Eugen Weber: UCLA Historian, PBS Host
Eugen Weber, an eminent historian whose books on France and modern Europe have influenced a generation of scholars and students, and who became well known for a 1989 public television series on history, died May 17 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.
A professor at the University of California at Los Angeles for more than 50 years, Mr. Weber was a prolific writer with wide-ranging scholarly interests. The most popular of his more than a dozen books is probably "A Modern History of Europe: Men, Cultures, and Societies From the Renaissance to the Present" (1971), which is a standard textbook in many college courses.
On occasion, Mr. Weber examined other historical subjects, such as anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism and apocalyptic beliefs, but he kept returning to France, a country he had known well since the 1940s, tracing the changing political and cultural life of the nation from the 18th century to World War II and beyond. His research was buttressed by documents and letters drawn from every quarter of the country and was enlivened by what a critic from the Sunday Times of London called "a Hollywood-like gift for storytelling."
When his book about the late 19th century, "France, Fin de Si?cle," was published in 1986, Los Angeles Times critic Lynn Hunt wrote: "The epoch immortalized by Marcel Proust in 'Remembrance of Things Past' has now found a historian equal to the task of capturing its tones and textures."...
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A professor at the University of California at Los Angeles for more than 50 years, Mr. Weber was a prolific writer with wide-ranging scholarly interests. The most popular of his more than a dozen books is probably "A Modern History of Europe: Men, Cultures, and Societies From the Renaissance to the Present" (1971), which is a standard textbook in many college courses.
On occasion, Mr. Weber examined other historical subjects, such as anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism and apocalyptic beliefs, but he kept returning to France, a country he had known well since the 1940s, tracing the changing political and cultural life of the nation from the 18th century to World War II and beyond. His research was buttressed by documents and letters drawn from every quarter of the country and was enlivened by what a critic from the Sunday Times of London called "a Hollywood-like gift for storytelling."
When his book about the late 19th century, "France, Fin de Si?cle," was published in 1986, Los Angeles Times critic Lynn Hunt wrote: "The epoch immortalized by Marcel Proust in 'Remembrance of Things Past' has now found a historian equal to the task of capturing its tones and textures."...