Howard Brett Melendy[1] (May 30, 1924 – April 19, 2008) was a prominent American historian,[2] writer, researcher, publisher, autobiographer, dean, history professor,[3] and filipinologist.
[5] In 1979, he returned to San José State University to act as emeritus professor and then as dean of undergraduate studies until 1981.
A memorial service was held for him at the Forum at Rancho San Antonio in Cupertino.
[2] Melendy's writings include major books about the social conditions and politics in twentieth-century[6] California and Hawaiʻi,[5] Hawaiian history, and Asian immigration to the United States.
Among his works are Governors of California: Peter H. Burnett to Edmund G. Brown (1965, with Benjamin F. Gilbert as co-author), Oriental Americans (1972), Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (1977), Chinese and Japanese Americans (1984), Hawaii, America's Sugar Territory 1898–1959 (1999, with Rhoda Armstrong Hackler as co-author), Walter Francis Dillingham, 1865–1963, Hawaiian Entrepreneur and Statesman (1996), The Federal Government's Search for Communists in the Territory of Hawaii (2002), and the autobiographical book or memoir[2] Growing Up Along California's North Coast: Boyhood Days in Humboldt County during the 1930s (2004).
[5] The materials and records Melendy collected while acting as the university archivist of San José State University from 1983 to 1987 are composed of academic journals, newspaper clippings, photographs, and handwritten and typewritten papers.
The materials and records, with the majority encompassing the years 1955 to 1985, have been preserved and named as The San José State University Faculty Papers of H. Brett Melendy, 1928-1985.