Thanks, Roy

I was introduced to Roy when I was a graduate student at a Yale, when he and his colleagues spoke at the May, 1994, "Hypertext @ Yale" conference (where a specially networked computer room was set up to allow participants to operate "Mosaic," the first World Wide Web browser). They presented the CD-ROM version of *Who Built America*, and it transformed the way I thought about doing, and presenting, history.

I contacted Roy a couple years later, when I'd been hired by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute to create the New Deal Network. Roy immediately emailed me back with his encouragement, suggestions, and a raft of contacts. I continued to ask him for his advice, and his generosity was boundless. I would have been honored simply to consider him a mentor, but Roy turned the tables by asking for *my* advice, asking me to comment on his articles, asking me to write review essays, and to serve on panels and advisory committees (where, surprise! one's advice was actually solicited!). I never turned him down. I would have agreed to his requests a dozen times over. Roy hooked me good.

Because, of course, the dirty secret about those of us who are social historians or who are committed to social justice is that many of us are not all that sociable. But Roy would have none of that. From the start he saw that this new medium must be a collaborative enterprise, that the inter-networks were about social networks. Roy understood the web long before there was a web. Not the web of servers and routers and hypertext transfer protocols. The big web. The web the poet Denise Levertov wrote about:

designed, beyond all spiderly contrivance to link, not to entrap:

elation, grief, joy, contrition entwined; shaking, changing, forever forming, transforming:

As committed as he was to social change, Roy never seemed to descend into cynicism, and I think in part that was because his vision of a better world was one of not simply what that world might *be*, but what the world *is*, once you strip away all the bullshit and injustice.

I'm so very fond of you, Roy, for all your gentleness and generosity. I know we continue to live on in the connections we leave behind, and I'm so grateful to find myself entwined in this wonderful community of friends and colleagues that you have fashioned: filled with people eccentric and talented, fun-loving and brave. Visionary; full of joy and sorrow. Thank you, Roy.