MosesWrites
In memory of John M Murrin
7 May 2020
On a particularly dark night, driving from Philadelphia toward Lawrenceville, John asked if we could stop and find a bathroom. With his characteristic humor and self-deprecating wit, he lamented the perils of an aging prostate and so off the highway we went, down an even darker Pennsylvania road until we found a small restaurant that was still open. He loved a few glasses of Chardonnay though not as much as he valued the intellectual excitement of the McNeil Center seminar, which we had just attended, and to which he had introduced me years before.
Others can explain with greater ease the range of John’s brilliance; many worked more closely with him than I did, and in no way do I wish to diminish his tremendous legacy by beginning a tribute with such a moment of vulnerability. Rather, I want to explore what I learned from John beyond his wellspring of knowledge, beyond his original, analytical insights about early modern history or colonial America or any of the other vast fields of learning over which he had total mastery.
Indeed, for the past week or so I’ve been writing in my mind pieces about empathy as education, and the vast death, and ungrieved loss, on an unfathomable scale, that has befallen the United States.
Then last Sunday, I awoke to news that John M. Murrin, Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University, had died from complications related to Covid-19.
I realize that his life, his mentorship, his kindness, and his wisdom—taken from us—leaves me understanding more than ever what I have been hoping to express.
John taught me in ways that defy the typical understanding of what teaching means. He listened. He told stories. He shared himself, bits and pieces, with Delphic power. He admitted to faults, not least in those occasional moments of vulnerability, while he also and always embodied a love for his wife and a reverence for truth, for inquiry into truths about the past—culled from exhaustive research, and based in a deep respect for the lives of those who came before us.
I begin with a reminiscence from one of many Friday trips to Philadelphia because it was during these car rides in the second half of the first decade of this century that I came to know John in a way that has forever shaped who I am.
Any encounter with John presented a mixture of intimidation and relief.
Intimidation, because, literally, he knew more about the seventeenth and eighteen centuries in British North America than any person alive, and likely any person who has ever lived.
Relief, because John did not just hold that knowledge in his nearly photographic memory, but because he had acquired it through genuine curiosity, with playful fascination, and in reverent desire to understand. To understand not as a matter of settled debate, but rather as an ever-refined and continually reshaped encounter. An encounter, not only with the past, but also with who we are as people, as a culture, and as part of a history that lives into the present.
Relief also because John had an incredible sense of humor, because he did not hold pretensions about academic pedigree or institutional affiliation; relief, because John had the ability to make the most insightful comments imaginable, yet he always did so constructively, with kindness, and as a suggestion for improvement. John pursued his own undergraduate studies at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, in his home state of Minnesota, and then earned an AM at Notre Dame before attending Yale where he worked with Edmund Morgan for his PhD. He appreciated how warm and welcoming Morgan had been, which contrasted with what Morgan himself, also originally a Minnesotan, had encountered at Harvard in a department where a culture of prep school elitism had ruled.
With his stories, John gave examples about how he had grown into such wisdom, though he never would have sought to attract attention to that very characteristic. I remember his recounting, with playful self-effacement (and a bit of discomfort)—when people treated him with unbounded reverence—that any deification ought to be met with even greater blasphemy, in a sentiment he attributed to EP Thompson.
In 1972, early in his career, John published a review essay in History and Theory, which tackled five formative works in the newly emerging field of New England “town studies” that deployed social and economic analyses in place of the intellectual and religious approaches that had come before. One of them also engaged with psychological theory, and John was absolutely devastating in his critique—brutal, even, in his refutation of the work’s most basic claims.
John told me about this by way of an anecdote involving his father, who he admired greatly, and to whom he had proudly shown this early published example of his intellectual mettle. Dad, he told me, read it carefully, and asked just one question. Have you ever met this person? I think you might have written it differently, if you had met him.
John came to embody the fact that the arguments essential to academic scholarship did not require arrogance or a desire to hurt others. Correction, however strong, ought not ever to entail malice.
Part of John’s empathy undoubtably came in response to my own personal struggles: during these years, my mother died from Alzheimer’s, and as her primary guardian, I had to grapple with everything from her medical care to legal disputes with her second husband, and to do so while processing my own grief and attempting to meet the challenges of a rigorous graduate education.
I never spoke at great length about these things, but John was aware, and he offered comfort and compassion without condescension; he remained a mentor, but also recognized that even as someone still young, just emerging into my later 20s, I was experiencing something well beyond my years.
While I fretted against insecurity, not least in front of a senior scholar with the potential to influence my future career, John showed me that such was the nature of our shared humanity, and not a matter of shame. He didn’t offer judgment, whether in praise or as a matter of criticism, and to this day, while I hope that on the whole John thought well of me, I have no real sense of how he viewed the intermittently fiery and despondent chauffeur with whom he had been stuck. Genuine empathy, I recognize as I grow older, must sustain that absence of judgment—as a mirror reflecting back, while also letting us know that light has passed through.
John, more than anyone, helped me to appreciate intelligence, even genius, as a unique opportunity, as potential deserving of exploration and celebration and risk-taking—not as fodder for measure or comparison. Despite his astoundingly capacious memory, John struggled with learning foreign languages, as I did too. He so admired his brother, Michael, a scholar of Renaissance literature, for the ease with which he had mastered nearly a dozen. Yet John eschewed resentment and joked about how this had been the case since their childhood. He had accepted this difference, and certainly he had found tremendous success with his own abilities.
