Letter to the Editor
Your feature (“America at 250: Why Studying U. S. History Matters,” summer 2026) was very welcome. I taught and researched U.S. history for 43 years, and Exeter largely determined my choice of lifelong vocation. In the winter of 1955, I was a lower in Frank Broderick’s world history class. He awakened in me a fascination with the past and a determination to continue studying history. He was a masterful teacher whom I have tried to imitate. As I have reminisced about Frank, I came to appreciate how exemplary the history faculty of Exeter was in the 1950s. As students, we knew that Henry Bragdon and Donald Cole were known well beyond the bounds of the Academy. Like thousands of young Americans, we read Bragdon’s textbook, History of a Free Nation.
What I did not appreciate in 1955 was how prescient Exeter’s history faculty was. Before the civil rights awakening in the 1960s, Exeter’s historians anticipated the sea change in the interpretation of America’s past. In 1959, Broderick authored the first biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. In the 1940s, as an undergraduate at Princeton, Broderick worked on behalf of civil rights and the admission of Black men to Princeton. (And he had the support of Robert Wicks, dean of the Princeton Chapel and, later, Exeter school minister.)
Winthrop Jordan, another Exeter historian in the 1950s, authored the history of racial thought, White Over Black, a landmark book which won the 1969 Bancroft Prize for the preeminent publication in U.S. history. (By the way, both Broderick and Jordan were Andover graduates.)
In the article, you quote Justice Willliam Brennan: “We remain imprisoned by the past as long as we deny its influence in the present.” At Exeter, Broderick, Jordan, Bragdon and their colleagues liberated us from the past. For while we discovered the authentic past in their classrooms, we were ironically and simultaneously exposed to the false: We were regularly assigned chapters from Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s The Growth of the American Republic, a widely used college-level text. These authors wrote that slaves were happy, healthy, well treated and elevated from the level of African barbarism. And slaves, in turn, gratefully revered their masters. In the classrooms of Exeter, we discovered that Morison and Commager was not history but an artifact of the American past.
Jack Marietta ’58
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Reviews of the new digital Bulletin are in!
Thanks for the online edition ... makes the Bulletin better than ever.
Bill Buck ’57
Online version of the PEA Bulletin is a welcome improvement. Let’s get some little movies on there!
Noel Evans ’64
Good for us!
Rob Abbot ’70
Very welcome development, and the digital edition is extremely well executed.
Jamie Broderick ’72
It looks great — thank you and congratulations!
Paul Sullivan ’73
This online version of The Exeter Bulletin is awesome! … Having the class notes online is great. I entered in the name of a classmate, and — BLAM! — there it was. Too cool :-)
Tim Kuo ’77
Great news — this is the version I didn't know I needed!
Kitty Balay ’81
Looks fantastic! Bravo!
Juliet Eastland ’86
What a wonderful development! I'm quite glad for this addition and very pleased that the print edition is not going anywhere. Thank you for your excellent stewardship of the Bulletin.
Natalie Kablaoui ’09
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What’s the best department on campus? We asked the experts.
Can you guess which department Nova Seals, instructor in English, picked as the best department on campus?
We want to hear from you! The Exeter Bulletin welcomes story ideas and letters related to articles published in recent issues. Send your remarks for consideration to bulletin@exeter.edu or Phillips Exeter Academy, The Exeter Bulletin, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH, 03833.
