Brison D. Gooch

Brison Dowling Gooch (March 1, 1925 – November 25, 2014) was an American historian who was a professor emeritus of 19th-century European history at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas (TAMU). He was an authority on the Revolutions of 1848, Napoleon III, Belgium, and the Crimean War.

Background
Gooch was one of six children to be born to Austin McLellan Gooch, a carpenter, and the former Clara Helen Dowling, in Bar Harbor in Hancock County, Maine. In the United States Army, at the end of World War II, he served in Belgium and Germany. While in Germany, he attended the Nuremberg trials and heard discussions of German army atrocities in Russia. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Prior to his tenure at TAMU, which included terms as the history chairperson and associate dean of Liberal Arts, Gooch taught at Culver Military Academy and was a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oklahoma at Norman, and department head at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. In an academic career that spanned four decades, Gooch taught during summer sessions at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the University of Maine, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he had received both his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He also was a Carnegie visiting scholar for a year at Yale and Fulbright Faculty Research scholar in Belgium.

Gooch’s second wife, Shirley Jean Ferrell Black Gooch (April 20, 1935 – September 3, 1996), known professionally as Shirley J. Black, was also a TAMU professor of European history and highly active in the profession.

Publications

 * The New Bonapartist Generals in the Crimean War, 1959
 * Belgium and the February Revolution, 1963
 * Napoleon III – Man of Destiny: Enlightened Statesman or Proto-Fascist?, editor, 1966
 * The Reign of Napoleon III, 1969
 * Interpreting Western Civilization, 2 volumes, 1969, editor
 * Europe in the Nineteenth Century: A History, 1970
 * The World of Europe Since 1815, 1973, editor
 * Interpreting European History, 2 volumes, editor
 * The Origins of the Crimean War, editor, 1969
 * Napoleonic Ideas, editor

Gooch contributed articles to a number of major historical journals, including the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Austrian History Yearbook, Military Affairs and Victorian Studies.

Professional organizations
Gooch was active in various professional organizations, including the American Historical Association (AHA), and he attended many meetings and conventions during his career and also in retirement. In December 1969, he was elected to the nominating committee at the AHA annual meeting, and in 1979 was also elected by his colleagues as the president of the Southwestern Social Sciences Association.

In 1974, Gooch was one of the founders of the Western Society for French History and served as its president in 1982.

Retirement
Brison Gooch retired in 1991 and relocated to Silverton, Colorado, a scenic mountain resort and former mining community in San Juan County in southwestern Colorado. After Shirley's death, Gooch married Freda Carley Peterson, a local historian, author of The Story of Hillside Cemetery, and archivist for the San Juan County Historical Society in Silverton.

In 2007, Gooch donated his personal library to Tabor College, a small liberal arts college in Hillsboro, Kansas.

In 2009, Brison and Freda Gooch were named "Citizens of the Year" by the Silverton Chamber of Commerce.

Gooch served as Silverton's municipal judge and as a member of the town council, until his resignation in December 2009. He was also a former member of the Silverton School Board.

Gooch died at the age of eighty-nine in 2014 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he had alternated his time with Silverton during his last years.