In Memorium
The community of scholars of the American Southwest suffered the loss of two important members recently. On 20 June 2010, University of New Mexico Professor Ferenc Morton Szasz died in Albuquerque after a long illness. During a career that spanned forty-three years, Szasz helped educate more than 20,000 students. He wrote four books, edited and coedited four more, and published almost ninety articles. The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion (University of New Mexico Press, 1984) was Szasz's most successful book.
David J. Weber, the foremost scholar of the Spanish borderlands, died in Gallup, New Mexico, on 20 August 2010 after a three-year battle with cancer. Since 1976 Weber was on the faculty at Southern Methodist University. In 1996 he became the founding director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. Weber was the author or editor of twenty-seven books and more than seventy articles. Beginning with The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), Weber published numerous books on New Mexico history. His best known work is The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992). In 2002 King Juan Carlos of Spain named Weber a member of the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica, the Spanish equivalent of a knighthood, and in 2005 Mexico named him to the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca . The American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted him in 2007.
—Rick Hendricks,
New Mexico State Historian