Obituary: Fred Bateman, Former BHC President

Professor J. Fred Bateman, 74, passed away on Monday, January 10, 2012, at his home in Athens, Georgia. Bateman was the Nicholas A. Beadles Professor in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He moved to Georgia to become department head in 1991 after a long and productive career at Indiana University that began in 1964. Bateman was the president of the Business History Conference in 1982-1983.

Bateman received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Tulane University, and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina. He spent two years as a research associate at Harvard University before taking his first academic position in the School of Business at Indiana University, where he became professor in 1975.

Bateman was the author of two books, the editor of two others, and wrote more than 50 scholarly articles. He was an expert in agricultural history and manufacturing in nineteenth-century America. His most frequent collaborators were Jeremy Atack, with whom he authored more than two dozen articles, and Tom Weiss.

He was interested in archival work and created several original databases that have been used by numerous scholars, including the panel database of American Agriculture. With James Foust he created the Agricultural and Demographic Records of 21,000 rural households from the 1860 census. With Foust and Tom Weiss he constructed a sample of U.S. Manufacturing Firms from 1850 to 1870, and with Jeremy Atack he constructed a sample of U.S. Manufacturing in 1880 and a matched sample of rural households in 1880.

Please see the EH.Net announcement for a full obituary.