[3] When he was three years old, both of his parents died in the 1918 flu pandemic, after which he and his older brother Wayne went to live with an uncle in Serbia.
[1] According to Alfred Rieber,[4] Beyond the obvious erudition and scope of his work, there was an underlying mission, as it were, to restore the rational and analytical aspects of Russian intellectual life to their rightful place in history.
When Alex began to publish there was still a powerful interpretive current among American and British specialists to treat Russian intellectual history and social thought in terms of a non-rationality and collectivism that separated them from the mainstream of "Western" thought.... As for his attitude toward Soviet scholars, that too was unusually reasonable.
Although he based his work mainly on primary sources, he did not neglect the contributions of the leading Soviet specialists in the history of science... Loren Graham wrote that[5] ...as a sociologist, he followed the views of Robert Merton in defending science from ideological incursions, whether those threats came from the Russian Orthodox Church or from disciples of Marxism.
In 2001 the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies bestowed on Vucinich its Distinguished Contributions Award for lifetime accomplishments.