A. Hunter Dupree

leading historian of American Science and Technology

Hunter Dupree died peacefully at home in Cambridge on November 30, 2019. He was two months short of his 99th birthday. Hunter was married to Marguerite Louise (Betty) Arnold for 68 years until her death in 2014. A native of Seattle, she graduated from the University of Washington in 1940, where she was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and Mortar Board. She was the daughter of G. Wright Arnold, a member of the Alaska Boundary Survey and long-time Seattle patent attorney and Marguerite M. Arnold a founder of the Girl Scouts in Seattle. She was sister of the late Wright H Arnold of Bellevue WA and mother of Anderson H Dupree Jr. of Bainbridge Island, WA.

Born on January 29, 1921, Hunter grew up in Lubbock TX. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in History from Oberlin College in 1942. In the Navy he was stationed in Seattle where he met his future wife; he served on the USS Tennessee in the Pacific theatre of World War II, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He completed his PhD at Harvard in History and became a leading historian of American science and technology. He is author of Asa Gray, 1810-1888, recognized as the seminal biography of Darwin's leading advocate in nineteenth-century America, and of Science in the Federal Government: a History of Policies and Activities to 1940, the first investigation exploring the relationships between science and the American government. He was professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley and George L Littlefield Professor of History at Brown University.

Hunter was a loving husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather, who will be deeply missed by his two children, Marguerite W Dupree and Anderson H "Andy" Dupree, and their spouses Rick Trainor and Jillon Dupree, and four grandchildren: Richard and Meg Trainor and Nicholas and Sarah Dupree, and by Richard's wife Rachel Finnegan, by their daughter and Hunter's great granddaughter, Juno, and by Meg's fiance;, Luke Auty.