Abstract
Samuel P. Hays, a pioneer urban, political, social, and environmental historian, passed away on November 22, 2017, in Boulder, Colorado. Sam, as his friends knew him, chaired the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History from 1960 to 1990, providing it with outstanding leadership. During these years, he influenced the profession by training dozens of graduate students and serving as a model for many young historians. He served on the first Editorial Board of the Journal of Urban History in 1974 and was elected president of the Urban History Association in 1992. He received the first American Environmental History Association Distinguished Scholar award in 1997 and the Distinguished Service Award of the Organization of American Historians in 1999.
Sam grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Corydon, a small southern Indiana town. He was a conscientious objector in World War II and worked with different federal conservation agencies, developing an interest in forests and forest management. Sam completed his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College and did his graduate work at Harvard under the direction of Frederick Merk. At Harvard, he later recounted that Oscar Handlin’s approach to social history strongly influenced him.
Two years after the 1957 release of his influential synthesis, The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914 (2nd rev. ed., 1995), Sam published the seminal environmental study, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, but then turned his attention to political and social analysis. A collection of his path-breaking articles from this period can be found in American Political History as Social Analysis (1980). Sam had a strong interest in the history of Pittsburgh and a number of dissertations on the city were written under his direction. His interest in Pittsburgh is reflected in his edited work, City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (1989).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sam focused primarily on environmental history and produced a number of articles, many of which are collected in Explorations in Environmental History (1998). Between 1987 and 2009, he published four more books: Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (with coauthor Barbara D. Hays, 1987), A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (2000), Wars in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (2006), and The American People and the National Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service (2009).
Sam was an avid collector of environmental and urban research materials and he established the University of Pittsburgh of Archives of Industrial Society. In addition to Sam’s academic work, he was an environmental activist, devoting long hours fighting to regulate environmental wrongs through the Sierra Club, testifying at hearings, and writing reports. His career was not without conflict, as he held strong beliefs about how history should be approached. Institutional analysis, he argued, was more significant to the understanding of environmental issues than biography and intellectual constructs.
Throughout his career, Sam pushed the boundaries of his field, striving for clarity and challenging his colleagues to sharpen their analyses. His sometimes vigorous and exacting style could produce impassioned disagreements. Because the common goal always remained the enrichment of our collective enterprise, Sam Hays will be remembered as a major pioneer and shaper of environmental and urban history.