George Martin Curtis III (April 11, 1935–September 19, 2023) was born into an Iowa family that was successful in both politics and business, but he chose an academic career over these alternatives. Educated at the Hotchkiss School, University of Iowa (BA, 1958), and the University of Kansas (MA, 1963), he decided to continue his education at the University of Wisconsin. There he studied with Merrill Jensen, one of America's leading documentary historians, and received a Ph.D. in history in 1970 after completing his dissertation, "The Virginia Courts During the Revolution."
Curtis's professional career included teaching, working as a documentary historian, and serving as a Fellow at Liberty Fund. He was a member of the history faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman (1968-73) and Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana (1980-2001), where he also served as Department Chairman (1987-1996). Among his students at Hanover were two future governors of Indiana, Mike Pence and Eric Holcomb. Between those two college appointments, Curtis served as a research associate with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (1973-75) and with the Papers of John Marshall project (1975-80). During the 1997-98 academic year, Curtis was a Liberty Fund Visiting Scholar. He remained at Liberty Fund as Senior Associate Fellow from June 1998 - August 2001, during which time he continued to teach at Hanover on a part-time basis. Curtis joined The Philadelphia Society in 2014.
Curtis was an outstanding teacher who was simultaneously demanding, insightful, and entertaining. Thanks, perhaps, to that final characteristic, he was a three-time winner of Hanover's Arthur and Ilene Baynham Outstanding Teaching Award (1984, 1989, and 1994). Given his skeptical approach to politics and his at times self-effacing humor, he may have taken this honor, bestowed by a majority vote of current students and recent graduates as evidence of the limitations of democracy.
His approach to his classes was engaging and creative. He taught a senior-level historiography course using novels rather than historical texts. Among the novels on the syllabus were Iain Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost and Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. He liked to change the reading list from time to time and once asked me (Steve) for a suggestion. I recommended Julian Barnes’ Flaubert's Parrot. A few weeks later, he told me that he had substituted Barnes’ book for one he had used in the past. I was disconcerted when his response to my "I'm glad you liked it" was, "Oh, I didn't read it. I trust your judgment." I asked him if he would mind if I joined him for the classes in which Flaubert's Parrot would be discussed, and he happily agreed. I was relieved when Flaubert's Parrot proved to be a successful tool, in his hands at least, to engage students in historical thinking. He was always interested in encouraging his students to be careful readers and thoughtful critics, and had no interest in creating a classroom of clones.
The two-hour drive from Indianapolis to Hanover gave us ample time to discuss the things that really mattered to us, primarily baseball – he a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan and me with an attachment to the Atlanta Braves – but also less important issues, such as the state of the world. In the classroom, I got to see firsthand the Curtis method of teaching, which included alternating between quiet meditations on the assigned works to loud screams if a student said something either extremely brilliant or particularly inane. In his classroom there was the ever-present possibility of an eraser flying through the air if he caught a student staring out of the window or nodding off during an intense discussion. One sure way a student could earn a warm spot in his heart was to catch an eraser in mid-flight and throw it back from whence it came.
G. M. Curtis was a generous and thoughtful friend, a challenging but supportive teacher, an avid sailor and baseball fan, and man of inquiring mind and upright behavior. Rest in peace.
Memorial by Steven D. Ealy
