Hogue, Arthur R. (Arthur Reed), 1906-1986

Indiana University professor of history, 1950-1974.

Arthur Reed Hogue was born on November 16, 1906, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Hogue graduated Magna cum laude from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1928 and was admitted to Harvard with a university scholarship in the same year. In 1929, the Harvard faculty of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Toppan Prize in Political Science. While finishing his doctoral work, Hogue began his professional academic career at Radcliff College as a teaching assistant in history in 1930 until 1934, when he received both his Ph.D. in history and a Francis Parkman Fellowship, from which he later resigned to take a position at Hanover College (Indiana) as an assistant professor.

Within one year (1935), Hogue had been promoted to full professor at Hanover, and by 1938 was named Head of the Department of History, and later named Academic Dean in 1944. He served as both department chair and dean for the next four years until 1948, when he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Illinois as an Assistant Professor. During this time, Hogue met and married Elizabeth Steinbrecher. They would have only a single child, David, but Hogue’s correspondence makes it clear that he had a large community of real and fictive kin with whom he regularly interacted. In addition, he developed his love of horses and the outdoors, and was known to always have at least one horse stabled in nearby Kentucky where he would spend his spare time. He also spent his summers at a ‘dude’ ranch in Colorado where his son, David, eventually settled.

Hogue remained for only two years at the University of Illinois, but it was during this time that, through a family acquaintance, he discovered a handwritten manuscript by Carl Schurz, a prominent German born American and statesman who campaigned for Lincoln, and was a close colleague of Charles Sumner, which the manuscript was about. The find was considered to be an important discovery of American history, and Hogue would be consumed with the transcription, translation, editing, publishing and correspondence regarding the Schurz papers for the next decade. In addition, the publication of Charles Sumner: An Essay by Carl Schurz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951) would involve him in an international search and recovery for missing documents, especially letters that were passed between Schurz and Miss Fanny Chapman, and were thought to have been ‘stolen’ during the second World War. Carl Schurz is a former United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior. In 1951, Hogue, along with one hundred other scholars, cultural advisors, and people involved in commerce, was invited by the German Government to an exchange study tour of West German Universities, which allowed him, among other activities, to converse with various scholars and interested parties in Germany about the problem of the missing letters, educational practices, and the life of Schurz.

In 1950, Hogue accepted the appointment of Associate Professor of History at Indiana University where he began to work on his primary interests of European History, particularly of the Classical and Medieval periods, while undertaking a lead role in teaching core courses in the History Department. Aside from a host of other university related committee work, including serving on the Faculty Council, he chaired the committee on Medieval Studies, taught many of the historical survey classes on European History, helped to found the American Society for Legal History, and began to formalize his long time interest in Medieval Legal History, particularly the development in English Common Law of the rules governing the relationship between buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, and debtor and creditor-subjects of his 1936 doctoral dissertation, Form and Action in Litigation between Creditors and Debtors in 13th Century England . In 1966, he published Origins of the Common Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), which has become a standard text for the basic understanding of the development of American law and its relationship to the English Tradition, still recommended by Law Schools in the United States, and currently in print. Following the publication of Origins, Hogue was promoted to full professor in July of 1966.

Hogue continued to be an active scholar and teacher until his retirement in 1974. In the retirement notices published by the university, Hogue was noted for his generosity and respect towards students and for his lively and informative lecturing style and was promoted to Emeritus without hesitation. Memorializing Hogue’s death on Tuesday, February 18, 1986, the Indiana University Faculty Council Memorial Resolution noted not only his significant contributions to scholarship, but his sense of humor and sophistication, “in the best sense of the word.”