Remembering Daniel Walker Howe

Daniel Walker Howe, 1937-2025 

The RAI community will be very saddened to hear of the death on Christmas Day of Dan Howe, Emeritus Rhodes Professor of American History, and Distinguished Fellow of the RAI. Dan was a deeply learned historian, gifted writer and much-loved mentor to many. His principal area of expertise was the history of religion and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among his most influential works was The Political Culture of the American Whig Party (1979), which reshaped the way historians thought about the relationship between politics and ideas, and encouraged them to take seriously the intellectual world of Whigs in what Dan always studiously refused to call “The Age of Jackson.” He will perhaps best be remembered for his Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), a gripping, panoramic view of these critical decades in North American history written in beautiful prose with wry touches of humour. 

Dan Howe was born in Utah, and educated at Harvard, with a second BA at Oxford where he studied at Magdalen with A.J.P. Taylor. He then taught at Yale and at UCLA, and served as Harmsworth Visiting Professor in the 1989-1990 academic year. In 1992, he came back to Oxford in a permanent capacity as Rhodes Professor. He was instrumental in creating the RAI and helping to raise the funds to make it a reality during the 1990s. He retired in 2002, moving back to Sherman Oakes, California, but continued to actively support the RAI in multiple ways. He returned regularly to Oxford during the summer months throughout the 2000s and 2010s, often working out of the vacant Harmsworth Professor’s RAI office.

Those of us who knew him will fondly remember his smile and gentle, insightful questions. And all of us benefit from his remarkable scholarship. He will be much missed.