David Ernest Alsobrook

Abstract

David Ernest Alsobrook Scotty E. Kirkland (bio) David ernest alsobrook, ph.d., the seventy-first president of the Alabama Historical Association, died on October 28, 2021, after a brief illness. He was seventy-five years old. I first met David in 2008 and was privileged to serve on his staff at the History Museum of Mobile from 2011 until 2015. Our overlapping research interests and similar upbringings cemented our fast friendship. For the past decade, we often served as "second readers," behind our spouses, of course, of each other's writing projects. I was undeniably the junior partner in that arrangement and benefited greatly from it. In the days after David's passing, I had separate conversations with Lonnie Burnett and Matthew Downs about our mutual friend and confidante and of the great loss to the Alabama historical community. I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss David's scholarship and professional service, particularly in the journal where much of his work appeared. In doing so, I recognize two things: that many who read this remembrance were lucky to have known David far longer than I, and any accounting of his contributions to Alabama history will somehow seem inadequate and incomplete. Such was the depth of his knowledge and the scope of his work. Born in Eufaula in 1946, David grew up in Mobile, where his father worked as a construction supervisor and his mother served as a teacher in the public school system. He earned an undergraduate degree in [End Page 4] secondary education with a concentration in English from Auburn University in 1968. He taught English and Social Studies during the 1968-69 school year at Eufaula High School. Thereafter, he taught for three years in Mobile County's recently integrated Theodore High School. During the summer terms, David pursued a master's degree in American History from West Virginia University, which he completed in 1972. His thesis explored the career of William Dorsey Jelks, a longtime Eufaula newspaper editor and governor of Alabama from 1901 until 1907. David subsequently authored the Jelks entry in Samuel L. Webb and Margaret E. Armbrester's edited volume Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State (Tuscaloosa, 2001). Leaving the secondary classroom behind, David returned to Auburn to pursue a doctorate, which he completed in 1983, writing a dissertation on Progressive-Era Mobile. As the first graduate of Auburn's Archival Training Program, he set a high bar for those who would come after him. Following a year as an archivist at the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) in 1975-76, he entered into the service of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), where he remained for three decades. His tenure included two stints working as archivist and White House liaison with NARA's Office of Presidential Libraries. David was a supervisory archivist at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and was the founding director of the George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton presidential libraries—the first person tasked with launching two such institutions. Returning to Alabama upon his federal retirement in 2007, he was director of the History Museum of Mobile for eight years. During a writing career which spanned some four decades, David authored more than twenty articles—and contributed as many book reviews—in a wide range of scholarly journals, including Provenance, Gulf South Historical Review, Government Information Quarterly, Alabama Historical Quarterly, the Atlanta Historical Journal, and the Annuals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In more recent years, he contributed to Alabama Heritage magazine and the online Encyclopedia of Alabama as well. [End Page 5] The greatest corpus of his work was to be found within the pages of the Alabama Review, the journal of the AHA, of which he was an active member for more than four decades. His first article appeared in the July 1977 issue. Although a mere five pages in length, the piece introduced into the historical record a fascinating April 1898 letter from Alabama congressman Henry D. Clayton on the topic of the impending war with Spain. Addressed to Governor Joseph F. Johnston, the letter expressed Clayton's contrary opinion of both the inevitability...