The Committee regards it a unique opportunity to recommend that the Distinguished Service Award for 1983 be made to one of the founders of our profession, Irving A. Leonard. By the time he received his doctorate at Berkeley in 1928 under the guidance of Herbert Eugene Bolton, Leonard had already established what came to be his distinctive characteristic as a scholar, an equal attachment to history and literature. In his own words, he became a “half-caste historian.” His career at the University of Michigan from 1942 until his retirement in 1965 included teaching and administrative duties in both fields, and he appropriately held the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Chair in his later years. In the Conference, Leonard has served on all the major committees and was Chairman in 1960. He was a member of the Board of Editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review in the 1940s and has been an Advisory Editor since 1954. His principal books have become classics in the cultural history of Spanish America: Don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1929); Baroque Times in Old Mexico (1959); and especially his master work, Books of the Brave (1949). By demonstrating the free flow of publications from Spain to America in the sixteenth century, Leonard did much to dispel the myth of Spanish obscurantism. Still active at age 87, he is currently collaborating on an edition of the works of Sigüenza y Góngora. Leonard has always been the true gentleman in his generosity toward colleagues and in his encouragement of younger scholars.
As a New England yankee who immersed himself in an alien language and culture and as a fine stylist for whom the narrative form has always been central, he recalls for us Prescott and the roots of our profession. In this day when social science is ascendant, Irving Leonard reminds us of the enduring bond between history and literature.
