Stevie Wolf’s Fine Legacy – Shan Holt

Figure 1. Stevie Wolf hosts a salon for fellow scholars of early American studies. Photo courtesy of George W. Boudreau.

Lots of people will not know Stevie’s fine legacy as a scholar in her splendid community studies, as a teacher and mentor at Winterthur and elsewhere, and as an incisive, thoughtful contributor to McNeil Center discussions from the Center’s founding year. I remember and honor her also as a model of professional womanhood.

Stevie let me know early that I was welcome in the intellectual community around the Center, even though I was only in my first year of part-time doctoral studies and working there as a secretary. Her genuine interest in who I was and what I was thinking created space in ways no one else did. When I became a wife and mother while being a young academic myself, she stayed right there, encouraging, fostering, honoring the impossible pressures that accumulated, sharing her experiences and wisdom on how to navigate it all.

Later on, when I left academia and retrained as a public historian, Stevie and her husband Ted remained friendly supporters, investing in my anti-hate group project, supporting my work at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, and continuing to advise me and lift my spirits.

In the last months of the monthly supper club that Mike Zuckerman and I maintained with Ted and Stevie for decades, she wasn’t able to rise from her wheelchair to serve us salad and dessert. That became my contribution and it felt right to do as a small thanks for all the perspective and support she had given me.

I miss my friend so very much, and I’m sure there are others in my generation of female scholars who knew her as a mentor as well. I believe we carry her legacy forward when we struggle for fair chances to be all that we are, study what interests us, and say what we think. Thanks, Stevie … your power remains.

A native of the Great Lakes region, Shan Holt earned a Ph.D in American history in 1991 from the University of Pennsylvania. Author of Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina freedpeople working for themselves, 1865-1900, she divided her career between academic teaching and public history, serving museums and historical organizations in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. She received an Emmy award for her work as a historical commentator in the popular video series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment (History Making Productions). From 2014 until her retirement in 2023, Holt taught history and public history at Pennsylvania State University’s Abington campus. Currently, besides supporting the League of Women Voters in eliminating the Electoral College, Holt is involved in several public history projects in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.