Remembering Rhys Isaac (1937-2010)

Short of stature but big of heart, Rhys Isaac, a well-known early American historian, died on October 6, 2010, aged seventy-two years of age. Rhys was a larger-than-life character. He was exuberant, filling everybody he met with his infectious enthusiasm and unbounded energy. What I most remember about Rhys was his ever-ready laugh; he was quick to poke fun at the world's injustices and ironies. He began one essay with an item of news from Williamsburg, July 10, 1752, which was no laughing-matter: a recently-arrived African "taking Notice of his master's giving another Correction for a Misdemeaner, went to a Grindstone and making a Knife sharp cut his own Throat." Haunted by the story, Rhys said it spoke to him "in its terse, almost matter-of-fact tone of a time when the world of slave-owners was able to take for granted the harshness of the system that supported its conquest and exploitation of the North American continent." The story also "seemed to carry an oblique allusion—unexpected only through being applied to a slave—to the release from humiliation that stoic Romans like the younger Cato might seek in falling on their swords." He was alert to life's cruelties, oppressions, and acts of rebellion.

As his full name indicates, Rhys Llywelyn Isaac was of Welsh ancestry. The Welsh are often credited with a passion for song and love of language—certainly true of Rhys, who loved to craft arresting sentences. He was born in South Africa in 1937, along with his identical twin brother Glynn, who had a prominent career as a paleo-anthropologist, before dying tragically young. In 1959, Rhys attended Balliol College Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In those days, it was possible to be offered a university post on the basis of a distinguished undergraduate degree. Thus, in 1963, Rhys emigrated to Australia where he first taught modern European history at the University of Melbourne. Later (in 1971) he joined La Trobe University, a newly-created institution on the outskirts of Melbourne, where he taught for almost thirty years. He became an important member of a band of scholars, sometimes referred to as the "Melbourne Group"—Greg Dening, Inga Clendinnen, Donna Merwick—who saw the value of combining history and anthropology, ethnography and dramaturgy. He gravitated from modern European to early modern American history.

His first research visit to the United States was in 1969, and his first scholarly conference was a celebration of the New England community studies, but his interests were always in a more southerly direction. He first came to the attention of early American historians with a number of pioneering essays. One of them, a study of Baptist counter-culture, "Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775," published in 1974, won the William and Mary Quarterly's Lester J. Cappon Award for that year's best article. In 1980, it also won the Douglass Adair Memorial Award, given to the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly during the preceding six years. One final honor was to be chosen as one of the "ten most significant articles" published in the William and Mary Quarterly over a half-century period and therefore deserve reprinting in In Search of Early America: The William and Mary Quarterly, 1943-1993.

Rhys followed up his essay successes with a pathbreaking book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press and the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982, and reprinted 1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Historical Society Book Prize in 1983. He is the only Australian to have won the Pulitzer Prize for history. It was a remarkably innovative book for its time, a wonderfully imaginative evocation of a provincial corner of the Anglo-American world. The narrative opens, in the best cinematic fashion, with a long, languid, sweeping look at the Virginia landscape and a society in stasis. Proud, gentle folk on horseback naturally catch the eye, their...