In Memoriam

We are saddened to receive the news of the passing of Murray Griffin Murphey, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and former editor of American Quarterly, on December 6, 2018.

Murphey was one of the key founders of the field of American studies. Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1928, Murphey earned his BA from Harvard, studying with C. I. Lewis, Perry Miller, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. After earning a PhD in American studies at Yale in 1954, he held a two-year Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the first universities to have a Department of American Civilization. He was subsequently appointed an assistant professor in the department, where he moved up to full professor in 1966. He was instrumental in the development of American studies as an academic field, particularly by systematically applying concepts and methods of social science to the study of US history. He also designed and taught an immensely popular yearlong lecture course on the American South. Among his publications are Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (1973) and Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge (1994). He continued to research and write in his retirement, publishing C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist in 2000 and The Development of Quine’s Philosophy in 2011. In 2018, shortly after his ninetieth birthday, he published Thorstein Veblen: Economist and Social Theorist.

He served as editor of American Quarterly from 1971 to 1973 and received the ASA’s Carl Bode–Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement in 2004.

The American Quarterly editorial team aspires to carry on Murphey’s vision and legacy in the journal.