In Memoriam: Tribute

SHIFTING VIEW: Starting her career in the 1950s, Young explored US history from a Native perspective. (University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

As a graduate student at Cornell University in the 1950s, Mary Young so impressed her thesis advisor that he recommended her to a colleague at a major university seeking to hire his best student. The colleague’s initial response was typical for the times. “Don’t you have a man?” he asked.

For Young, a professor emeritus of history at Rochester who died in February, the gender barrier was only one of the constraints she would face and overcome. She also helped blaze a new path in the study of American history as one of the first historians in the academy to recognize and explore the active role of American Indians in shaping the nation’s course.

Louis Roper ’92 (PhD), a professor of history at SUNY New Paltz who holds the title SUNY Distinguished Professor, says Young’s innovation “wasn’t just the fact of doing Native American history, but in looking at American history from a Native perspective.” At the time, he says, “no one did that.”

In her 1961 book, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Mississippi and Alabama, 1830–1860, Young analyzed the complicated dynamics of multiple groups—indigenous peoples, white settlers, and land speculators—in the scramble for Indian lands following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Theda Perdue, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on indigenous people of the southeastern United States, says the book broke new ground on racial and class dynamics in the pre–Civil War South.

“I think Mary had a real impact in shifting the history of southern Indians in particular away from war and the Trail of Tears toward a deeper understanding of race and of the dynamics that led to removal,” Perdue says.

Following on the heels of her book, which the University of Oklahoma Press reprinted in 2002, Young published several major articles in the leading journals of American history. She won two major awards for her article “The Cherokee Nation: Mirror of the Republic,” published in the American Quarterly in 1981.

Born in Utica, New York, Young attended Oberlin College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in history, magna cum laude, in 1950. After completing her PhD in 1955, she taught at Ohio State University until she was hired at Rochester in 1973. When Young joined Rochester’s history department as a full professor in 1973, she was the first female scholar in the department ever to hold that rank.

Joan Shelley Rubin, the Dexter Perkins Professor in History and Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, says Young balanced “very high standards of intellectual rigor” with unusual professional generosity and a disregard for academic hierarchies. She was also, Rubin notes, “an incredible character.”

Young attended virtually every departmental lecture, during which she inevitably sat in the first row and listened intently—albeit with her eyes closed, a habit that misled many an invited speaker.

“Everyone deferred to Mary to ask the first question,” Rubin recalls. “She appeared to have been asleep, but then her question was brilliant.”

It was almost always “the tough question that went right to the heart of the matter,” says Casey Blake ’87 (PhD), a professor of history and the Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies at Columbia University.

Blake recalls another dimension to Young: her attachment to the “Burned-over District.”

“One of the things that I came to learn about Mary over time was just how connected she was to the landscape and history of western New York and eastern Ohio,” he says. The region was known as the “Burned-over District” in the first half of the 19th century due to the intertwined radical movements, including abolition and religious revivalism, that prospered there.

“I think Mary had an attachment to the legacy of that moment,” Blake says. “In some respects, I think of her as politically and intellectually formed by it.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)