Neil R. Stout MA’58, PhD’61, died at his home in Hardwick, Vermont, on February 3, six months after his 90th birthday.
He was born August 12, 1932, in Lowell, Ohio, and grew up on a small family farm. It was widely expected that he would go to an agricultural college, but with his mother’s encouragement, he applied to Harvard and was accepted with a full tuition scholarship. After graduating with a BA in history in 1954, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to qualify for the GI Bill, and had the good fortune of being sent to France in peacetime. He returned to America in 1956 to marry Marilyn Blumenstiel, a Simmon’s College graduate whom he had met at a freshman mixer his first week of college, and to begin graduate studies in American history at the University of Wisconsin. He once described his years at Wisconsin — a young newlywed, studying under Merrill Jensen — as among his happiest.
His first faculty position was at Texas A&M but, eager to leave the segregated South, he accepted an offer in 1964 from the University of Vermont. He remained on the UVM history faculty until 2001. Though he specialized in colonial America, he ranged widely in his academic work, helping to found UVM’s historic preservation program, directing the university’s program in cultural history and museology, and teaching interdisciplinary courses such as a class on autobiographies. At the time of his death he was still in regular contact with students stretching back to the early 1970s.
His writings include two books, The Perfect Crisis: The Beginning of the Revolutionary War and The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775. A guide he wrote for his students, Getting the Most Out of Your U.S. History Course: The History Student’s Vade Mecum, became so popular that a large textbook company bought it and sold it with their history textbooks. His final piece of published writing appeared in November 2022 in the journal Commonplace, “The Curious Affair of the Horsewhipped Senator: A Diplomatic Crisis That Didn’t Happen.”
He is survived by his daughter, Hilary Stout, and son-in-law, Peter Truell, of New York City; three grandchildren; two sisters, Sarah Stout, of Chevy Chase, MD, and Nancy Stout ’64, of New York City; and his partner, Elizabeth Dow, of Hardwick, Vermont. Marilyn died in 2017 after 61 years of happy marriage. He also lost his son, Peter Stout, in 2014, and a sister, Mary Carol, who died in infancy in 1942.