AMHERST — Popular teacher, eminent biographer, respected Civil War historian: Stephen Oates wore a number of hats, all of them with style.
The former University of Massachusetts Amherst professor died a little over a year ago at age 85. Now friends, family, former students and fellow scholars are getting ready to honor him.
On Sept. 9, the university will host “Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life and Legacy of Award-Winning Biographer and Historian Stephen B. Oates,” an all-day symposium that will examine Oates’ work as a writer and biographer — he was the author of 16 books — as well as a public intellectual and a teacher and colleague.
Oates, born in Texas in 1936, was especially known for his biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., abolitionist John Brown, and Nat Turner, the enslaved African-American man who led a famous rebellion against slavery in Virginia in 1831. Oates referred to those works as a “Civil War quartet,” as he believed all four men “humanize the moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” as he once said.
His 1977 biography of Lincoln, “With Malice Toward None,” was widely praised when published, with a number of reviewers calling it the new “standard” for one-volume biographies of America’s 16th president. Oates’ book on King Jr., from which the title of the UMass symposium is drawn, won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. Overall he was noted for an accessible writing style that helped bring his subjects to life.
Oates was also a featured voice in filmmaker Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS series on the Civil War. Commenting last year, Burns said Oates “knew the bottom-up story as well as the top-down one, but more importantly, he knew and appreciated the huge stakes for the United States and indeed the world in a Union victory.”
Oates taught history at UMass from 1968 to 1997, winning a number of awards from the university for his work and also winning a silver medal in the national Professor of the Year competition. His classes, UMass officials say, were enormously popular, with as many as 500 students filling his large lecture halls.
Hugh Carter Donahue, a writer, scholar, and consultant on technology and broadcasting issues, was one of the those students, winning an award in 1972 as the top history undergraduate at UMass. Donahue, who lives in Pennsylvania, recalls Oates as a generous man “who met students on their own terms” and invited him to attend some of his graduate seminars and to contribute research for his biography of John Brown.
“He was a very dynamic teacher who worked all the time, was really productive and enthusiastic, he had very close relations with his peers — he really was the perfect professor,” said Donahue, who became a lifelong friend of Oates and went on to get a doctoral degree himself. “He was one of my inspirations” to go on to graduate school, he said.
Donahue and Greg Oates, Stephen Oates’ son, have spent months organizing the Sept. 9 symposium, with the support of the UMass Department of History, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the university libraries. Greg Oates, who lives in Amherst, said he’d begun thinking about some kind of event not long after his father died: “How can I best extend and honor my dad’s legacy?”
To do that, they’re bringing together a number of Civil War-era scholars such as keynote speaker Harold Holzer, a leading authority on Lincoln, and Catherine Clinton, a University of Texas professor who has written biographies of Mary Todd Lincoln and Harriet Tubman as well as studies of women in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
A number of UMass professors and others with university connections will be at the event, including Gretchen Gerzina, a professor of biography in the English Department and the author of a number of biographies; David Glassberg, the founding director of the university’s Public History Program; and Playthell Benjamin, a writer, radio commentator, and founding faculty member of the school’s Afro-American Studies Department.
Several former students of Oates will also be on hand to talk about how taking his classes shaped their lives. The symposium includes three panel discussions — Donahue is one of the panelists — each with its own moderator.
Joining the forum as well will be former Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella, today the president of the American Association of Colleges & Universities.
Oates faced controversy in 1990 when some other scholars claimed there were cases of plagiarism in his Lincoln biography and two other books. Oates denied the charges, and numerous scholars came to his defense. The American Historical Association issued a mixed verdict on the matter in 1992, saying Oates had not committed plagiarism but had placed too much reliance on “the structure, distinctive language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars and sources.”
Donahue, who calls the charges against Oates “grossly unfair,” said his former professor’s struggle to fight those charges exhausted him. But he said Oates rebounded by writing two innovative works, “The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820-1861” and “The Whirlwind of War: Voices of the Storm, 1861-1865,” in which the author used first-person narratives of numerous figures from that era as a new way to examine how the Civil War came about.
Greg Oates, a screenwriter who has adapted material from some of his father’s books for proposed TV series, says the Sept. 9 symposium will conclude with a memorial service for his father, with family and friends sharing memories and appreciations.
“Let the Trumpet Sound” takes place 9 a.m to 5 p.m. at the Old Chapel at UMass. You can register for the free event at umass.edu/history/event/stephen-oates or by emailing julie.martel@umass.edu. Deadline to register is Sept. 2.