Linda Pacini Pitelka

Linda Pacini Pitelka, loving spouse, mother, grandmother, scholar, teacher, and voracious reader, died of heart-failure on February 11, 2026, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the age of 78. She passed peacefully and painlessly in her sleep at the UNC hospital in the presence of her husband, Vince Pitelka and their son Morgan and daughter-in-law Brenda. Linda spent her final years surrounded by care, comfort, conversation, and the everyday joys she cherished.

Born in Ukiah, California in 1947, Linda grew up in Mendocino County, a place that would later anchor her historical research. A first-generation college student, she attended Humboldt State College in the late 1960s, where her life changed in two profound ways: she discovered her deep love of theater and film, and she met Vince, her partner for the next 57 years. The two married in 1970 after meeting in a campus production of Lysistrata, beginning a lifetime of shared work, curiosity, and creative energy. Linda immersed herself in the vibrant theater community at Humboldt. After completing her undergraduate degree and beginning graduate work in technical theater, she became the manager of two historic movie theaters in Arcata, the Minor Theatre and the Arcata Theatre, where Morgan grew up among projectors, marquees, and double features, developing an early education in classic cinema. Film remained a central part of the Pitelka family’s culture, and in recent years Linda delighted in seeing her grandsons Ravi and Luca become dedicated cinephiles in their own right.

In the early 1980s, Linda earned an MA in Chinese history and developed a taste for research and academia. In 1985, Linda and Vince made a bold leap, leaving Northern California for Amherst, Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies with the goal of becoming professors. Linda shifted to American history and earned her PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994, becoming an expert on late 19th- and early 20th-century California. Her research centered on Mendocino County’s intertwined histories of immigration, Indigenous communities, race, and gender, subjects that connected the scholarly world with the landscapes and social dynamics of her upbringing.

In 1994, Linda joined the faculty at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she taught American history for more than two decades until her retirement in 2018. She was a dedicated and beloved professor, known for her rigor, compassion, generous wit, and gift for mentoring students. Her colleagues and students remember her as an incisive thinker who cared deeply about historical complexity and the ethical responsibilities of teaching. Outside the classroom, Linda was an unstoppable reader. Books filled every corner of her home. She read fiction and nonfiction with equal passion, mysteries, historical novels, literary fiction, sweeping biographies, and the occasional vampire saga. Even in recent weeks she was happily revisiting the works of Dorothy Sayers and Robert Caro. Linda’s intellectual life extended well beyond her scholarship. She was a committed feminist who taught and modeled feminist principles for her students and her family. She engaged deeply with questions of race, class, and social change, approaching contemporary events with the historian’s insistence on context and nuance. Her conversations were known for their intensity, humor, and generosity of thought.

In her personal life, Linda found joy in small daily rituals, particularly gardening, watching birds, sharing meals with family, and above all in reading and talking about ideas. She treasured her years in Chapel Hill, where she and Vince lived close to their son and his family, spending time with her grandsons and continuing the cross-generational dialogue about books and film. In recent years, as mobility and eyesight decreased, Linda shifted to container gardening and audiobooks, and could often be found on the front or back deck among the plants she loved, happily listening to books and birds.

Linda is survived by her husband, Vince; her son Morgan and daughter-in-law Brenda; her grandsons, Ravi and Luca; her sister, Debbie Schumaker Wismer; and a wide circle of friends, colleagues, former students, and loved ones who will remember her fierce intellect, her humor, and her extraordinary capacity for love. She will be missed every day.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to causes that Linda supported, like the ACLU (https://action.aclu.org/give/now) or the Immigrant Defense Project (https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/).