History
The son of Lawrence College professors Freeman Alfred Havighurst and Winifred Weter, born in Appleton, Wisconsin, he grew up in Fox River Valley. Havighurst attended Ohio Wesleyan University and earned a Bachelor of Arts, University of Denver (1924); attended King's College London, 1925-26 Bachelor of Sacred Theology Boston University (1928); Masters of Arts Columbia University (1928) and was awarded honorary degrees from Lawrence College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Marietta College, and Miami University.
Havighurst joined the faculty of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1928 and served interim terms on the faculties of Connecticut College, the University of Colorado and the University of British Columbia. In 1968, Miami named him Regents Professor of English Emeritus. He retired as research professor emeritus in 1969.
He married Marion Boyd, a poet and writer, in 1930 and resided in Oxford, Ohio, she died in 1974. He remained in Oxford until the last few years of his life when he moved to Richmond, Indiana to live with relatives, where he died of heart disease.
He was from a distinguished academic family including his brother, Robert J. Havighurst, a noted professor at the University of Chicago.
Author of over thirty books, including Pier 17, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and Annie Oakley of the Wild West (Oakley's life was the inspiration for the earlier musical Annie Get Your Gun). His writing earned awards from the Friends of American Writers, the American Association for State and Local History and the Rockefeller Foundation. River Road to the West received the American History Prize of the Society of Midland Authors.
He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Delta Theta, the Society of American Historians, the Authors League and served as vice president of the Society of Midland Authors.
A major bequest from Havighurst created the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University upon his death.
Read more about this topic: Walter Havighurst
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)