Levine Remembered Part 1:

As some of you know, Larry Levine was my doctoral adviser. He was my friend, and often times my champion on campus and in our field.

This isn't my eulogy to Larry, I just miss him so much that I feel like the only other people who might understand are the students on this list.

My memories of Larry are more salient with the cooler weather setting in, because that was the time of year I spent in class with him. The rest of the year was spent in e-mails or on the phone. But in the fall, he held my doctoral seminar courses at what he liked to call GMU's DC campus. GMU's DC campus can be found inside of Union Station, at the coffee shop across from White House Black Market. It might not look like much, but in truth it was a great place to learn. I bet there are a number of you who can attest to that.

For more than a year, I've been pretending that Larry's semester at Berkeley was just taking longer than usual. In recent e-mails he even mentioned coming back to teach in Spring 2007, and so I've been putting things off, pretending like he wasn't really sick. I've been waiting and focusing on things other than my orals and dissertation, because we were supposed to do them together.

Larry was a big part of why I both got into our program and at times flourished. His illness was a major setback to me a year ago, not for academic reasons, but because for more than five years he was my friend, mentor, and champion. He appreciated me and helped me learn as I struggled through my many mistakes. My feisty personality has gotten me into a lot of trouble, but as a former partner-in-protest for personal ideals, he stood by me (true to Berkeley form).

There are so many things I could say about him, but for those students who never got the chance to meet him, work with him, or listen to him, I thought I'd share a few memories.....

August 2000
Having already graduated from Mason with my MA I missed the chance to work with a certain hippy-like professor, who was nothing short of a legend on campus. I was determined to rewrite my History 711 paper with his help, and I was quietly hopeful that I could parlay that content into an application for admission to our Ph.D. program.

I expected a resounding "yes," join my class from him. But, met with a "Come see me and I'll think about it" instead. And, I did meet with him before that class, and we talked and I explained my many attributes, but he wavered. After several classes and a few conversations with other professors in the department (thank you to you both) Larry allowed me to force ad into his course.

One month later, my car (with most of my research) was stolen. My research was worth more than the value of the little white Tercel, and in what world would a person steal history musings? The car was recovered, but the research lost for good.

I confided to Larry that I would need to drop out of the course, as I had very little to work from. I apologized profusely for my idiocy in the whole effort. But, instead of letting me drop the course he encouraged me to start over. For him there were no deadlines in this instance, he wanted me to write the story he knew I wanted to tell. Apparently, Larry had a car that was stolen once upon a time as well. Who knew empathy could reach as deep?

Larry had an unbelievable amount of empathy, and he understood me better and gave me more chances that I can recount. And, he laughed with me at my ability to get myself in difficult situations . . . .

December 2001
The following year, I had one more "unique" situation that delayed my turning in my journals on time. My hair was very long and I made the egregious error of employing the assistance of a "round brush." The brush was literally stuck in my hair for more than 5 hours. We're talking stuck-to-my-head kind of stuck.

Under stress and on deadline, I threw in the towel, stopped writing, and called my sister to come help me pull out hair by hair. I sent Larry an e-mail and explained my predicament and argued that I needed to have an extra day to work on these journals, because no self-respecting historian could have great thoughts with a brush stuck to her head.

Larry greeted my dilemma with both laughter and gentle scolding. I turned in my journals with nothing less than a large kink in my hair and included a replica of the brush that had nearly been my downfall.

These past few years, Larry was my champion when I made mistakes in our program, he mentored me, he wrote with me, he changed the way I looked at history and the way I looked at what I was doing with my life.

October 2002
Larry and I were struggling to use e-mail successfully, so I provided him with an Etch-a-sketch (technology more suited to his needs). Every so often he would reproduce that toy and chuckle.

There were never enough days with him in them.

To that tough kid from New York, smoker of Lucky Strikes, who learned to love history by listening to the WWII vets in his night school classes, who began with Hofstader and wrote about Bryan, who according to my History 610 course may or may not have been onto something with Highbrow Lowbrow, who changed the way historians studied slavery, who invaded the privacy of the Roosevelt's with grace, and who changed my life and the lives of countless other students, I miss you forever. And, I know what I would tell you if you asked me how the history of the US would be different if the map was flipped around and the colonists landed on the West Coast. It was a strange question, but I have an answer. Maybe not the right one, but I'd debate it until your cup of coffee ran out.

Levine Remembered Part 2:

I took Larry’s course in Approaches to American Culture a few years ago, not because I had a focus on, or even a pressing interest in, American Culture but because it was taught by Larry Levine. My historical interest is more directed to business, law, and finance. But, having been at the barricades at Columbia College in the Spring of 1968, I had an empathy for the long-haired intellectual with the New York irreverent style, especially when mixed with his gentle good will, affability, and respect for others. Three things will always remain with me from Larry’s course and Larry himself: First, there is great commentary, whit, and pathos in the seemingly mundane, work-a-day songs of a downtrodden people – revolt is not just displayed in obvious ways at the barricades but also in the subtle culture of a people, a culture that inspires the individual human spirit and then fuses individuals into a community, even if enslaved. Second, Larry’s oft quoted aphorism from!
the Soviet era: “the future is certain (meaning the victory of the Soviet worker); it is the past that is changeable (referring to the Soviet-style expunging of past leaders from the historical record).” As we understand our history afresh, we inevitably shape our future. And, third, thinking about our current manifold dilemmas as a nation with an ear to Larry’s thoughts on culture, I now hold the view that all historical analysis (whether regarding the “history of the past” or the “history of the future”) begins with the cultural underpinnings of a community (whether local, national, or global) regardless of one’s focus on business, law, and finance; these are secondary matters. The enslaved, black work gangs of the 19th Century are forever singing, sotto voce, in the recesses of my mind. It is a song that Larry preserved and placed there.

