A Tribute to Roy

I knew Roy was sick, and I suppose there’s a certain appropriateness—given how much of his life he lived on the Web--that I learned about his death from a friend’s email, but the news was still shocking, and brought me to a stop like no other I could have imagined.

I would never claim to have been close to Roy, in the sense that I may not even have been one of those 1,542 electronic business cards Deborah mentioned in her remarks at Roy’s memorial celebration. But like many of you on this site, you never had a conversation with Roy without feeling close to him, and I think I can say this too: since I first met him while working on the Radical History Review more than 30 years ago, I never had a conversation with him when I didn’t feel better afterwards than I did before. It’s not only that he was the funniest academic I’ve ever known, or that he communicated such warmth so effortlessly. It’s that he, personally and professionally, embodied the idea that we historians, and particularly radical historians, had the right and obligation to hope: for a more just and decent profession, country, and world.

Without Roy, many of us would have been far more tempted to make our careers into efforts to document just how bad things have been in the past, and how, very likely, they could even get worse. Roy’s book “Eight Hours for What We Will,” even though it charts a kind of declension in working-class leisure, opened a different kind of door for many of us: the idea that we could look at leisure and play as serious, even respectable areas of research. In my own case, I think I can say that without Roy, I could not even have considered, much less written, my first book, about the history of early baseball. When it was just a completed dissertation (and I was out of academia), and one of my advisors thought it might make a useful article someplace, and a couple of series editors had dismissed it—Roy ended up an anonymous reader for Cornell Press. Here’s what I wrote 20 years ago in the preface.

Roy Rosenzweig's thorough