For a sketch of Susanna Barrows, published a couple of years ago, see
http://history.berkeley.edu/newsletter/2008_Summer/barrows.html

On 10/29/10, Robin G W Room <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>  I got the news this morning that Susanna Barrows has died. It hit me
> hard.
>  I happen to be in Paris, by myself for a couple of days. I decided
> the best tribute I could think of was to go to the "France 1500" exhibition
> at the Grand-Palais, a luminous show about France at the junction between
> the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
>  It was a great show, but it was not
> as Susanna would have organized it. The material of the show was the art
> and books and furniture of the nobility, beautiful and grand and sometimes
> revealing about their lives, and certainly informative about historical
> currents and influences. Susanna's France in 1500 would have been about how
> peasants and townspeople lived, how they laughed and danced and ate and
> loved and fought. And, of course, how they drank.
>  To me, Susanna was a
> historian of drinking, and all that goes along with it. Whereas for her own
> scholarly tribe, the historians, the alcohol was incidental; she was a
> historian of mentalities, or culture, or a social historian, who had found
> a rich new trove in the French archives in the records of what went on in
> the French cafés and their predecessors turned in to the French state by
> police and informers.
>  I met Susanna first at what turned out to be her
> hiring lecture for the History Department at UC Berkeley. Three of us from
> the Alcohol Research Group had noticed that the History Department was
> sponsoring this lecture about alcohol in France by a visiting professor,
> and decided to go. Susanna later told me that she wondered who the three
> faces in the front row were, smiling and bobbing enthusiastically. She
> opened the talk with a picture of a bill from when she had been in hospital
> in France, to illustrate the difference in French and American mentality on
> wine. As a matter of course, the French hospital had served wine with the
> dinners for in-patients; but her American health insurer had a category in
> the bill labeled "extra wine", which they declined to pay. The talk went on
> from there to open a window for us on the ideas and social history around
> wine in France, particularly in the 19th century - a look into the past
> vividly illustrated with slides of caricatures by Daumier, of impressionist
> and later paintings of drinkers and drinking places.  She got the job. And
> so began a new chapter in Susanna's main vocation, as teacher and mentor to
> a multitude of doctoral students in history. "Teacher and mentor" doesn't
> really convey how important she was to a generation and more or historians
> who got their start in Susanna's courses and seminars. The testimony of a
> few of them can be read in the Friends of Cal History Newsletter for
> Summer, 2008
> (http://history.berkeley.edu/newsletter/2008_Summer/barrows.html [1]), when
> the UC Berkeley Graduate Division awarded her the Sarlo Distinguished
> Graduate Student Mentoring Award. As that article notes, one of her former
> students pointed out that "All but one of the twenty-seven or so theses
> [she] directed have become university press books." And those books have
> put "what the French call 'l'usine Barrows' (the Barrows factory) at the
> forefront of the field…. In short, Susanna Barrows is the major graduate
> teacher of her generation in modern French history."  The article also
> notes that the dissertations Susanna directed had little relationship with
> one another. Her genius was to help each student to develop his or her own
> interest. So there have been only a relatively few students over the years
> which have picked up her interest in matters relating to alcohol. In this
> respect, those of us connected through her alcohol side only every now and
> then had to share her with the historians. Although when those connections
> did happen - I remember an uproarious excursion from Paris for an
> afternoon-long lunch at an Orléans restaurant with two Michelin stars - it
> was clear that Susanna was a central figure in the overlapping circles of
> American historians of France and, indeed, Europe. She was loved, but also
> respected - she had clearly paid her dues in the French archives, keeping a
> list, for instance, of when each of the departmental archives was closed
> for summer vacation.  The biggest work connection which Susanna and I had
> came when, under her influence, the Berkeley Alcohol Research Group hosted
> an international conference on the social history of alcohol in 1984.
> Funding for the conference came from NIAAA, which in those days had a
> broader view of its duties to scholarship than at some later times. The
> conference had a mixture of social historians and social scientists
> interested in history; as I remember, the proceedings (in the first
> reference below) included some interesting comments on each others' habits
> from the two tribes. It became the first of a series of alcohol and drug
> history conferences which continues today, most recently in Glasgow
> (http://historyofalcoholanddrugs.typepad.com/alcohol_and_drugs_history/conferences/
> [2]) While a number of other papers from the Berkeley conference were
> published in Contemporary Drug Problems, those which fitted in a social
> history frame were collected in a book Susanna and I edited (the second
> reference below). Included in the book was her wonderful paper, using
> archival materials, on 19th-century Parisian cafés as "the parliament of
> the people".  The Susanna I knew was full of life and joy. She loved France
> and the French, and particularly her first love, Paris. But it was a love
> that could be critical, or at least was open to teasing. She treasured the
> details of life, of how people differed in how they lived, of what
> translated and what did not translate between cultures. She was always
> ready to follow an intellectual trail, often with fruitful results.  The
> world is less without her.  Robin
> Susanna Barrows, Robin Room and Jeffrey
> Verhey, eds. (1987) The Social History of Alcohol: Drinking and Culture in
> Modern Society. Berkeley: Alcohol Research Group.
> Susanna Barrows and Robin
> Room, eds. (1991) Drinking: Behavior and Belief Systems in Modern History.
> Berkeley: University of California Press.
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1]
> http://history.berkeley.edu/newsletter/2008_Summer/barrows.html
> [2]
> http://historyofalcoholanddrugs.typepad.com/alcohol_and_drugs_history/conferences/
>


-- 
David M. Fahey
Professor Emeritus of History
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
USA