HER HISTORY
LIVES ON By Katie E. Ismael
S
he may not have physically been there, but it was still her hands writing the words. It was still her voice that was coming through. It was still her years of research and her scholarship they were bringing to life. There, within the pages of Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution, Caroline Cox was with them again.
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History Professor Caroline Cox, who joined Pacific in 1998, died on July 11, 2014. This April, her fourth and final book was published, with the help of family, friends and colleagues.
Cox was a beloved history professor and magnetic storyteller who had influenced countless students before she succumbed to cancer in the summer of 2014. To understand how this professor’s fourth and final book was brought to completion, you need to know her history.
HER STORY... There is much to say about Cox and her 59 years on this Earth. At the age of 24, she emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, to pursue a career in finance. She worked in New York City, in Idaho and in the Bay Area before she had a career shift. As one story goes, while working in finance in San Francisco, she would pass a homeless man every morning in front of the same store. One day, she heard him crying. She stopped to talk to him, then held him as he cried. Right then, she decided to make a change so she could have a bigger impact on the future. So, at the age of 30, she entered college. She went on to earn her degrees, including a PhD in history, at UC Berkeley. “Her experience as a nontraditional student encouraged her to mentor and support every student who crossed her threshold in her 15-year career at Pacific,” said Greg Rohlf, also a history professor and a close friend of Cox. She joined Pacific in 1998 and established her academic reputation as a cultural historian of the Continental Army, wrote Rohlf in a memoir published in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History newsletter. Her first book, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army, was widely reviewed and praised for its analysis of hierarchy and class attitudes in colonial America, he said.
University of the Pacific | Pacific Review Summer 2016 | Pacific.edu