Turning Points

Davis reflects on the "turning point" of her life. The year was 1952, she had spent six months in France doing the first research for her Ph.D. thesis on "Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyon." She was trying to explore the Reformation from the vantage point of artisans, rather than just that of the theologians and the great princes. To find evidence about working people, many of whom are illiterate, one has to go to archives: to government lists and church records, to criminal prosecutions and marriage contracts. She planned to go back to France after she took her general exams. Not long after her return, two gentlemen from the US State Department arrived at their apartment to pick up her passport. She was devastated, heartsick, by the loss of her passport. She had counted on getting back to the archives in France not only to finish the research for her thesis, but for any future work she hoped to do on her new path of social history.