Earlier this semester I learned that James Kirby Martin passed away. He was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Houston. Last week, I learned that Professor Edward Countryman of Southern Methodist University had died as well. In the span of several weeks, two very important historians of the American Revolution in New York State had left us.

            I did not know Edward Countryman well. We spoke when our paths crossed at conferences. He was always interested and interesting, the kind of senior scholar who was consistently welcoming and encouraging toward his younger colleagues. From the beginning of my career as a historian, I loved Professor Countryman’s work. His book, A People in Revolution, I read during my first few weeks in grad school at Syracuse. Countryman captured the excitement of the Revolution, the tension and the violence as well, in a work that I found deeply impressive. I wrestled with questions my undergraduate education never forced me to confront about the nature of the Revolution and its consequences. When I first taught my course on the American Revolution, I assigned A People in Revolution. It was probably too much for most of my undergraduates in Montana, but those who persevered learned that the Revolution involved movements that engaged people who previously had been excluded from imperial and provincial networks of power. Researching and writing this book must have been a massive undertaking, and teaching it helped me understand in new ways the complexity of the story.

            When I began to assemble lectures for my own course on the Revolution, I relied heavily, and even assigned a few times, Countryman’s brief one-volume history of the American Revolution published by Hill and Wang. It’s a wonderful brief synthesis that conveys the excitement and energy, and the significant shortcomings, of the Revolution. Countryman was truly a historian who worked from the bottom of society upwards, bringing the insights of what at the time was called the “new social history” to the Revolution. When I taught the American History survey course, I assigned Americans: A Collision of Histories. I hated the big textbooks then in vogue in survey courses. If you are going to teach a survey, it is best to assign a book you are willing to read and able to enjoy.  It was a perfect brief survey of the first half of the American story.

            I paid less attention to James Kirby Martin’s work when I was in grad school. He was more interested in military history, it seemed to me, and that is not where my interests rested. It turned out that assessment was, like many grad student judgments, both harsh and incomplete, for Jim had eclectic interests.

I met Jim for the first time early in 2009 at the American Historical Association conference in New York. It was a job interview of sorts, and Jim played a large role in bringing me to the University of Houston in the fall of 2009. I enjoyed teaching at UH, and I liked my colleagues, but Houston was a bad fit for my family. We bolted. Though I only lasted a year, Jim did all he could to persuade us to stay. As a colleague during my year in Texas, Jim was always friendly and supportive (I realize that not all my UH colleagues felt the same way about him). I never would have written a book on the Treaty of Canandaigua had not Jim asked me to contribute to the series he edited for Oxford University Press. It feels like every year I tell one student or another to look at Jim’s biography of Benedict Arnold. Jim remained a productive and active scholar until the end. He could not have been farther politically from Ed Countryman. Jim was a devout Christian and a Tea Party conservative. What too many of our critics fail to recognize is that it is the work that matters. Both historians produced work that mattered.

            Martin and Countryman both wrote about the Iroquois during the Revolutionary era. Jim Martin’s Forgotten Allies, co-written with Joseph T. Glatthaar, provided readers with a sweeping narrative history of the Oneidas’ experience during the war. He drew a large audience, became close with the Oneidas of New York, and for a time pursued the possibility of turning portions of the book into a motion picture. Jim loved the history of New York State. He was a regular attendee at the Fort Plain History Conference. The last time Martin and I spoke was during a Zoom call. I was trying to assemble a group of historians interested in constructing a “1779 Project” to look closely at the role of Indigenous dispossession in New York State. Jim attended as a representative of the Oneidas. He and I did not see eye-to-eye on the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, but nonetheless I was glad to see him. Though I soon thereafter left the project and took my work in another direction, I am glad that Jim and I had kept in touch after I left Houston. I wish I would have reached out more often.

            Countryman’s most significant contribution was his 1996 article in the William and Mary Quarterly entitled “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American Revolution.” It came out just before I moved back to New York, and just before I began thinking seriously about the Haudenosaunee. Countryman, in a historiographical essay that ranged widely in its 22 pages, placed dispossession at the center of the Revolution in New York. “Fostering public virtue, rewarding soldiers of the Revolution, and establishing American communities all figured among the motivations of the architects of the American land system,” he wrote. “So did paying the national debt without anybody except Indians having to sacrifice.”

BACK IN 2013 at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture conference in Baltimore, several of us mid-career historians gathered for lunch. Thinking about the sorry state of the academic job market, one of us mused that we were among the last generation of tenured full professors in our field. Since that time, as assaults on public higher education intensify, the situation has become even more dire. There is a sadness, for me, in watching an earlier generation of prolific and important historians exit the stage while my profession succumbs to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted by right-wing ideologues, troglodytes and trolls; neoliberal approaches to university management; and the growth of a feckless class of college administrators with degrees in “higher education” who have done their best to suck the life out the system. Martin and Countryman both did work that matters. At a time when our profession is under assault, as politicians join in criticism of history and historians, and as schools go through restructurings that will change and diminish them forever, it’s worth keeping in mind all that we have lost.