James Kirby Martin, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Houston, passed away on New Year’s Eve. I had limited exposure to the man—he coedited my book about the Battle of Harlem Heights with Mark Lender for the Westholme Small Battles Series and was kind enough to review my forthcoming work, Winning the Ten Crucial Days—but he impressed me as someone whose gentlemanly manner well complemented his admired scholarly standing as a student of early American history. The author of fourteen books, Jim was a professor at Rutgers for many years before relocating to Texas, as well as having taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and The Citadel. For those who are interested, you can find more information about him on his website.

I wanted to remember him here by offering the following excerpt from the preface to his 2019 volume, Insurrection: The American Revolution and Its Meaning (originally published as In the Course of Human Events: An Interpretive Exploration of the American Revolution in 1979), which is, for my money, perhaps as good an introduction to its subject as one is likely to find—a lucid, concise narrative that is comprehensive in scope and insightful in its interpretation:

The late novelist L. P. Hartley once compared the act of learning about past times to visiting foreign nations with customs, values, and ideals different from our own. Hartley’s observation is well taken. Probing deeply into earlier eras requires a commitment to keeping peoples and events in their actual historical context rather than engaging in present-minded critiques of their values and ideals, as if our own beliefs and actions are universally above reproach. In this volume I have worked to stay in context. My purpose has been to describe and explain rather than pass along critical judgments about Revolutionary era persons who did not subscribe to the same set of social and economic values that we hold dear today. If one is looking for present-minded historical judgments, they are readily available these days. Certainly, both leaders and followers in the Revolutionary generation had their blind spots. However, we need to remember that no generation has ever reached perfection in its accomplishments and that some persons during the Revolutionary era put forth a noteworthy effort in seeking to establish a better world for posterity.

Thank you, Jim. RIP.