UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #780
KINGDON, ROBERT

KINGDON, Robert (1927- ) 
Emeritus Professor of History; Emeritus Director, Institute for Research in the Humanities
At UW: 1965-1998

Interviewed: 2006	
Interviewer: Robert Lange
Length: 353 minutes, 52 seconds

Family background; Early education and high school; Oberlin College; Graduate study at Columbia; Dissertation research; Teaching at UMass; University of Iowa;  Hiring by UW; Courses; History department; Honors and awards; Professional society memberships; Religious Studies; Graduate students; Directorship of the Institute for Research in the Humanities; Registers of the Consistory of Geneva. 

First Interview Session (July 10, 2006): Tapes 1-3

Tape 1/Side 1

00:00:43	Robert Kingdon was born in Chicago in 1927.  His parents were students at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

00:02:36	RK was raised in Hawaii, where his father was a minister.  He talks about living in Hawaii.

00:04:52	He discusses the educational system in Hawaii.

00:05:59	When he was eight years old his family moved to Honolulu.  His father worked at a Portuguese Protestant church.

00:07:48	RK enrolled in the experimental school of the University of Hawaii.

00:09:10	His parents worried about finding a suitable high school for RK to attend and they decided to leave Hawaii.

00:11:18	The family moved to Chicago for a summer before his father got a job in Wisconsin Rapids.

00:12:21	RK attended public high school in Wisconsin Rapids.

00:13:21	His grandfather was an educational missionary in Korea.  After repeatedly butting heads with the local Japanese authority, he was ultimately expelled from Korea in 1936.  This story raised a question that RK would ponder in his career: what does one do when his or her religion is not accepted by the government?

00:19:04	He describes an influential high school teacher who excited him about history.

00:21:50	He talks about life on the home front during the Second World War.

00:23:55	He was involved in forensics during high school.

00:24:40	His father served as minister of the First Congregational Church in Wisconsin Rapids for twenty-eight years.  Acquaintance with the Nash family.

00:27:16	RK decided to attend Oberlin and began studies in the summer of 1945.

00:30:26	End of side.

Tape 1/Side 2

00:30:37	Robert Kingdon discusses his undergraduate education at Oberlin.  He had thoughts of becoming both a professor and a minister, although he doubted his ability to fulfill the pastoral duties involved in ministry.  He talks about two of his uncles who were professors.

00:33:38	The admissions director warned him that it would be difficult to get an academic job.

00:34:16	RK opted to major in history.  He discusses his history professors, including Harvey Goldberg.

00:39:44	The history department offered no courses on the Renaissance or Reformation.  He took courses on the history of political thought, intellectual history, and religion.

00:42:03	RK was interested in themes such as theories of resistance.

00:45:53	He describes his honors examinations at Oberlin.

00:47:37	RK applied to Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and Cornell for graduate study in history.  At the time he had not yet decided to specialize in the Reformation.  He chose to attend Columbia after the dean offered him more fellowship money.

00:50:26	He knew that he wanted to study European history and had the requisite language skills in French and German.

00:53:36	He talks about his advisor.  In his first seminar he studied diplomacy in the city of Geneva; this topic led him to the Reformation.

00:55:20	RK wrote to some of the most distinguished Reformation scholars to talk about his interests.  A professor from Yale was very generous.

00:57:20	He completed his masters in one year and took his doctoral examinations in his second year.  He wrote his thesis on the Reformation in France and Scotland.

00:58:18	In 1950 he went to a work camp in Europe under the sponsorship of the World Council of Churches.  He talks about traveling in Europe.

01:01:42	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 2/Side 1

00:00:18	Robert Kingdon continues to discuss his time in Europe in 1950.

00:01:27	He returned to Columbia to prepare for his doctoral examinations.

00:02:17	He discusses his relationship with his major advisor.

00:05:08	He talks about the Union Theological Seminary.

