Francis Paul Prucha

Francis Paul Prucha (January 4, 1921 – July 30, 2015) was an American historian, professor emeritus of history at Marquette University, and specialist in the relationship between the United States and Native Americans. His work, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, won the Ray Allen Billington Award and was one of the two finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in History. His dissertation, a study of the role of the peacetime army in the settlement process, was published in 1953 as Broadax and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Development of the Northwest, 1815-1860.

Prucha was a Jesuit; he joined the Society of Jesus in 1950 and was ordained in 1957 after studying at Saint Louis University and Saint Mary's College in Kansas. Three years later, he began teaching at Marquette and is remembered by generations of alumni as a model of the teacher-scholar. He became a priest with the name "Father Francis Paul Prucha, S.J." in 1957. From 1960 until his retirement he was on the history faculty at Marquette University. He served as visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma and at Harvard and was the Gasson Professor at Boston College.

In the late 1960s, while studying under a Guggenheim Fellowship, Prucha began work on a comprehensive history of US Indian policy. His research culminated with the two-volume The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1985 and is regarded as a classic among professional historians. The Great Father was awarded the Billington Prize by the Organization of American Historians in 1985. The recipient of six honorary degrees, Prucha was awarded his emeritus appointment in 1988.

Prucha died at the St. Camillus Jesuit Community in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. At 94 years of age he was the oldest member of the Wisconsin Province. He was a Jesuit for 64 years and a priest for 58 years.

Scholarship Prucha was a member of the Western History Association, serving on the editorial board of the Western Historical Quarterly and as the association's 22nd president in 1982–83. Prucha was also inducted into the Milwaukee Central Library's Wisconsin Writers Wall of Fame. In 1987, he became a Fellow of the Society of American Historians in recognition of a lifetime of scholarship characterized by "literary distinction" and "scholarly merit". and his study, Andrew Jackson's Indian Policy: A Reassessment, has been dubbed as "the best defense of Jackson's Indian policy". Biographer Jon Brudvig summarizes Prucha's interpretation of that government policy:

Prucha's survey portrayed natives and Europeans clashing from the earliest period of cultural contact. To protect the American Indians, Prucha demonstrated how public officials use their authority to guard Indians against the destructive forces of the dominant culture. Prucha calls this paternalism, "a determination to do what was best for the Indians according to white norms, which translated into protection, subsistence of the destitute, punishment of the unruly, and eventually taking Indians by the hand and leading them along the path to white civilization and Christianity."

Honorary degrees

Doctor of Humane Letters, Le Moyne College, 1974. Doctor of Humane Letters, Creighton University, 1978. Doctor of Laws, Merrimack College, 1985. Doctor of Letters, Marquette University, 1988. Doctor of Humane Letters, Loyola University Chicago, 1992. Doctor of Humane Letters, College of the Holy Cross, 1992.