Science & invention / Literature
Natalie Zemon Davis
1928–2023 · historian
Historian of early modern France and author of The Return of Martin Guerre, born in Detroit and educated at Cranbrook's Kingswood School.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
Toronto, Canada
aged 94- Birth name
- Natalie Zemon
- Detroit years
- 1928–1940s; 1950s
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit in 1928 into a middle-class Jewish family of Eastern European origin, and she attended Kingswood School Cranbrook, the girls' school on the Cranbrook campus in Bloomfield Hills. She went on to Smith College, Radcliffe and Harvard, and in 1948 married the mathematician and activist Chandler Davis. While he taught at the University of Michigan in the 1950s she did her doctorate there, finishing in 1959, but his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee cost him his job, and in the 1960s the family moved to Canada. She taught at Toronto, Berkeley and Princeton. Her book The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), written after she advised on the French film about the same sixteenth-century impostor case, became a classic of social history and was translated into more than twenty languages.
Highlights
- The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), translated into 22 languages
- Second woman to serve as president of the American Historical Association
- Holberg International Memorial Prize and U.S. National Humanities Medal
- Companion of the Order of Canada
- Kingswood School Cranbrook alumna; PhD, University of Michigan, 1959
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 2
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1940s
Kingswood School Cranbrook
Eliel Saarinen's girls' school on the Cranbrook campus, where she was a student before going to Smith College.
Studied here · 1950s–1959
University of Michigan
She completed her doctorate in history here in 1959.