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Jack Temple Kirby, W. E. Smith Professor of History emeritus at Miami University (Ohio), died suddenly of heart failure in St. Augustine, Florida, on August 6, 2009. At that moment, he was the incumbent president of the Southern Historical Association.
He was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on August 22, 1938, to a blue-collar family that came to have three children, himself and two sisters (Susan and Betsy). His mother was Theodosia Palmer Kirby and his father Clifford Temple Kirby, who worked as a machinist. Jack was educated locally at Old Dominion University (BA., 1963) and spent a few years in the army, which sent him to Japan. After receiving his graduate degrees from the University of Virginia (MA., 1964; Ph.D., 1965), in 1965 he was appointed as an assistant professor at Miami University, where he spent the whole of his academic career. There he married a midwesterner, Ann Bulleit, and had two children, Valerie and Matthew. Though not indefinitely, Oxford, Ohio, suited him. He proved a very good teacher, an administrator of dazzling efficiency, a reassuring counselor of wisdom and compassion, and a mediator. He liked a quiet pace of life, he quite liked being (as after a decade or so he was) a big fish in a small pond, and for a long time he did not seem to have a great compulsion to return to the South. Nonetheless, a gentle disengagement from Ohio commenced after his divorce in the early 1990s, when he became the partner of the novelist Constance Pierce, like himself a southerner. It occasioned little surprise when, upon their retirements, they moved together to Florida.
His scholarly work would seem to fall into four phases, the two last overlapping. In...