History Matters 2016 by Jacob Schupbach

HISTORY Matters 2016

Meet the New Faculty NDUBUEZE MBAH YAN LIU

Honors Students

Shaina Ahmed & Anthony Field

Attend Phi Alpha Theta Conference

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2016 History Matters

DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS The History Department is excited to announce two new graduate degrees: an MA in History with a Concentration in Public History, and an Advanced (Graduate) Certificate in History. The Public History Concentration is a terminal MA program designed to serve students who are interested in history but who do not want to pursue a career as an academic. A collaboration with UB’s Arts Management Program, it prepares students for jobs in museums, historic/ heritage sites, or other public cultural institutions by giving them deep training in the practice of history combined with training in the business and advocacy skills required for employment in the arts-and-culture sector. The Advanced Certificate program is a relatively short but rigorous course of graduate study designed for students in other fields who do not intend to devote their careers to history, and for professionals already in the workplace who would benefit from advanced training in historical knowledge, research, and writing. For example, architects and urban planners working with historical preservation, librarians handling historical records and data, or scholars in other disciplines whose research engages with historical content and narrative would all benefit from the Certificate program.

In this Issue:

3 ›› 4 ›› 5-6 ›› 7-8 ››

9 ›› 10 ›› 11 ›› 12 ›› 13-14 ›› 15 ››

Department News Message from the Chair › James J. Bono New Faculty Profiles › Ndubueze Mbah › Yan Liu Featurettes › Review: Smack: Heroin and the Postwar City › The History Buffs Podcast › DIG: History and Geneology Consulting Faculty News Faculty Publications Graduate Student News Undergraduate Student News Alumni Profiles › Dr. Douglas Bacon, MA ‘94 › Wayne Berman Message from the Incoming Chair › Victoria Wolcott

On the cover Honors students Shaina Ahmed and Anthony Field, accompanied by Prof. Thornton, presented their research at the Phi Alpha Theta conference at Penn State-Erie this spring. Photography by Tamara Thornton

Longtime Department Administrator, Gloria Paveljack set to retire After many years of dedicated service, our superb Department Administrator and Assistant to the Chair, Gloria Paveljack, decided to accept an early retirement and left us in late September. Other staff changes include the departure of our long-time and much valued graduate secretary, Mary Robilotto, after many years of dedicated service. Mary has been replaced by Tammy Granata. A new professional staff position was created nearly two years ago, ably filled by Susan Buttaccio, who is responsible for our newly resurrected newsletter.

History Matters 2016

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR | JAMES J. BONO

n January 2009 when I assumed the role of Chair, the nation was weeks away from the historic inauguration of the country’s first black President. As I write now in the waning days of my chairmanship, we are about to witness a major party’s nomination of the very first female candidate for the Office of the President. In the interim, a host of momentous events have etched themselves upon our collective social imaginary—among them: the move toward universal healthcare; a succession of Supreme Court decisions altering the political and social landscape (from corporations as “persons” to recognition of the right to same-sex marriage); the rise of “Green” movements and international efforts to address the challenges of climate change; the “viral” emergence, spread, and decline of the “Occupy” movement; the assertion of “historical” mandates to wage war against those with different beliefs, values, and practices (ISIS is but one example); urban-based institutional violence played out against the backdrop of race, class, religion, gender, and sexual orientation; the world-wide refugee crisis; the heart-wrenching cascade of the repeated slaughter of innocents whether at the hands of disturbed individuals or homegrown terrorists, from Paris to Brussels, from Sandy Hook and Boston to San Bernardino and Orlando. Change is all about us. How we understand, come to terms with, and act in the face of massive change —alternately inspiring and dispiriting; hopeful and horrific—marks us for who we are as a people: as a diverse community of citizens or as a babel of disparate voices, a noisy cacophony of the self-interested, the fearful, the sadly disconnected or disenfranchised. Now, perhaps more than at most times in the recent past, we need to think, understand, contextualize, and imagine the present and possible futures armed with the perspectives, tools, affordances of history: with habits of sober, caring, compassionate, and rigorous interrogation of the present as intimate of, and entangled with, its pasts. We need to understand and to tell stories. We need the understanding that comes from listening to our own and others’ stories and from struggling in response to fashion broadly responsible and just

