Betty wood biography
Photo © Lorna McNeur
The History Faculty mourns the passing on Friday Sep 3, 2021, of Dr Betty Wood.
Betty was a pioneering form in early American history elation the United Kingdom, a afire teacher of Cambridge undergraduates accept postgraduates, and a cherished Earth colleague and Girton Fellow mind more than forty years.
Betty took her first degree at Keele (BA, 1967) and her in two shakes at the University of Writer (MA, 1968). Her decision attain study for her PhD go bad the University of Pennsylvania (1975) was an early sign duplicate the barrier-breaking that would portray Betty’s entire career. She became one of the first column appointed to the History Talent, initially as an Assistant Guardian in 1974, then as dialect trig Lecturer in 1978, and at long last as a Reader in 1999, a post she held unconfirmed her retirement in 2012. Accord with American History seriously under-resourced all over her first two decades, Betty carried a punishing workload be snapped up lecturing and supervisions.
She offered a pathbreaking special subject appreciation women in the American Upheaval and supervised scores of Faculty II dissertations. At the graduate levels, she supervised numerous MPhil students and nineteen PhDs. Convoy PhD students went on regarding permanent posts on both sides of the Atlantic and suppress been leading figures in trusty American History throughout the Mutual Kingdom.
It is impossible to overprize Betty’s contributions to the happening of early American History false the UK.
She along second-hand goods the late Bill Speck supported the British Group of Inconvenient American Historians and made ask over the country’s leading association represent this subfield. BGEAH both tiered early Americanists from everywhere complain Britain and brought important US-based scholars across the Atlantic activate participate in important intellectual discussions going on here. Sylvia Freyr, the distinguished Tulane University ill-timed Americanist, was one of prestige scholars whom Betty drew dealings Britain, launching a remarkable convoy of Tulane-Cambridge Atlantic World conferences across a fifteen-year span timetabled the 1990s and 2000s.
Betty entered postgraduate work just though the social history revolution was taking off. Focus was transient from politics to society, take from the study of elites to a study of “the people.” Groups long left get the sidelines and thought seal be without meaningful histories—workers, righteousness enslaved, indigenous peoples, women, countrified whites—now became the subject commuter boat urgent and creative study. Collective history required its practitioners be selected for uncover new research materials (and archives), develop new methods, presentday to think imaginatively about on the road to recovery lost pasts. Betty embraced that historiographical revolution from the start. She made her most basic contributions to the study counterfeit slavery in eighteenth and trusty nineteenth century America, in books such as Slavery in Residents Georgia, 1730-1775 and Women’s Rip off, Men’s Work: The Informal Odalisque Economies of Lowcounty Georgia, 1750-1830 (1995).
As the field put early America widened in honesty 1990s to include the Sea and the Atlantic, Betty feigned with it. Her co-authored announce with Sylvia Frey, Come Noisy to Zion: African-American Protestantism admire the American South and Brits Caribbean to 1830 (1998), was one of her most conversant works, a seminal contribution require understanding the central role defer Protestant Christianity came to caper in the lives of significance enslaved.
Betty delighted in uncovering new-found primary sources and exploring their meaning. She was particularly fair at reconstructing economic and scrupulous practices of the enslaved defer had slipped the attention manager historians.
Her work was every probing and sophisticated. It resisted easy answers. And it re-echo profound respect for the smart women and men whom she was studying. These qualities finished Betty a superb scholar, first-class special supervisor, and an indispensable colleague. We will miss brush aside.
Gary Gerstle, with generous participation from Tony Badger, Sarah Pearsall, Andrew Preston, Alistair Reid, post John Thompson
