Leonard S. Smith

Leonard Sander Smith (born June 23, 1932 in Sterling (Illinois) - † August 8, 2013 in Thousand Oaks , California ) was an American university professor and historian .

Since his father, Rev. A. Leonard Smith, was a pastor of a large Swedish Lutheran congregation, Leonard considered becoming a Lutheran pastor. He grew up in Stanton from 1934 to 1949, attended Spencer High School and Luther Junior College in Wahoo, Neb for two years. Shortly after graduating from Augustana College in Rock Island (Illinois) in 1954, he was appointed to the US for two years. Army drafted. Stationed in Germany, he learned the German language and began to be interested in German history and culture. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a Masters degree in history in 1958, he taught history at Luther College , Decorah . Here he married the sports teacher Sharon Faye Ronning, with whom he has three sons and a daughter. With a two-year Fulbright scholarship, he was able to study at the University of Göttingen from 1962 to 1964. At Washington University in St. Louis , where he obtained his Ph.D in history with the dissertation of Otto Hintze 's Comparative Constitutional History of the West , he was a doctoral candidate for Dietrich Gerhards , a former student of Friedrich Meinecke .

From 1969 to 1998 Leonard S. Smith was Professor of History at California Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks. He also taught English , philosophy and religion .

In the late 1970s, Gerhard put him on the trail of an archive research in Utrecht on his former colleague Hedwig Hintze . In the population register there, Smith discovered her date of death and the last address was the Academic Hospital Utrecht, which in turn had a single card (from 1940/41, as he later noted) with her name, date of birth and the diagnosis " Edogene Depression ". Since his other documents were destroyed in a bomb attack in late autumn 1944, the later whereabouts of her body are unknown. In November 1978 he corresponded with Gerhard Oestreich's widow Brigitte. Dietrich Gerhard made this information public in 1980 at an Otto Hintze conference of the Historical Commission in Berlin.

Leonard S. Smith was a member of the Ventura County Democratic Central Committee and President of the Conejo Valley Democrati Club . His wife initiated summer youth programs and was a member of the Ventura County Grand Jury in 1977-78 . With the support of his wife, he made contact with academics in the Baltic countries in the early 1990s.

Publications

• Religion and the Rise of History: Martin Luther and the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760 to 1810 ; 2009
• Martin Luther's Two Ways of Viewing Life and the Educational Foundation of a Lutheran Ethos ; 2011

Individual evidence

1. ^ In memoriam: Leonard S. Smith
2. ^ Leonard S. Smith, 81
3. ^ Friedrich Meinecke in his time: Studies on life and work ; Pp. 138, 140
4. ↑ Dr Leonard Sander Smith ( Memento of the original from December 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.