James J. Bono, Department of History Chair

“No matter what the problem to be solved or the knowledge to be harvested, History remains critical to successful societal efforts at framing questions properly and achieving sustainable solutions.” James J. Bono stories rooted in hard-won evidence and critically assessed experience. We need to re-envision the stories we are stuck in. We need to reclaim our pasts to confront sources of impasse—of the problems we face—while simultaneously re-membering pathways to different futures. We need the historian’s dispassion coupled to the historian’s passion. We need history, and an historically informed citizenry. Despite such need, since January 2009 we have seen a historic, nationwide trend away from the humanities and toward professional schools and professionally oriented majors. The number of history majors is down nationwide and at UB. Whatever the career and material benefits of such momentous shifts—and study after study suggests that such benefits are short-term, outpaced in the long run by traditional liberal arts education—what we cannot expect is that this shift will lead to the kind of understanding and futures that the dizzying pace of massive change—for better or for worse—makes us yearn for. For these aspirations are not susceptible to technocratic solutions alone. History (and the humanities) matter.

Since 2009, the History Department has experienced significant changes, many of which put us in a strong position to respond to the challenges we face, to help our students and our society understand the present and build better and more meaningful futures. With a new Dean and a dynamic Provost committed to the value of the humanities, UB, too, has changed, making these words from my 2012 Chair’s message seem all the more relevant today: “Because of its comprehensive character as a flagship state university together with its manageable size and flexibility, UB is in a position to bring to bear the knowledge, practices and expertise of many different disciplines from the sciences to the humanities in order to develop answers to questions and solutions to problems that work for real people and for real communities. No matter what the problem to be solved or the knowledge to be harvested, History remains critical to successful societal efforts at framing questions properly and achieving sustainable solutions. Why? For one, historical thinking encourages students to develop experienced-based perspectives that only familiarity with a repertoire of past problems and past attempts at solutions promotes. Such historical thinking will increasingly become a precious commodity as we face progressively more complicated, even intractable, problems today and in the future. For another, such historical perspectives also enable our students to draw lessons from past attempts to solve problems that unwittingly generated a host of unintended consequences. Such knowledge—and the practical skills they breed—are, of course, indispensable to the broad education and future success of all students. In short, the value of a UB education—one that includes history at its core—draws equally from two sources: the research-based contribution that multiple departments, professional schools, and disciplines offer in teaching students to be creative, flexible, and collaborative problem-solvers; and the role that visionary teaching of students can play in translating research for use by students in addressing important problems of inherent public value, both in the short term and for future generations of citizens. History . . . has a large and important role to play in this vision.” ‡

2016 History Matters

NEW FACULTY | NDUBUEZE MBAH What drew you to join the faculty at UB? I was drawn to UB because it is a renowned research institution that fosters academic excellence in both research and teaching. I see myself as a teacher-scholar, in the sense that my research is inspired and nurtured by my classroom engagements with students. UB provides me with an opportunity to work with both undergraduate and graduate students. With the former, I have an opportunity to teach African history in ways that challenge prevailing misconceptions of African societies, underscore the diversity of the continent, its historical engagements with the world, and contributions to global civilization. Working with graduate students affords me a unique opportunity to bring new research frontiers in the field of African studies such as gender and sexuality, Atlantic creolization, popular culture, technology and urbanization to prospective Africanist scholars as well as students whose research interest in other parts of the world would benefit from interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies. I feel welcome in the collegial environment that the history department affords. Its intersecting research hubs, such as North and South Atlantic, Gender, and Transnational Developments, foster intellectual exchanges, collaboration and mentorship that keeps