Such acceptance means to share with an enthusiasm that invites, and not an arrogance that repels.
As an avid traveler, my own experiences contrasted with John’s, who with his wife chose to stay closer to home, even in their retirement, rather than flying far and wide. Yet John listened kindly as I recounted my fascination in visiting a now remote and abandoned trading fort off the southern coast of Tanzania, or my awe at the scale of Cartagena’s fortifications.
I considered what it meant to share in a way that didn’t invite Instagram-style envy, that didn’t belittle the different opportunities and choices of others.
While John’s scholarly work fits, in many ways, a traditional mode of historical analysis and exposition, I always appreciated his respect for others’ approaches, and his willingness to learn even when information or ideas came in a refrain far different from any he would have composed. John’s grasp of theory, of debates in scholarly methodology, reflected wide and considered reading. I remember him telling the story of how, in teaching an introductory graduate seminar on historiography, he set up a perfect joke about Thomas Kuhn’s canonical work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: holding a dime in each hand, he moved them back and forth, and asked, what’s this: a pair of dime, or paradigm, shift. John had an incredible capacity for puns and jovial humor.
Rather than engage with fads, either to endorse or deride, he took a measured approach that sought resonance and value, that aided rather than took the place of original analysis. From his counter-factual reasoning to his willingness to engage with the taboo—authoring a brilliant essay on bestiality in colonial America—he asked questions that expanded the very nature of how we understand history.
As I pursue my own work in education, I pause at my skepticism or admiration for certain buzzwords or trends, from “grit” to STEM and STEAM, and try to assess worth not as a matter of easy answers or a wholesale replacement for what we have, but instead as a prospective means to improve and refine the strengths I already possess, and those individual talents and abilities held by each of my colleagues.
Unlike many in academia, John did not feel possessive of his students, or look to create disciples, to demand any kind of intellectual fealty. If a new graduate student found interests that drew them in another direction, he happily supported their freedom to work with a different advisor. If another found themselves called toward colonial America, he happily welcomed them without prejudice or precondition beyond a desire to see them thrive.
In turn, I’ve learned to accept that not everyone will be drawn to my own classes with the same level of enthusiasm, particularly amongst the requirements of a secondary curriculum. A student avidly interested in computer science may find seventeenth century primary sources a challenge beyond their worth. Or one may simply be withdrawn or apathetic and unsure of their own purpose in any area. But my job, ultimately, must be to connect and inspire with as great a diversity of approaches as I can muster, not to exclude or criticize or condemn. I in no way claim this as an easy endeavor, but an aspirational one that takes the sort of patience and empathy I admired in John. While part of my heart hopes many more students will take on the joys of studying at a liberal arts college and becoming young humanists, I too want to support equally those who foresee a future pursuing a business degree at a large university.
The success of a teacher, particularly a professor, often becomes a measure of the volume of their scholarly output, of books published, prestigious lectures given, and awards won. Yet John betrayed this traditional approach and may well be the only tenured historian at Princeton, at least in the last century, to have not written a single-author monograph. Instead, a number of his essays were gathered recently in an edited volume, and other influential pieces are scattered across a range of journals. His field-changing dissertation on the anglicizing trends of the 18th century—that colonists in fact become more British, rather than developing an independent, proto-revolutionary culture—remains unpublished to this day.
On the rare occasions I ventured toward this question as to why John, with his astounding wealth of knowledge, hadn’t published more, he often pointed me in one direction: to the initial sections of the advanced textbook, Liberty, Equality, Power, of which he was a co-author. Instead of seeing such work as a scholarly afterthought, a way to make some extra money, John wrote his sections for that textbook as a serious contribution to how we teach and learn about early America. In a way, it embodies John’s profoundly egalitarian disposition—in this case, the belief that a student in a massive survey course should have available the same richness and nuance of historical scholarship that would otherwise be drawn from journal articles and texts used in seminars at elite institutions.
Today I feel sadness from afar, knowing that John will no longer continue to encourage others with his empathy and wisdom. I am astoundingly humbled to have had the privilege to learn from him, however imperfectly, and I can only hope that I may reflect into the world a small part of what he offered me and his other students. I treasure the chance to think back through those many car rides, of the notes passed in seminars, of the way he shuffled from his house and into the passenger seat of my car.
I also feel sadness knowing John has, in part, become a statistic in the horrific toll taken by Covid-19. So much loss creates as much a vacuum as it does an outpouring of mourning, of grief isolated in lockdown and overwhelmed by the staggering, cumulative number of nonetheless singular, heart-breaking losses. While I battle my own frustration and sadness and rage at the current status quo of the US approach to public health, I take some small solace in the purposeful, discrete remembrance I find in my attempt to pay tribute to such a wonderful human being.
John once offered a sly commentary on a hackneyed joke told in reference to some of his more famous colleagues: do you know the difference between God and professor so-and-so? Well, God is everywhere, and professor so-and-so is everywhere except Princeton.
I like to think now that John and his inspiring legacy not only remain in Princeton, a place he valued deeply and to which he contributed mightily, but also extend far beyond, brought forth by those who were fortunate enough to live within his mortal orbit. Such democratic and decidedly undivine recognition would, I hope, be the kind of legacy he wished to leave.
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