SOURCE: "Carl Becker," in Mythistory and Other Essays, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 147-73.

In the following essay, McNeill presents a personal view of Becker as a teacher and historian.

Forty-four years have passed since I came here to study history under Carl Becker; and returning to lecture, not to listen, is a little spooky. Memories, filtered and framed by subsequent experience, crowd round; and their vivacity is enhanced by the fact that I chose as my subject three historians who helped to shape my mind and whom I met here at Cornell in three different ways: Becker in the flesh, Toynbee through the first three volumes of A Study in History; and Braudel spectrally, through the writings of one of his mentors, Marc Bloch.

Is it an ill omen that Becker comes first? Turning my thoughts to him is perhaps quixotic in this place where his...