(Media-Newswire.com) - By Media Relations | 26 October 2006

BERKELEY – Lawrence W. Levine, a highly influential history professor for more than three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, died on Monday (Oct. 23) of cancer at his home in Berkeley. He was 73.

Through his writings and teaching, colleagues said, Levine helped transform cultural history in the United States into a vibrant and accessible field of study. A champion of multiculturalism, Levine won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 1983 for his intellectual curiosity and scholarship.

In "Black Culture and Black Consciousness" ( 1977 ), Levine's best known work, he made use of the oral expressive tradition of African Americans to examine how they perceived themselves, their position in American society, and their relations with whites.

According to UC Berkeley history professors Leon Litwack and Waldo Martin, the book was a pathbreaking study of folk thought and culture that exerted an extraordinary influence on several generations of scholars - not only historians, but anthropologists, folklorists, musicologists, sociologists, and students of American and African American culture.

Historian Shane White, a professor in Australia at the University of Sydney, where Levine once taught as a visiting professor, added that Levine was "one of the best historians writing in the second half of the 20th century. His pioneering explorations of the American past made possible the current explosion in the popularity of cultural history."

Levine's 1988 book "Highbrow/Lowbrow" and the 1993 book "The Unpredictable Past" demonstrated not only the varieties of historical consciousness and documentation, but the interplay of American thought and behavior in folk and popular culture. And "The Opening of the American Mind," a 1996 book, was a spirited defense of multiculturalism and a powerful critique of conservative critics of modern American culture.

In a 1996 interview with The New York Times, Levine said that in "The Opening of the American Mind," he tried to show "that the genius of America has been its ability to renew its essential spirit by admitting a constant infusion of different people who demand that the ideals and principles embodied in the Constitution be put into practice. The result has been to open America to great diversity..."

UC Berkeley's Martin said Levine "was a great historian who revolutionized American cultural history. He also was a great friend."

Said Lily Wong Fillmore, a professor emerita in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, "He educated all of us about American cultural history, and he taught me the meaning of the expression 'mensch' - he was truly a person of integrity, good humor and honor."

Fillmore and Levine were on a committee in the 1980s that developed a campus requirement that all new undergraduates take a class on America's complex racial and ethnic past and present.

Levine was born on Feb. 27, 1933, and raised in New York City He received his bachelor's degree in 1955 in history from the City University of New York and his master's and doctorate degrees in history from Columbia University in 1957 and 1962, respectively.

He told The New York Times that before going on to graduate school, his history teachings had been limited. He said he knew "very little about the majority of the people in the world. We studied Northern and Western Europe. Nothing in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even Canada was a great blank. My own father was an immigrant from Lithuania, and my grandparents were from Odessa, but we talked only about Northern and Western Europe. There's something wrong with that."

Levine joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1962, retiring in 1994 as the Margaret Byrne Professor of History. Also in 1994, he was appointed professor of history and cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

While on the UC Berkeley faculty in the 1960s, Levine immersed himself in the political life of the campus, participating in sit-in demonstrations by the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, to force stores to hire black people. He also joined other historians who marched in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

During the Free Speech upheaval at UC Berkeley, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity on campus, activity in support of the civil rights movement.

In the late 1980s, Levine was a member of the campus Academic Senate's Special Committee on Education and Ethnicity, which developed UC Berkeley's American Cultures Breadth Requirement, first launched in 1991.

The innovative move, which made national headlines, resulted from complaints at the time by students who felt their history wasn't being taught on a campus that was rapidly changing in its ethnic and racial composition. The curricular change became a successful part of the UC Berkeley experience and attracted the attention of educators elsewhere.

Fillmore, who also is UC Berkeley's Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education emerita, said Levine's contribution to the committee was "crucial: He was a moderating force, reminding the committee about the necessity to be inclusive and interdisciplinary, if the proposal had any chance of winning the support of the Senate faculty. The committee had faculty and student members, and Larry Levine made sure that students' voices were heard and included in the design of the proposal."

Litwack, a close friend of Levine's, said "few individuals I have known in this profession or out of it have been as important to me: as committed, as insightful, as creative, as imaginative, as challenging, as intellectually engaged, as stimulating, as provocative, as tough-minded, as open to new ideas and experiences. He will always be with me in my work and thoughts."

During his 32 years on the faculty, Levine received many honors. Following the MacArthur award, he was elected in 1985 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 1994, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

From 1992-93, he served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and he received the 2005 American Historian Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction.

Levine is survived by his wife, Cornelia; stepson, Alexander Pimentel of Richmond; sons, Joshua and Isaac of Berkeley; sister, Linda Brown of New York City; and three grandchildren, Stephanie and Benjamin Pimentel, and Jonah Levine.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the American Cancer Society. A memorial service is pending.