When Professor Burns of Dartmouth raved that Harvard historians never travel beyond the Cape and are interested in nothing west of the Hudson, he must have forgotten Paul Buck. This stocky, bespectacled historian came to Harvard in 1923 and has since acquired a reputation of knowing "more about the South than any man in the Country," as one Alabaman newspaper editor put it.

Since his expanded Ph.D. thesis appeared in book form as "The Road to Reunion" and won him the 1938 Pulitzer Prize in history, Professor Buck has sat securely on the top of the American history heap. And although he does spend his summers on the Cape and has done the major part of his studying in Cambridge, he could never be called a New Englander. Born in Columbus, Ohio and attending Ohio State in his home town, Buck, after deciding not to be a biologist, has traveled periodically through the South and spent a year in Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Scholarship.

Last month Buck officially assumed his duties as wartime Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sixteen years after he began as an Instructor in History under Professor Arthur Schlesinger, also a graduate of Ohio State.

Buck himself would rather be known as a historian of America than of the South. The problems of the South, he explains, are only intensifications of the nation's problems. In this war he sees the country developing techniques to solve its domestic problems. "The South," he reminds his students with a little jerk of his hands, "has a lot of people who need to be helped." The historian, in his case at least, has emerged, from his traditional book-lined study into the light of day.

When his Pulitzer Prize was announced, the then Assistant Professor of History was relatively unknown. The authorship of his book, which developed a wide popular appeal, was attributed to Solon J. Buck, now National Archivist, and even to Pearl Buck. Among the notes of appreciation he received was one from Margaret Mitchell, whose novel of the horrors of the Reconstruction contrasted so sharply with Buck's objective study of the healing of the wounds of war.

The "Pittsburgh Courier," Negro daily, denounced both of them because of their presentations of the race problem in this country. But as Buck wrote then, "Once a people admits the fact that a major problem is basically insoluble they have taken the first step in learning how to live with it."

Music and sports have always played their part in his spare time. One of his prides is an extensive collection of American folk music in which he does not hesitate to include the blues. He smiles and confesses, however, "I don't know anything about jazz." In high school Buck played second base on the ball team until his eyes forced him into track, where he continued running the middle distances throughout college. Now he devotes three afternoons each week to the Faculty Fistball Class in the Sargent Gymnasium. He still retains an interest in baseball and sticks by the Yankees, "but I hate to see them win all the time."