Tom Pressly was a distinguished professor of American history in the
University of Washington for much of his long life. Born on January 18,
1919, he was raised in Tennessee, first in Troy, a town in the west,
then in Knoxville, the state’s third largest city. Educated in the
public schools of Troy and Knoxville and in Harvard University, he
received B.A. and M.S. degrees in 1940 and 1941 with history as his
major field of study.
Following receipt of the master’s degree, young Pressly became a member
of the nation’s rapidly developing military forces. Drafted into the
Army in June 1941, well before the attack upon Pearl Harbor, he was
commissioned a second lieutenant in April of the following year and then
served nearly a year in the Sixth Air Force in Panama. Now a first
lieutenant, he spent the next six months in Mississippi, where he
trained to become a navigator. Next, he instructed student navigators
for more than a year and, late in that period, guided a B-24 on a
delivery flight from California to Australia. Reassigned to the
Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, he flew combat missions in B-24s during
the last three months of the European War. Finally, in November 1945,
after well over four years of service, Captain Pressly was discharged
from the Army.
Almost immediately after he had arrived for training as a navigator at
Selman Field in Jackson, Mississippi, Tom met Lillian Cameron, the
secretary of the field’s commanding officer. On April 30, 1943,
following a brief courtship, the young couple married. After the war,
Cameron and Tom became parents of two children, Thomas James Pressly II
and Stephanie Pressly. Their courtship had been short, as it was for
many wartime marriages, but this one lasted for more than sixty years.
In 1946, Tom returned to Harvard for another year of graduate study and
then embarked upon an academic career. He taught first at Princeton
University for three years and then, in 1949, accepted an appointment in
the University of Washington and completed his doctoral dissertation.
By that time, he had lived for thirty years in two sections of the U.S.,
both the North and the South, and served in the Army Air Forces in
Panama and Europe as well as the United States, and those years had
prepared him well for the career that lay ahead.
Tom succeeded in Seattle, rising to the rank of full professor by 1960.
W. Stull Holt, the head of the small history department during those
years, was a veteran of both World War I and World War II and a strong
leader. Although the two veterans disagreed about some professional
issues, they developed a long friendship. One large contribution to
Tom’s success in the department was his publication, in 1954, of a major
book, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, a work in intellectual as
well as political history that was published by Princeton University
Press, widely reviewed, and widely admired. The admiration for the book
was not the only testimonial at the time to his talents as a historian.
He also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Center for
Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University that
enabled him to devote two years in the 1950s to research and writing.
Furthermore, as evidence that he seemed destined for a great career as a
publishing scholar, he chose a great topic for a second book. It was to
be a study of the idea of the right of revolution in the United States,
another work on the links between political history and intellectual
history. In 1962, he published a major article on the topic in The
American Historical Review and seemed headed toward a great career as a
publishing scholar.
Yet, Tom never finished the book. Although he continued to work on the
topic for a number of years, he did not publish the book because he
never made it his top priority. Instead, by the 1960s, teaching clearly
occupied that position on his scale. He directed the work of several
talented graduate students who went on to good careers, but the number
was small and the last one finished his dissertation in the early 1970s.
After that, he still taught graduate students in his classes and served
on doctoral committees but never chaired one. Some graduate students
worked with him as teaching assistants and benefitted greatly from that
experience. What they witnessed was Tom teaching undergraduates and
bringing great enthusiasm and creativity to the task. The students
included some who hoped to teach history in high schools; he had a
strong interest in them and continued to be available and helpful after
they graduated from the university. However, students did not need to be
headed toward a career in the historical profession to appreciate his
teaching. On the last day each quarter, many students in his
undergraduate classes on the American Civil War and the U.S. in the
twentieth century stood up and applauded him enthusiastically.
Tom was a creative teacher. He sought his own ways of doing the job and
designed what colleagues and others called “the Pressly Method.” It
emphasized the reading of primary sources, the documents written by
people who participated in and/or witnessed history. The method
testified to the professor’s confidence in the students. He viewed them
as capable of reading and writing effectively about what they found in
the sources. He encouraged them and gave them opportunities to do that.
In 1974 the University of Washington Alumni Association recognized Tom
Pressly as an “Outstanding Teacher!”
Tom’s reputation as a professor interested in teaching spread beyond the
UW campus. As early as 1961, he directed a History Teachers Conference.
In 1965, he participated in a National Defense Education Act Summer
Institute for High School Teachers, held at the University of Puget
Sound; the next year he directed another institute of this kind at home,
seizing an opportunity to stimulate teachers drawn from around the
country. During the late 1960s, he served on the American Historical
Association’s Committee on Teaching and co-authored a booklet for that
association on “The Preparation of Secondary-School History Teachers,”
first published in 1968 and revised and republished later on. He also
served from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s on the National Advisory
Board of the Society for History Education and, in 1989, contributed an
article to the Organization of American Historians’ new Magazine of
History, a journal designed to serve teachers in the schools.
Beyond his contributions as a scholar, a teacher, and a teacher of
teachers, Tom was a great colleague inside the History Department.
Although he did not believe he could be an effective leader like his
friend Holt had been, he participated in departmental decision making
and governance in other ways. Perhaps even more important, he reached
out to and helped individual department members. He welcomed newcomers,
taking them out for meals so as to get acquainted with them. He wanted
to learn about their backgrounds and interests. He discussed their lives
and work as well as his own and indicated clearly that they were
welcome to turn to him for whatever he had to offer. And he kept in
touch.
Tom retired from the classroom in 1987 after nearly forty years in the
department but remained active. Living on for twenty five years, he
explored the possibility of turning out a new, updated version of his
great book on the Civil War. He did not accomplish that huge task, but
he did turn out other publications. He finished a book that a former
doctoral student and recently deceased friend, Maclyn Burg had begun on
the World War I experiences of Stull Holt. With another former student,
Glenn Linden, he published a reader on the Civil War, designed for
classroom use and giving students the primary sources he so strongly
wanted them to read and use. Entitled Voices from the House Divided: the
United States Civil War as Personal Experience, it represented the
Pressly Method.
During these years, Tom, helped by friends and family, also made two
generous contributions to the department that reflected both his
devotion to teaching and his high regard for his colleagues. One, the
Thomas and Cameron Pressly Endowed Prize Fund, recognized each year
excellent teachers of history in Washington’s secondary schools. The
other, the Thomas and Cameron Pressly Endowment for Faculty Development
in History helped young colleagues needing support for the development
of new courses while they also moved forward as scholars. A gift to
either of these funds would be a fitting way to recognize and extend
Professor Pressly’s influence. To give a gift, visit
https://www.washington.edu/giving/make-a-gift?page=funds&source_typ=2&source=ECL
or contact the History Department at 206-543-5790.
During this long retirement, Tom remained close to family, colleagues,
and other friends. He frequently came to campus for meals with them in
the Faculty Club (later the UW Club). Enjoying good health until the
late summer of 2010, he played tennis with friends and jogged by
himself. His son, a lawyer in Rutland, Vermont, his daughter, a school
teacher in Pasadena, California, and their spouses and children visited
often. Cameron died in 2005; he moved out of their home several years
later and into a nearby retirement center, and he died in his sleep on
April 3, 2012, less than three months after celebrating with friends his
ninety-third birthday.
