May 21, 2007
Eugen Weber
Eugen Weber has died at 82. Weber taught history at UCLA for decades, and won the university's distinguished teaching award in 1992. I was a TA at the time, but not one of his graduate students. Many of my friends worked under him, and had a near-reverential tone when they spoke of him.
His 1989 public television series"The Western Tradition" was a godsend to me when I first started teaching. My first year of teaching, I was terrified that I would run out of things to say after twenty minutes. My mother gave me all of the video tapes of his series, which covered the period from the Bronze Age to the Cold War. I used segments of them in both my ancient and modern history classes. Yes, students, I once showed videos all the time! As the years passed, I grew more confident as a lecturer and I began to incorporate Weber's material into my own talks. I showed fewer and fewer episodes of"The Western Tradition"; I would guess that I last popped in one of Weber's tapes in, oh, late 1998 or early 1999.
Over the course of my first five or six years of teaching, I must have seen each of his 52 half-hour episodes two or three dozen times. I knew his heavy Central European voice by heart, and was accustomed to his litle jokes (most of which flew right over the heads of my students). All those tapes have long since gathered dust, but I can recite the script of many from memory. Eugen Weber was a wonderful popularizer of Western Civilization, a first-rate scholar who was also a marvelous generalist. He was one of UCLA's finest, and I deeply regret not having served as his teaching assistant or having worked more closely with him.
His 1989 public television series"The Western Tradition" was a godsend to me when I first started teaching. My first year of teaching, I was terrified that I would run out of things to say after twenty minutes. My mother gave me all of the video tapes of his series, which covered the period from the Bronze Age to the Cold War. I used segments of them in both my ancient and modern history classes. Yes, students, I once showed videos all the time! As the years passed, I grew more confident as a lecturer and I began to incorporate Weber's material into my own talks. I showed fewer and fewer episodes of"The Western Tradition"; I would guess that I last popped in one of Weber's tapes in, oh, late 1998 or early 1999.
Over the course of my first five or six years of teaching, I must have seen each of his 52 half-hour episodes two or three dozen times. I knew his heavy Central European voice by heart, and was accustomed to his litle jokes (most of which flew right over the heads of my students). All those tapes have long since gathered dust, but I can recite the script of many from memory. Eugen Weber was a wonderful popularizer of Western Civilization, a first-rate scholar who was also a marvelous generalist. He was one of UCLA's finest, and I deeply regret not having served as his teaching assistant or having worked more closely with him.