Longtime U-M historian, professor Sidney Fine dies

One of the University of Michigan’s most famous historians/professors, Sidney Fine, has gone into the history books.Excerpt:Historian Sidney Fine, who is believed to have had the longest active teaching career in University of Michigan history, died Tuesday at Heartland Healthcare Center in Ann Arbor. He was 88.Mr. Fine earned his PhD in American history at U-M and then taught there for 53 years, retiring in 2001 at age 80.Over his half-century of lecturing, he taught more than 26,000 students.In fourth grade, he announced that he was going to be a history professor; decades later, Mr. Fine taught a 20th-Century history class that was one of the most popular ones at U-M.When he turned 70, the academic inspired Lansing legislators to abolish mandatory retirement for tenured professors at Michigan universities and colleges.”Sidney Fine was one of the best-known members of the history department, an amazingly productive and distinguished researcher and an outstanding teacher,” said Terrence McDonald, dean of the U-M College of Literature, Science and the Arts.Read the rest of the story here.