MEMORIAL RESOLUTION                                            SenD#4638
===================                                        January, 1997


FREDERICK P. BOWSER
(1937-1996)

The colleagues of Professor Frederick P. Bowser regret his death on June 
17, 1996,  after a long struggle with cancer.  A native of New Mexico, 
Fred was raised near Roswell and attended the University of New Mexico, 
where he studied under France Scholes who kindled in him a life-long 
commitment to research and writing on the colonial history of Latin 
America.  Later, at U. C. Berkeley, Fred took his Ph. D. under Engel 
Sluiter, who taught the traditional virtues of deep archival research 
and exacting attention to detail, virtues which Fred himself embodied in 
his research and teaching in the Stanford History Department which he 
joined in 1967.

FredŐs legacy includes one landmark book on the history of slavery in 
post-Conquest Peru, and several important articles and papers. The 
African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650, a Stanford Press book, was 
awarded the Herbert Eugene Bolton prize in 1975 for best book published 
in English that year in a topic in Latin American history. His long 
essay on the Spanish colonial church in the Latin American Research 
Review is a classic.  His legacy also includes the many graduate 
students he mentored at various stages of their training, providing a 
mix of high scholarly standards, encouragement, and tough love which was 
the hallmark of his effectiveness and which they reciprocated with 
affection.

For his dry wit, collegiality and consummate professionalism and 
commitment to the Latin American history program, Fred Bowser is greatly 
missed.  He leaves his wife Margaret Chowning, who teaches Latin 
American history at Berkeley, and their twin daughters, and another 
daughter from his first marriage.

                                                 Stephen Haber
                                                 John J. Johnson
                                                 John D. Wirth