00:06:12	RK was never a teaching assistant; he received financial support from fellowships.  As an undergraduate he was also on scholarship and worked in the Wisconsin paper mills in the summers.

00:08:19	He wrote his dissertation on “Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France.”  He received a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to spend a year doing research in Geneva.

00:10:00	RK describes his research in Geneva.  He was fortuitous to find an archivist who helped him decipher manuscripts and he also met his publisher there.

00:15:58	He discusses the primary documents he used in his research.

00:22:09	RK completed his PhD in 1955 and his dissertation was published in 1956.  Two upcoming conferences honor its fiftieth anniversary.

00:25:25	He worked at the University of Massachusetts as a full-time instructor and then assistant professor from 1952 to 1957.

00:29:42	End of side.

Tape 2/Side 2

00:30:00	Robert Kingdon took a teaching job in early modern history at the University of Iowa in 1957.  He hesitated to move because he had already been tenured at Massachusetts.  He was attracted to Iowa because it had a good graduate program and research library.

00:35:00	RK taught basic courses on the Renaissance and Reformation and an interdisciplinary course with a philosopher on the history of skepticism.

00:37:25	He returned to Geneva every two or three years to do research.

00:38:23	He talks about living in Iowa City.

00:39:17	Iowa’s history department was smaller and less well funded than Wisconsin’s.  But Iowa had a School of Religion.

00:40:23	RK describes some of his outstanding graduate students at Iowa.

00:46:10	Visiting professorship at Stanford.

00:48:18	RK talks about his research and publications while at Iowa.  He edited documents about English Catholics by William Cecil and William Allen.

00:56:09	The University of Wisconsin recruited RK to come to Madison.  George Mosse wanted someone to teach Reformation.

01:00:46	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 3/Side 1

00:00:23	Robert Kingdon was drawn to UW by its strong graduate program, tradition, and financial support.

00:02:10	The UW history department was unique in dividing the Renaissance and Reformation.  RK developed a course on the Catholic Reformation.  He did not teach many survey courses.

00:07:00	He the state of the history department when he arrived in 1965.  David Cronon was the chair.  The department had a good reputation in European history.

00:10:50	He was unaffected by the era of campus protest.

00:14:39	RK served as graduate adviser within the department.  He never aspired to be chair.

00:15:47	He received a grant to go to Princeton and work on a book.  

00:16:23	He was interested in the history of printing and he went to Belgium to research this.

00:16:53	He discusses his book, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement.

00:18:35	Research on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

00:26:51	RK speaks about the entry of women into the history department.

00:31:28	End of side.  

Tape 3/Side 2

00:31:45	Robert Kingdon discusses his relationship with David Cronon.

00:32:24	RK talks about his honors and awards.  He was a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.

00:39:31	He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1969-70, when he spent time in Geneva and Rome working on his massacre book.

00:48:03	He was a senior fellow at the Folger Library in 1973-74.  The library held many pamphlets on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

00:49:00	The Humanities Division gave him the Hilldale Award in 1992.

00:50:02	RK became a member of the Institute for Research in the Humanities in 1974.

00:51:49	He talks about his research on the history of printing in Belgium in 1957.

00:59:34	He mentions some talks he has given to religious groups.

01:03:21	End of side.  End of tape.

Second Interview Session (July 12, 2006): Tapes 4-6

Tape 4/Side 1

00:00:21	Robert Kingdon describes his membership in various professional organizations: Renaissance Society of New England; New England British Studies Society; Central Renaissance Society; American Society for Reformation Research; Sixteenth Century Studies Society.  He edited the journal of the Sixteenth Century Studies Society.

00:11:06	RK continues to discuss editing the journal.

00:18:06	Society for French Historical Studies.

00:19:07	He occasionally goes to the meetings of a historical society in Geneva.

00:21:19	Society for the History of French Protestantism; International Congress of Historical Sciences; International Society for the Comparative Study of Church History. 

