Sadly, Brian passed away in the fall of 1997. On his behalf, friends and colleagues completed the work he had begun on the conference, which was successfully staged on April 17, 1998. Friends at Virginia Tech remember Brian as a thoughtful, hard-working, and intense individual who was always able to laugh at himself. Faculty members in the History Department especially remember Brian's playful sense of humor, sensitivity, and kindness. Brian was a special individual who is dearly missed by all who knew him. In their son's honor, Brian's parents established the Brian Bertoti memorial fund.

***

A tribute to Brian Bertoti on the occasion of the 10th Annual Innovative Perspectives in History Graduate Conference at Virginia Tech, March 2007, by Michael C. Hickey, Professor of History, Bloomsburg University

A decade has passed since Brian Bertoti's death. Stop for a second and consider what a decade means in the institutional life of a History program. . . .Two cohorts of undergraduate students and five of graduate students have passed through the Virginia Tech program since Brian's time there. For a faculty member, ten years represent perhaps a third of his or her career. Former students, even outstanding students, often fade from memory after a decade. Brian Bertoti was exceptional, however. . .

I first met Brian his sophomore year, when he took one of my courses at Bloomsburg University in PA. He was nineteen and I was all of thirty-two. He was a funny, gawky kid who liked to read popular books about the Civil War. My course wasn't on the Civil War — it wasn't even on U.S. history — but Brian did a great job anyway. The next semester, he started stopping by my office to say hello, to talk about playing trumpet, to jabber about baseball, and to explain to me that the American Civil War was much more important and interesting than the Russian Civil War and that I had studied the wrong country in the wrong century. . .

The next fall Brian took another of my courses. He was still funny, still gangly. Now he was reading serious scholarship and for fun he goaded U.S. history profs into debates about the causes of the Civil War. He didn't have much of a chance to do that in my course (it was on European Intellectual History). But he threw himself into reading Marx and Freud and Sartre, dissected what he read, and started making linkages between that and what he was learning in other courses. After that Brian kept stopping by to chat, mostly to tease me about my hapless Chicago White Sox, but also to ask questions about comparative history. Our frequent discussions became exchanges between two people trying to understand the past.

By the fall semester of his senior year Brian had emerged as the intellectual leader of his student cohort — a bright group, two of whom are now in tenure-track university positions in U.S. History. Because Brian was funny, relaxed, and self-effacing, he was very popular with other students and also with the faculty. He had become a confident young adult — no gawkiness left. He was serious about improving his writing, eager to do research, determined to spend the rest of his life studying history. When I shook his hand at graduation that year, Brian had already had been accepted to the graduate program at Virginia Tech.

In the half-dozen or so times that I saw him during his graduate school career, Brian would fill me in on what he was doing in courses, talk about his research plans, try to convince me that I should give up Russian history and take up a serious subject. . .like the Civil War. . . .He would feign frustration at my ignorance about the meaning of "hokie," joke about how much more sophisticated Blacksburg was than Bloomsburg, and explain that I had better show respect to his fighting chicken baseball cap. Beneath the joking exterior, though, there was a very serious and very dedicated historian-in-training.

When Brian died, the profession lost a promising young historian. I lost a friend. That this conference on Innovative Perspectives in History bears Brian's name means a great deal to me, as it does, I am sure, to his family.