a report on the projects of the Massachusetts History Workshop, inspired by our comrades' initiatives in the UK. An expanded collection of these critical reports appeared in a volume Roy edited with Susan and Steve, entitled Presenting the Past (Temple University Press, 1986). The volume featured a thoughtful introduction by the editors, who warned of the perils of a romantic populism and an idealized communalism.

Roy also contributed to the pioneering American Social History Project founded by the late Herbert Gutman and by Roy's close friend, Steve Brier. Roy served as an editor for the path...