History Matters 2016

one abreast of innovative theoretical and methodological paradigms in the humanities and social sciences. What are your areas of interest in teaching and research? I teach introductory African history classes such as ‘Africa and the World,’ ‘Africa through the Era of the Slave Trade,’ and ‘Modern Africa: 1820-Present.’ These multi-disciplinary courses explore interactions between Africans at local, regional and international levels; Africa’s indigenous socio-political institutions and the processes of state formation; and the dialectical processes through which Africans became integrated into the larger world system. They encourage students to question existing sources of knowledge about African peoples, and humanize African lives by presenting Africans as active participants in the making of their own worlds. Foregrounding African-centered primary sources, films and novels such as Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, Mhudi, The Concubine, Things Fall Apart, Houseboy, and So Long a Letter, these courses introduce students to specific themes in African studies such as gender, African oral, written and artistic expressions, ethnicities, religions, conflict, conquest and resistance, diaspora and migration, nationalism and post-colonial modernity. My advanced undergraduate courses include ‘Comparative Slavery: Africa, America, and the Caribbean’ and ‘Christian and Muslim Societies in Africa.’ My graduate seminars include ‘Women, Gender and Sexuality in Africa,’ ‘Debates in the Historiography of the Atlantic Slave Trade,’ and ‘Atlantic Creoles.’ My research has focused primarily on the changes in women’s sociopolitical power and the shifting constructions of masculinities in pre-colonial and colonial West Africa. I am working on my book manuscript, “Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age,” a pioneer study of the transformative constructions of masculinities in pre-colonial

Africa. It argues that competitive performances of masculinity and political power by Ohafia-Igbo men and women underlined the shift from a pre-colonial period characterized by female breadwinners and more powerful female political institutions, to a colonial period of male political domination in southeastern Nigeria. Bridging a major gap in gender theory in African studies, by bringing the vast literature on female power and authority in West Africa into direct conversation with the nascent field of African masculinity studies, “Emergent Masculinities” demonstrates that the repercussions of West African dynamic engagements with the Atlantic world are best understood in the longue durée that captures the dialectics of slavery, legitimate commerce, colonialism, and Christian modernity in reshaping African gender regimes. The social processes that enabled men to emerge in dominant positions of power during the transition from slavery to colonialism were manifest in the increasing Atlanticization of gender identities in the Bight of Biafra; and shifting gender performances defined Biafran socio-political transformation in the Atlantic Age. What are you currently reading? ∙ Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste ∙ I. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827 - 1930 ∙ Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade ∙ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection ‡

MBAH’S BACKGROUND ›› Ph.D., Michigan State University, East Lansing ›› B.A. University of Nigeria, Nsukka ›› Fields: African History, South Atlantic, Slavery/Emancipation, Gender/ Sexuality, Social/Cultural History

NEW FACULTY | YAN LIU What drew you to join the faculty at UB?I find UB a place of great intellectual vigor. The university gathers a wonderful group of Asianists in the History department and the Asian Studies Program with whom I am excited to interact. The History department is also building up a robust assemblage of medical historians whose works intersect with mine in many aspects. In addition, I am impressed by the congenial and nourishing environment in the department that is key for the growth of young scholars. What are your areas of interest in terms of both teaching and research? I am a cultural historian of medicine in pre-modern China. Specifically, I am interested in tradition Chinese pharmacology, religious healing, the history of the body, and Chinese medicine in global context. I am also interested in studying and teaching the history of Chinese medicine in comparative perspective, with reference to pre-modern Europe and contemporary America.

What brought you to your current areas of interest and research? My current research examines the prominent use of poisons as therapeutic agents in medieval China, highlighting the hazy boundary between medicine and poison, and the paradoxical nature of drugs in general. Initially, I was intrigued by the contemporary view of Chinese medicine as natural and benign in comparison to Western biomedicine often deemed as artificial and toxic. This dichotomy, I found, is problematic because the history of deploying poisons in Chinese pharmacy is deep. Whence my exploration. Ultimately, I hope that this project will not just unveil an ignored yet important history of Chinese medicine, but also foster fresh insight into our pharmaceutical practice today— to ponder ways we prepare and ingest substances on the one hand, and how we feel who we are, on the other. What classes will you be teaching this year? What classes would you like to teach in the future? In the year of 2016-17, I will be teaching a survey course on Asian history, a seminar course on the comparative history of poisons, medicines, and foods, an introduction course on the history of Chinese medicine, and a graduate-level course on the history of the body. In the future, I would like to teach courses on food history, the history of senses, medicine and religion, the history of emotions, medicine and gender, and global history of medicine. What book(s) are you reading right now? Because my project investigates medicinal substances, I am particularly interested in works that investigate materiality, materialism, and technology. On the one hand, I am reading philosophical works by Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Bernard Stiegler to see how things are conceptualized and critically evaluated. On the other hand, I am exploring some empirical works that provide case studies of things. Two that I

