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Associate Professor of History Ellen Fitzpatrick is a student of twentieth-century America. "I find history both humbling and comforting," she says. "We see in the generations before us that people were faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, they lived in tumultuous times, and many devoted themselves to making the world a better place. There's a lot to be learned from the struggle they carried on." Fitzpatrick grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town rich in history. Her walk to grammar school took her by the home of Helen Hunt Jackson; Emily Dickinson's house was on the way to junior high. She went on to study at Hampshire College and Brandeis. She joined Harvard's history department in 1989 and is a popular teacher; this spring she is explicating American women's history and America in the Progressive Era. A prolific writer, she has just finished a textbook, "America in Modern Times," with Alan Brinkley, Ph.D. '79; it's due out next year. In the acknowledgments to her first book, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform, she noted the contributions of Chuck, seen above-a Himalayan with lilac points before whom one feels one should genuflect. Fitzpatrick once entered him in a cat show, and he won a prize for Most Impressive Tail. "When I'm writing a book and at the computer for long periods, he is quite supportive," she says. "He sleeps by the printer. When I am writing a short piece-a review, for instance-he runs across the keyboard."

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