Roger Ransom: A Riversider and a Renaissance man

Whether he was in a social setting or a classroom, Roger Ransom saw his role as unmistakable: Keep the audience captivated.

Ransom, who was on the UCR faculty for more than 40 years, liked to hold court in any setting and could do so on topics ranging from his academic disciplines, politics, the arts, or his time abroad, including extended stints in Russia.

Roger Ransom, photographed by Civil War miniatures in 2004. Photo by Michael Elderman.

Ransom died Dec. 28 at 87. He outlived his prognosis by many years following a 2014 diagnosis of multiple myeloma.

At a 2023 dinner party with his wife, Connie, and UCR friends, he sat at the head of the table - his penchant for stagemanship and self-deprecating humor on display.

Ransom said he entered Reed College in Portland as an undergraduate physics major, following in the footsteps of his father. Ransom recalled a physics professor pulled him aside and admonished "he was afraid I would not be a physics student much longer because I was no good at it."

"The difficulty with that is that he was right," Roger quipped over minestrone soup and sourdough bread at the home of his friend Kathryn Morton, whose late husband, Tom, was a UCR chemistry professor and close friend.

His eyes twinkled as he talked about how he met Connie in the late 1950s.

Ransom said his future father-in-law met Roger's older brother, David, and that Roger benefitted from the positive impression David made. If he was the brother of a man like that, his father-in-law surmised, Roger must be ok. "I could do no wrong in his eyes after he met David," Ransom said.

Roger described his late brother as a genius; David was Roger's hero, Connie said.

"He was engaging in conversation; you looked forward to talking to him," said Ron Loveridge, a longtime UCR colleague who has been on the UCR faculty since 1965. "But it wasn't that he was self-centered; he respected the ground rules of conversation."

Ransom grew up in California, New Jersey, and London. He graduated from Reed in 1959, persuading Connie to marry him a year later after a letter-writing campaign. He earned his Ph.D. in economic history at the University of Washington in 1963.

His first academic appointment was at the University of Virginia, where he taught from 1963 to 1968. When he first started teaching there, Connie said, "he was very young, and he looked even younger." Ransom was glad for the U.Va. policy that called for male professors to wear a coat and tie, because it distinguished him from the students.

When he went to UC Berkeley as a visiting professor, Ransom was disappointed by the relatively lax dress coat and continued wearing a suit. In time, he traded his ties for pendants, which he would collect the rest of his life.

In 1968, he got the call to join UCR's economics department.

"He was maybe the most generous university citizen of any faculty member I've ever known," said Carlos Cortez, a history department faculty member from 1968 to 1994, and still an active presence on campus.

Cortez alluded to a one-year period in which Ransom, an active faculty member, agreed to step in as interim director of UCR's California Museum of Photography. "How many people would do that?" Cortez asked.

Cortez was history department chair in 1984 when he heard a rumor that Ransom was planning to leave UCR. Cortez intervened and persuaded Ransom to jump from economics to history.

Ransom was grateful for the switch. "I want to just be able to tell stories," Cortez recalls Ransom telling him.

Over his career, Ransom authored seven books, many about Civil War history, for which he gained an affinity during his time at U.Va., and many with collaborator Richard Sutch. His books included the seminal "One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation," a 1977 book that analyzed the institutions that replaced slavery in the post-Civil War South. The book took 10 years to write, with Ransom and Sutch using quantitative data to argue against traditional views of Reconstruction, highlighting the constraints that limited Black freedom.

Many university professors consider research their first love, but Ransom enjoyed teaching equally.

"He was what many of us are not; he was a great lecturer. He could fill up theaters," Loveridge said.

Loveridge's assessment is more than figurative: For many years, UCR rented lecture space at the nearby University Village theater complex. After formally retiring from the faculty as a distinguished professor of history and economics in 2008, Ransom returned for several years to teach History 20, an expansive look at 20th Century world history. "This is the history of the 20th Century as I lived it," he would tell hundreds of students in a theater.

At University Village, he employed the movie theater screens to theatrical effect, projecting artwork, which he would then relate to the day's lecture. He opened classes by booming the music from "2001: A Space Odyssey." "The students really had to pay attention because they couldn't do anything else," Connie said.

"There are very few lecturers who could hold a room of 500 students the way Roger could," said David Biggs, the current chair of the history department.

"He was a showman," Cortez said. "He had a great bravado."

Outside of the classroom, Ransom was deeply involved in local politics, holding a school board seat for eight years in the late 1970s and early '80s.

"He voted with his feet," said Loveridge, who served several terms as Riverside's mayor, with the Ransoms hosting events on his behalf. "He participated; he showed up. He was deeply involved in the community outside of campus."

From 1989 to 1999, he and Connie operated Art Works, an art gallery on Brockton Avenue in Riverside. It was not a moneymaker, but the Ransoms prided themselves on providing a venue where local artists could display their work. Roger, the distinguished economist, kept the books.

His final book, "Imperial Wars in the Modern Era," was written with his grandson, Jared David McKenzie, and published in July 2025. The book addresses how war and imperialism - a powerful country's reach extended through often-unsavory means - have shaped the modern world.

At the 2023 dinner, then two months into the book project, Ransom cautioned the U.S. would not escape the imperialist brand. Referencing the "Louisiana land grab," and the Trail of Tears, he said: "If that's not imperialism, I don't know what is."

Ransom is survived by Connie, his wife of 65 years, and daughters Charlotte Ransom McKenzie (Bob) and Leslie Flint Ransom, grandsons Jared and Jack McKenzie, and his sister, Marelie Brown (Bill). A memorial service will be at the Culver Center of the Arts on Sunday, March 15 at 2 p.m.

The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences has a Roger and Connie Ransom Endowed History Award, and donations in Roger's memory are welcome. Please contact Eveleen Samayoa ([email protected]) for more information.

Lead photo by Stan Lim; taken at a 2020 UCR Arts event.

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