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Last Issue:
Tuesday,
December
18
2007
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History Professor Honored
Published on 25-Apr-06
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Marion Merrill, wife of Horace Samuel Merrill, with the plaque honoring her husband.
Photo by Thai Q. Nguyen
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Horace Samuel Merrill helped his students get through school and through life. Last week, the Department of History honored its former professor's contributions to the field and his commitment to students with a scholarship endowment and plaque.
Merrill, who became professor emeritus in 1980 and died in 1996, stressed the importance of historians being able to write well. Graduate students attended writing seminars hosted by Merrill and his wife Marion Galbraith Merrill a their home. There they snacked and learned "Merrill's Rules" for historical writing.
"Rules like, 'Writing in the active voice, making sure you had topic sentences,'" says former doctoral student Donald Ritchie, who earned his master's and doctorate under Merrill in the late '60s and early '70s. "He tried to get historians to think how they're putting words on paper."
During seminars, if students were too hard on each other, Merrill would make sure that the scorned students left with at least one positive word about their work. On the flip side, says Ritchie, if Merrill thought students were being too easy on each other, "He would zero in on something."
What left an impression on Ritchie just as strongly is Merrill's paternal care. He and his wife didn't have children of their own, "so he adopted all of his students," he says. Ritchie remembers a young graduate student couple strapped for cash, with a new baby. "Sam showed up on their doorstep with groceries for them."
He was equally generous with his academic pursuits. Marion Merrill often worked side-by-side with her husband in his research, but deferred credit for her assistance. However, his last book, The Republican Command, 1897-1913, lists both names as author. It won Phi Alpha Theta National Book Award. It is the national history honor society.
Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1910, Merrill received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1942 and joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1946. He wrote Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West 1865-1896 in 1969 and biographies of Grover Cleveland and William
Freeman Vilas. A "gruff but avuncular mentor," he supervised 26 doctoral and 68 master's candidates.
The Merrills were also active in Civil Rights Movement, "back when it was not at all fashionable to do that," says Ritchie, adding that they were good friends with fellow notable historian John Hope Franklin. The brought him to Maryland to teach a summer course in 1964.
"He really is part of this institution," say Ritchie, meaning the university. "He shaped the department... and was just a pleasure, a very decent human being."
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