Alan Rogers, of Wellesley, emeritus professor of history at Boston College, died September 1, 2026. He was 90. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Marion and Vincent Rogers, he moved to California with his family as a child. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and then pursued graduate studies there, receiving his Ph.D. in 1968. After teaching at the University of California at Irvine, he joined the Boston College faculty in 1974. He served several terms as chair of the history department and was promoted to the rank of full professor; he retired in 2020. Along the way, he held positions as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Stirling in Scotland and at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta.
Students remember him as a master of the classroom. Whether in a large lecture hall or in the intimacy of a seminar room, he commanded their attention and earned their admiration. Always carefully prepared, he roamed the room, speaking in fully-formed logical paragraphs on the topic of the day without notes, making his points clearly and prompting students to new questions and insights. His courses on legal and constitutional history – he was never without his heavily annotated copy of the Constitution – were always enrolled to the limit, eagerly filled by students who had set their post-graduation sights on law school and joined by other students with no such intentions, drawn to his classes by his reputation. To budding scholars, he was an attentive mentor, sought after by graduate and undergraduate students alike, supervising many doctoral dissertations and senior honors theses.
Alan’s own scholarly interests ranged widely. He began with a focus on the era of the American Revolution. His first book, Empire and Liberty, charted the long, slow growth of opposition to British colonial rule in the decades before 1776. That led to a study of the ratification of the United States Constitution in Massachusetts, a book he coauthored with his Boston College colleague, Thomas O’Connor. At that point, he took an unusual professional step. Rather than continue along already-familiar paths, he transformed himself into a legal historian, the kind of jump into a new field that most faculty never attempt. This entailed movement into a later historical period and led, in 2008, to a history of the long and successful effort to abolish the death penalty in Massachusetts. His last monograph, published in 2014, analyzed “child cases,” instances where state laws permitting so-called religious exemptions had harmed the health and even the lives of children. He contributed to numerous scholarly and legal journals, and he was invited to join a team in writing a history of the Boston Bar Association. All these works were marked by painstaking research and a lively, readable style, and he also produced works of history for broader, more popular audiences. His Boston: City on a Hill from 1984 appeared in a second edition in 2007, cowritten with his wife, Lisa J. Rogers. His brief history of the “Boston Strangler” cases, which terrified the city in the 1960s, vividly reconstructed a dramatic period in Boston’s history.
He was active in many historical organizations, including the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the Wellesley Historical Society. He served as president of the New England Historical Association in 1999-2000.
In addition to his lifetime of professional accomplishments, Alan was surrounded by a large circle of friends, with whom he undertook an enduring variety of activities. He was a mainstay of the BC history department softball team, and he regularly challenged graduate students to squash matches. Together with faculty colleagues and others, he ran the Boston Marathon several times. Well into his 80s, he climbed Mount Washington (the highest peak in New England) yearly with a stalwart crew. His hearty laugh was recognized and treasured by many.
Besides Lisa, his wife of 38 years, he leaves his daughters, Nora M. Rogers and Lisa P. Rogers and her husband Richard Ziegler, and his daughter-in-law Leah Rogers. He also leaves five grandchildren: Mikaela and her husband Nate, and Annika, Ari, Owen, and Zoe. He was predeceased by his brother Robert and his son David.
A memorial celebration will be held at Boston College at a later date. Donations in Alan’s name may be made to the ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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