All Scholars

Although relatively little-known today, Tom B. Jones was one of the most prominent ancient historians in the United States during the decades immediately before and after World War II. He was the author of over one hundred publications, including eighteen books and thirty-five articles. Except for service in US Naval Intelligence from 1942 to 1946 during which he worked on the decipherment of Japanese naval codes and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander, he spent his entire career at one university, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. During his almost four decades there, he established the first ancient history sequence at the university, supervised thirty-five doctorates in one of the largest and most successful graduate programs in Ancient History in the US. He also received not only outstanding teaching awards but also the university’s highest honor, designation as Regents Professor in 1970.

Jones’ background was not typical of academics in the early and mid-twentieth century. He was born and grew up in rural western New York and retained a love of that environment throughout his life, eventually living on a small farm after retirement in Wisconsin, where he raised goats. He learned the rhetorical techniques he would employ in the large lecture courses--some as large as 500 students—he was taught not in formal courses in rhetoric but by listening to speakers like William Jennings Bryan at the Chautauqua Institutes he attended while still a teenager. 

Unlike most ancient historians of his period, Jones was not trained in a  Classics department but in a History department in a public university, receiving all his degrees at the University of Michigan. His thesis was directed by the distinguished Roman historian A. E. R. Boak (1888-1962). Boak also inspired his interest in the political history of the third century CE which remained the focus of his scholarship on Roman history throughout his career. Despite finishing his PhD at the height of the Depression, Jones still obtained two offers of faculty positions, one from a liberal arts college in South Dakota and one from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, which he accepted, becoming assistant professor of history there in 1935 and being promoted to professor in 1949 after his return from wartime service. 

The range of Jones’s scholarship was exceptional by any standard. In addition to his work on Roman history, he also produced professional quality scholarship in several other fields including Latin American history, the history of the ancient Near East, numismatics, and the history of science. Indeed, his first book was not in Roman history but a well-received textbook on Latin American history that was published in 1939 and had a second edition in 1950. He also continued to work in Latin American history for almost two further decades, publishing two additional significant books and supervising four PhD dissertations in this field. 

Although Jones’ scholarship was varied, a characteristic feature of it throughout his career was his attraction to topics for which numerous sources existed but which previously had not been seriously studied. A prime example is  what is considered to be his most important contribution to scholarship: Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty. In this study, for which he taught himself Sumerian, he edited several hundred Sumerian economic texts—primarily receipts—that were held in collections in various American museums and used them to reconstruct administrative practices in one of the most important periods of ancient Near Eastern history. Similarly, in his numismatic work he was able to connect Greek imperial coinages minted in the eastern Mediterranean to developments in the third century CE in an important series of articles published in the 1960s. Not all of his ventures into such fields, of course, were successful. So, for example, his attempt to connect Linear B to Cypriot syllabic scripts by application of the code-cracking techniques he had learned in WW II was judged a failure by scholars in the field, although he did remain one of the individuals with whom Michael Ventris (1922-36) shared his famous work notes on the decipherment of Linear B. More successful was his work in the history of science, which arose from his thinking about the history of geography and his concern for issues connected to education overall throughout his career.

His involvement in the history of science began in the 1960s with work on the Enlightenment debate on the shape of the earth. That research in turn allowed him to accept an invitation to assume responsibility for the history of science portion of a post-Sputnik National Science Foundation education grant. The result was a book, Extending Man’s Senses: the Telescope and the Microscope, and several further works devoted to improving the teaching of science and ancient history in Minnesota public schools.

 His interest in education was not, however, limited to K-12 education, but included university teaching as well. Most of the books he published during his career were, in fact, textbooks, including both Western Civilization textbooks and two popular ancient history textbooks: Ancient Civilization and From the Tigris to the Tiber: An Introduction to Ancient History. He did more, however, than write successful textbooks. At a time when graduate students received no serious preparation for careers in college teaching, he incorporated teacher training as a required part of the PhD program at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, requiring graduate students to take a seminar on the teaching of history to prepare them to teach the lower division Western Civilization course that they would have to teach in the liberal arts colleges and public universities in which most of them would be employed. 

Jones was in many ways a transitional figure in the development of ancient historiography in the United States. In his two most important synthetic works, The Silver-Plated Age and The Twilight of Antiquity: The R. S. Hoyt Memorial Lectures, he anticipated later trends in scholarship concerning the importance of the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity, but he did so without challenging the dominant view that the Roman imperial period was one of cultural decline. It is understandable, indeed, that his most innovative and long-lasting work was in a field that was still in process of formation and which he and his students did much to establish in the curricula of history programs in American higher education: ancient Near Eastern history. In one area, however, the profession still has to catch up with him, namely, the need to provide graduate students with formal teacher training as a required part of their PhD programs.