Albert Hoxie
Albert Hoxie was a beloved History instructor who inspired tens of thousands of students over his 46 year teaching career at UCLA. An expert on Renaissance art, Hoxie loved travel and teaching. Upon his death in 1999, Professor Hoxie bequeathed his extensive collection of over 160,000 European art and architcture slides along with his personal library and a generous monetary endowment to the UCLA Department of History.
Professor Hoxie majored in Classics and History at Stanford. A graduate student in medieval history (with an art history minor) at Wisconsin when the Second World War began, he left school to enter the service. He served as an officer in Italy and North Africa and was the official historian of the Army Air Force Corps in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. By 1950 Professor Hoxie was teaching both History and Art History at UCLA, but he soon settled in the History Department as a jack of all trades, teaching 32 different lecture courses in his long and illustrious teaching career.
Albert Hoxie was an engaged and passionate teacher. According to Professor Geoffrey Symcox, his lectures were tremendously popular with students and they often applauded at the conclusion of his class. One student whom he inspired was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wrote in his 1996 book Black Profiles in Courage, “He taught me that authentic history was not dry, lifeless facts but rather the living legacies of real human beings.” UCLA’s highest teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award, was awarded to Professor Hoxie in 1973.
The slides that he bequeathed to the department were collected over the course of Professor Hoxie’s career, on annual photography trips around the world. The majority of his travels and his images came from Western Europe. The late long-time history department counselor (and graduate of UCLA) Paul Padilla spoke fondly of travelling abroad with Professor Hoxie as a history graduate student. He recalled trips behind the Iron Curtain and through Iran where Professor Hoxie acted as tour guide to the taxi driver, retelling many historical stories of the city and its architecture. Returning home from abroad, Professor Hoxie would often invite friends and colleagues to view his slides. “The sense I have of art history I owe principally to him and those slide evenings,” noted Professor Symcox. Mr. Padilla had fond memeories of Professor Hoxie’s famous New Year’s Eve parties, where the host would regale his guests with amusing stories from history or from his travels. Albert Hoxie was a charismatic, popular, and beloved professor and friend.
The UCLA History department has created this website to honor Albert Hoxie and to remember his slide collection and his impact on the department.
Albert Hoxie Obituary by Brian Fishman as posted on the website phillipmfeldman.org
Albert Hoxie Memoir
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