Henry L. Roberts and the Study of the History and Politics of East Central Europe

Abstract

Henry Lithgow Roberts was born in Denver, Colorado, USA, on 27 September 1916, the descendant of Welshmen who had migrated to the United States when the freshly opened ore seams of the Rocky Mountains provided employment opportunities for skilled miners in the post-Civil War era. Parenthetically I interpolate here the recollection that he was amused and pleased when his only daughter (now a young professor of Greek at Haverford College outside Philadelphia) displayed the Red Dragon of Wales in her dormitory room at Swarthmore College, also near Philadelphia, during her undergraduate years in the late sixties and early seventies, even before the current vogue for ethnic identification had seized the imagination of her generation in general. Roberts went east for his higher education, earning his bachelor’s and the first of his two doctoral degrees at Yale University, respectively in 1938 and 1942. His doctoral dissertation there was supervised and sponsored by Hajo Holborn (1902–69), one of the most distinguished of the younger Weimar German historians to have been driven into exile by the Nazi regime. The subject of that first dissertation was an intellectual biography of the Göttingen historian Arnold Heeren (1760–1842). It would be erroneous to interpret this choice of a dissertation topic as an incipient step towards Roberts’s eventual professional interest in east central and eastern Europe.