Deceased June 23, 2022

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In Memory

Robert Dalzell—professor, author, beloved husband, brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather—passed away at the age of 85 on June 23, 2022.

He was born in Cleveland on April 28, 1937, son of Robert Fenton Dalzell and Lucile Cain Dalzell. After graduating from University School in Cleveland (Class of 1955), he ventured east to Amherst College, where he discovered two of the great loves of his life: American history and Lee Baldwin. He married both, beginning unions that lasted for the rest of his life. 

He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1966 and, after teaching there for a few years and beginning a family, moved in 1970 to Williamstown, where he taught history and American studies at Williams College for the next 42 years, retiring in 2012.

In 1961, Bobby and LeeLee (as their grandchildren would come to know them) discovered the summer community of Sweden, Maine. Here, in the woods on Keyes Pond, the couple bought a plot of land and built a pair of cabins that became the seat of summer for their family over the coming generations.

Here, too, Robert finished the first of what would become five books that he authored and, with his wife, co-authored. He wrote for the rest of his life, turning in his last years from scholarly histories to a novel in which he tried to imagine more deeply and more personally the lives of some of the people he had been teaching and thinking about for so many years.

In a lifetime that saw a great deal of social change, Robert was passionate about the national experiment and its search for political solutions that brought more to more Americans. If summers were about scholarship and writing, the remaining three seasons he devoted to the classroom—a space that for him encompassed not just his students but his colleagues, his friends and his family. He was a born teacher, and when he engaged in conversation, he did it with all his attention and all his heart. 

Robert is cherished and survived by his wife, a brother, a sister, four children and seven grandchildren. The last years of his life brought him further blessings, including (by marriage) new children, grandchildren and even two great-grandchildren.

Adams Alexander Dalzell ’92