00:23:10	American Society of Church History.

00:25:12	RK welcomed the development of the Religious Studies Program at UW.  His courses on the Reformation were listed in the program.

00:29:40	Center for Calvin Studies.

00:31:18	End of side.

Tape 4/Side 2

00:31:27	Robert Kingdon continues to talk about the Center for Calvin Studies in Grand Rapids.

00:37:38	 Seminar activities in the Foundation for Reformation Research in St. Louis.  One of the key activities of this organization was the teaching of paleography.

00:44:30	RK describes some of his former graduate students and their subsequent careers.  One of his earliest students studied women’s history and ran a women’s history seminar at UW.

01:01:34	End of side.  End of tape.	

Tape 5/Side 1

00:00:16	Robert Kingdon continues to discuss some of his outstanding graduate students.

00:23:30	RK talks about contentious issues in the history department in the 1980s and 1990s.  There is a political split in the department between left and right.

00:26:27	The proposed department of Afro-American studies became another issue for the history department.

00:27:32	The history department was nationally known for its radicalism, based mostly on the reputations of Harvey Goldberg and William Appleman Williams.  But there are also many conservatives in the department, such as Stanley Payne.

00:30:43	David Cronon was department chair when RK arrived at UW.

00:31:18	End of side.

Tape 5/Side 2

00:31:31	Robert Kingdon talks about Allan Bogue and Theodore Hamerow as chairs of the history department.

00:33:27	RK was frustrated in his attempts to get an appointment in early modern European history to complement his work in Reformation studies.  Ultimately Suzanne Desan filled this position.

00:37:12	He talks about his career in the Institute for Research in the Humanities.  He served as a member of the selection committee.  He had been elected a permanent member of the Institute while he was doing research in Washington.

00:43:37	David Cronon left the directorship of the Institute to become dean of Letters & Science.  The selection committee chose RK as the new director.

00:46:26	The biggest challenge he faced as director was to mediate tensions between the College of Letters & Science and the Graduate School.  He relates the history of the Institute and its dependence on L&S.

00:49:23	RK succeeded in increasing the number of postdoctoral fellowships.  Chancellor Wiley later phased out this program but the Solmsen gift enabled the Institute to maintain it.

00:51:19	He was surprised that the Graduate School withdrew its support for the Institute.  He never met with Dean Robert Bock personally.  

00:54:19	The Graduate School wanted the Institute to raise its own funds.

00:57:58	Initially the members of the Institute were comprised of a network of classical and Renaissance scholars who had close academic and personal relationships, centering on the figure of Marshall Clagett.

00:59:50	The Institute membership became more diverse under the directorship of David Cronon.  RK describes some of his fellow members.

01:02:34	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 6/Side 1

00:00:26	Robert Kingdon continues to describe his fellow permanent members of the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

00:03:15	David Cronon was able to fund the Institute from his position as dean of L&S.

00:05:11	The Institute needed greater visibility on campus.

00:06:47	RK describes various sources of funding for the Institute.

00:08:47	He talks about organizing conferences.

00:14:14	Conferences and other events commemorating Martin Luther.

00:16:51	The Institute has been used to recruit and retain faculty members in the humanities.

00:19:05	RK is apprehensive about the future of the Institute.

00:22:44	He discusses the support of L&S deans for the Institute.

00:24:10	The Institute will move out of its current facilities in Washburn Observatory.

00:24:46	RK discusses his current affiliation with the Institute.

00:25:42	He describes deciphering manuscripts of the Geneva Consistory.

00:31:22	End of side.

Tape 6/Side 2

00:31:50	Robert Kingdon continues to discuss his work on deciphering manuscripts of the Geneva Consistory.  These manuscripts contain records of divorce cases, sexual behavior, and business practices.

00:39:22	The transcripts are currently being edited.

00:40:34	Volumes on Calvinist views of marriage and marital problems.

00:45:55	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview.

END