am reading are Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination by Paul Freedman, and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing. Will you share with us something we might want to know about you that is not on your CV or the department’s website? I am originally from China, and my hometown is a city called Shenyang in the northeastern part of the country. From the early twentieth century to the seventies, the city had been an important economic base famed for its heavy industry, yet in the following decades, lost the eminence as the country’s economic priority shifted to the coastal regions. The city has been reviving recently. Had you not read the first line, you might have thought that I am talking about Buffalo. The striking similarities between the histories of the two cities fascinate me. I look forward to further exploring Buffalo and reflecting how its past illuminates the understanding of the present, and suggests new possibilities into the future. ‡

LIU’S BACKGROUND ›› Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard University ›› M.A., Asian Studies: China, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI ›› Ph.D., Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,, MI ›› B.S., Neurobiology and Biophysics, University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei, P.R. China ›› Fields: medicine, religion, and society in pre-modern China

2016 History Matters

FEATURETTES

Review:

Schneider, Eric. Smack: Heroin and the Postwar City, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

David Herzberg ›› Eric Schneider’s Smack: Heroin and the Postwar City is a good example of why I love history: it tells a gripping, fine-grained story about the past and uses it to draw big, surprising conclusions that force us to rethink debates and controversies still swirling today. Schneider’s story is about the epidemic of heroin addiction in American cities after World War II; his big surprising conclusion is that political geography, not neurobiology, might hold the key to understanding American drug problems. It is well worth reading on both grounds. One of the most intriguing aspects of the postwar heroin epidemic was who the addicts were. Before World War II, heroin addicts had been largely working class, older European immigrants; after the war, they tended to be younger African Americans and Latinos. Historians have long been aware of this switch, but no one had managed to explain it before. Schneider realized that the clearest connection between the two groups of addicts was location: New York City’s densest neighborhoods. Before World War II, these neighborhoods had been home to “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe; after the wartime Great Migration and postwar “white flight,” they were populated by African Americans and Latinos. The people changed; the neighborhoods remained constant. Heroin addiction, Schneider hypothesized, was a story about geography. As Schneider explains, there were many reasons New York became the single largest heroin market in the world. For one thing, in the years before 1924, when heroin was still legal, the city was home to many of the companies that manufactured it. Even afterwards, when the heroin trade depended on smuggling, New York’s busy harbor was the easiest place in America to import an illicit good. Moreover, the city was already equipped with a fully-developed and well-staffed network of black markets. As Schneider’s painstaking research establishes, these

History Matters 2016

factors made New York’s heroin sales highly competitive and relatively cheap; heroin became more expensive—and more difficult to find—the farther you got from the city. According to Schneider, then, addiction was plentiful in New York mostly because heroin was plentiful in New York. There was no need to evaluate the moral and cultural characteristics of the communities living there: addiction was a disease of exposure. (An argument, by the way, that also helps make sense of why physicians have one of the highest rates of addiction in America.) Even so, one might wonder: of all New York’s millions, why was it African Americans and Latinos who so disproportionately became heroin addicts after World War II? Here Schneider points to the dynamics of “white flight.” The children of European immigrants fled inner cities after the war in part because of subsidies from the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration encouraged such moves. Nonwhites, however, were largely excluded from these programs, and were further kept out of “white” neighborhoods by banks, realtors, insurance companies, and—as a last resort—brick-wielding white homeowners. African Americans and Latinos were thus channeled into the poorest neighborhoods. These neighborhoods had the worst job prospects, the most corrupt policing, and the liveliest black markets. Whether they liked it or not, African Americans and Latinos lived in the very neighborhoods that made New York the epicenter of the global heroin trade. Having thus set the stage, Schneider then proceeds to deliver a rich (if depressing) story of how heroin’s availability produced heroin addicts. It began, he argues, in Harlem jazz clubs, which fostered a nocturnal and rebellious subculture that lionized heroin-using musicians—a perfect market niche. From there it became what might best be described as a consumer fad, as neighborhood teens sought out the drug

