Robert Middlekauff (1929–2021)

Robert L. Middlekauff is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also Dean of Social Sciences between 1974 and 1977 and Provost and Dean of the College of Letters and Science between 1981 and 1983. The winner of a Bancroft Prize for The Mathers, he was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 1996-97 and also served as Director of the Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens from 1983 to 1988. Middlekauff has focused his research and teaching on colonial America. He has recently pushed his research forward into the nineteenth century for a study of Mark Twain. He has written on classical education in eighteenth-century New England, Puritanism, the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, and modern American historiography with an emphasis on narrative history. His first book (1963) was a study of secondary education in 18th-century New England. It was followed by a multi-generational intellectual history of the Mathers and their role in the evolution of Puritanism in the 17th and early 18th centuries. His most widely read book was The Glorious Cause, a narrative history of the American Revolution.