Deborah P. Clifford, a writer and historian, died after a brief illness at Fletcher-Allen Health Care in Burlington, on July 25, 2008. She was 75 years old. Born Deborah Pickman on March 22, 1933 in Boston, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Torresdale, near Philadelphia, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1957 with an honors degree in history. That same year she married Nicholas Clifford, and in 1966 the couple moved to Cornwall, Vermont with their four daughters, when her husband was appointed to the Middlebury College history department. In 1974, she earned an MA in history from the University of Vermont, and thenceforth wrote and published widely in Vermont and New England history. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1979) was a biography of Julia Ward Howe, and Crusader for Freedom (1992) was a life of the reformer Lydia Maria Child. From 1995 to 2000, she helped to edit Historic Roots, a magazine designed for adult new readers. In 2001 The Passion of Abby Hemenway, a life of the great nineteenth-century Vermont historian came out, and most recently, with her husband, she wrote "'The Troubled Roar of the Waters': Vermont in Flood and Reconstruction, 1927-1931" (2007). She twice won prizes for her articles from the Vermont Historical Society, and in 1995 she was presented with the Governor's Award in Vermont History. Most recently, she was elected to the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also taught occasionally at Middlebury College, at the University of Vermont, and at Vermont College, and lectured widely on topics in Vermont history. Next year Remarkable Vermont Women will appear as part of a series from the Globe-Pequot Press. She played an active role in various local and state institutions, her interests ranging from child care to education to history, and most recently she had been a member both of the Vermont Women's History Project, and of the Vermont Lincoln Bicentennial Committee. From 1981 to 1984 she served as the first woman president both of the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, and of the Vermont Historical Society in Barre. She was much admired by those she worked with, and much loved by family and friends for her liveliness, for her openness to new people and new ideas, and for the great interest that she always took in others, their needs and their interests. She lived in Cornwall until 1993, when she and her husband moved to New Haven, where she was active in the New Haven Historical Society. She is survived by her husband Nicholas, four daughters, Mary Tittmann of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sarah Laughlin of Philadelphia, Susannah Blachly of Marshfield, Vermont, and Rebecca Clifford, of Florence, Italy, as well as six grandchildren. The funeral will take place at eleven o'clock at St. Mary's Church, Middlebury, on Wednesday, July 30, and burial will be in the Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven. Instead of flowers, donations may be made either to the Vermont Historical Society or the Vermont Foodbank