Daniel Howe

Many will be saddened to learn of the death on Christmas Day of Dan Howe. Dan was the Rhodes Professor of American History (and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College) from 1992 to 2002. He had also been the Harmsworth Visiting Professor (attached to Queen’s) in 1989-90.

Daniel Walker Howe was a distinguished historian of the United States in the nineteenth century; and his contribution to the Oxford History of the United States What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (2007) was both a major contribution to the history of the United States, and also won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History. It was also in many ways his Oxford book, having been prepared during his decade in the Chair.

Dan came to Oxford after a distinguished teaching career at Yale and UCLA, but he readily adapted to the Oxford faculty. All those who worked with him here will remember with affection his straightforward generosity of spirit, his commitment to teaching, and the warmth he brought to many events.

Obituary for Professor Daniel Howe - Lawrence Goldman

Professor Daniel Walker Howe (10 Jan. 1937 – 25 Dec. 2025) who died on Christmas Day 2025 had an extensive and long-lasting relationship with the Oxford History Faculty. He read History at Magdalen College in the early 1960s. He was the Harmsworth (Visiting) Professor of American History and a fellow of Queen’s College in 1989-90. He subsequently held the Rhodes Chair of American History from 1992-2002 and was a fellow of St. Catherine’s. 

Dan Howe was born in the city of Ogden, Utah, just to the east of the Great Salt Lake in the north of the state, in January 1937. His father was then a journalist. Dan attended high school in Denver, Colorado, and always spoke with the distinctive accent and tempo of someone who grew up in the American West.  

He studied at Harvard and graduated in American History and Literature in 1959. He then undertook a ‘Second BA’ in American History in two years in Oxford. The ‘Second BA’ was then the usual qualification sought by American students who came to study here. He took his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, and occasionally spoke of the student radicalism he witnessed there after the Berkeley ‘Free Speech Movement’ erupted in 1964 in opposition to the Vietnam War. Dan was a lifelong Democrat and a committed Christian.   

His first position was at Yale (1966-73), from where he went to a chair in the History Department at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) in 1973. His permanent home, where he and his wife, Sandra Shumway, brought up their three children, was thereafter in Los Angeles. Sandra was a graduate of Radcliffe College and they met in 1961 in Oxford where she was also studying. 

Dan’s tenure of the Rhodes Chair in the History Faculty coincided with the very rapid expansion of the teaching of American History in Oxford. The basis for this had been laid at the end of the 1980s when various options in American History were added to the syllabus in each of the three years of the BA History degree. Until then, surprising as it may seem in a university with such broad and historic links to the United States, the opportunities for the study of American History were limited, and the subject considered peripheral.  

Working together with a group of university lecturers and college tutors including Duncan MacLeod, Clive Holmes, Lawrence Goldman, Eric Rauchway and Peter Thompson, Dan devoted much of his time in Oxford to the development of American History in the Faculty in the expectation – which was correct – that once the undergraduate programme was secure, postgraduate education in American History would also expand. By the time he retired from Oxford a thriving Masters degree in American History was up and running and more students than ever were studying for doctorates in the subject.  

This collective endeavour, led by Dan, was so successful that the Rhodes House Library, where books on both American and British Imperial History were delivered and read by students, couldn’t cope with the increased demand for its services and the idea of building a new institute for American Studies emerged. Dan was a member of the committee that planned and executed the construction of the Rothermere American Institute which was opened in 2001. He also took a strong interest in the development of American History in other British universities, visiting them to lecture and give seminars. He was a founding member of BrANCH, “British American Nineteenth Century Historians”, now one of the key organisations in the American History ecosystem in Britain. 

Dan’s long-remembered inaugural lecture in Oxford in 1994 was on the connections between British and American History since the American Revolution. But all his admirable institutional commitments limited his time for writing and publication during the decade he was in Oxford. He had already published one brilliant book on The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979). This explored the history of the American Whig Party from the 1820s to the 1850s through the lives of some of its leading figures, among them President John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. On its demise after 1850, the Whig party formed the basis of the new Republican Party which would go on to prosecute the Civil War under the first Republican President, Lincoln himself. The ‘political culture’ Dan wrote about was a combination of party political analysis, social history, and psychologically-astute biographical portraiture of notable figures. Dan’s study of the American Whigs is one of the key works in the broadening of the concept of ‘political history’ that began half a century ago.  

Later, after leaving Oxford, Dan published another highly-acclaimed book on the development of the United States in what is sometimes called the Jacksonian Era, covering the decades between the War of 1812 and American victory in the Mexican War of 1846-8. In What Hath God Wrought. The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (2007), a volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, Dan Howe adopted a conventional chronological approach but one different in emphasis and interpretation from most of the syntheses of the era that had hitherto held the field. The book’s title was drawn from a biblical phrase from the Old Testament that was used by Samuel Morse at a ceremony in Washington DC in May 1844 as the first official message sent by telegraph. 

Since the so-called “Progressive Historians” of the 1930s, this age had been interpreted as experiencing the commercialisation of American life, the triumph of American capitalism, and the first stirrings of organised labour and radical protest in reaction. Dan didn’t disagree, but following new historical trends and incorporating a mass of new research, he showed the complexity of the era by focusing not only on political and economic history, but also on American religion, on the transformational effects of the railroads and telegraph, and on the experience of native Americans, immigrants, women, and slaves. These groups were now written into the main national narrative, and that narrative was essentially positive, in Dan’s view. In this period the American Union established itself at its continental extent, and its people – though not all of them - prospered. The resulting book is the most richly textured history of the American ante-bellum period that we possess. It deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for History.   

Dan liked to spend his Oxford vacations at home in Los Angeles. But every summer Sandra would join him here at the end of the academic year and they would together throw the very best ‘4th of July’ party at their house in North Oxford. Long after his retirement from Oxford he would return each summer to see friends and former colleagues and soak up the atmosphere: Dan had loved Oxford from first sight. Throughout a long career he remained committed to the importance of good teaching and meticulous research. In his scholarship and in his life, Dan Howe kept his ‘eyes on the prize’.  

Lawrence Goldman