in emulation of idolized jazz figures or the drug trade’s few wealthy success stories. In sharp contrast to the myth of “pushers,” Schneider notes, heroin dealers were very reluctant to sell to teens, particularly if they were white, because parents and politicians might cause trouble. Drug use spread even more widely in the 1960s, when deindustrialization made drug-trade employment more crucial than ever to the local economy, and police cracked down on disciplined street gangs that had discouraged heroin use among their members. Meanwhile, continued immigration and residential segregation meant that more and more African American and Latino families were being funneled into those same neighborhoods, expanding the ranks of nonwhite youths exposed to heroin and the drug trade. In a savage irony, authorities blamed nonwhite city residents for their plight, and saved their concern for what they considered to be more sympathetic victims: suburban whites who might be led astray by inner-city drug “pushers.” (In fact, Schneider explains, whites only started using heroin in any real numbers in the late 1960s, when “hippies” began to move into central city neighborhoods like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York.) Instead of trying to solve the structural problems that beset city neighborhoods, mayors and governors and eventually Presidents launched “wars against drugs” fueled by anger over rising property and street crime. Segregation, deindustrialization, and other problems disappeared as liberals and conservatives joined together in identifying heroin use as a cause— ›› Continued on next page

rather than a symptom—of the disastrous state of American cities. As Schneider makes clear, such logic lent itself all too easily to racial stereotyping, with inner city communities lambasted for their supposed pleasure-seeking amorality. This, in turn, helped to justify the gettough approaches first implemented in New York’s 1973 Rockefeller drug laws and which have been filling U.S. prisons ever since. This is a dispiriting end to a troubling tale, but Schneider’s message is not all doom and gloom. Addiction, he argues, is tragic but not demonic; we do not need to determine what is wrong with the values and character of the individuals and communities afflicted by it, or contemplate widespread reprogramming of problematic people. Instead, addiction is like other social problems, caused by comprehensible webs of geography, economy, and politics. It can thus be addressed by policies far more rational and humane than American drug wars. The heroin epidemic, for example, was partly a consequence of residential segregation. If African American and Latino families had been able to move away from the nexus of heroin traffic— or if their neighborhoods, like the suburbs, had benefited from massive state investment that produced livingwage jobs—their children would not have faced outsized exposure to heroin. If we want to protect the public health by reducing addiction, Smack ultimately teaches us, our first step should be to step back from moralizing and think pragmatically about the political geography of exposure to drugs. ‡

PHOTO: MARISSA RHODES

FEATURETTES

Top row, left to right: Tommy Buttaccio, Sarah Handley-Cousines, Averill Earls, Dan Wallace, Marissa Rhodes. Bottom row, left to right: Katie Smyser, Elizabeth Garner-Masarik

The History Buffs Podcast One of the most exciting ventures to come out of the History Department recently is the wildly successful History Buffs Podcast started in November 2015 by a group of enterprising graduate students. Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Tommy Buttaccio, Marissa Rhodes, Katie Smyser, Elizabeth Garner-Masarik, and Dan Wallace cooperatively act as producers and editorial board for the podcast which has been downloaded over 23,000 times and is accessed roughly 20,000 times a month by people accessing our feed through their mobile apps. Although born in the History Department this student-run, -owned, and -operated program is living on beyond their UB careers. Earls, Handley-Cousins, Buttaccio, Wallace have all graduated but will continue to contribute. Currently the archives (https://historybuffs.org/) have more than 30 episodes and they generally release one per week on Sunday evenings. Topics have ranged far and wide from the development of American accents to the historical basis for the Game of Thrones universe. ‡

Putting Their History Skills to Work

PHOTO: MARISSA RHODES

DIG: History and Genealogy Consulting dighistoryconsulting.com was founded by Drs. Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins, both graduates of the University at Buffalo History doctoral program. The company provides a range of services, including genealogical research and writing, and museum exhibit curation. They are currently working on a museum exhibit for the Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Academy, which includes collecting oral histories from alumni, designing physical artifact displays, and an interactive digital exhibit to be displayed in the school’s renovated lobby. You can find information about their writing, editing, research, and curation services on their website. This summer they also partnered with the Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart to run a Podcasting Camp for Middle School Girls. ‡

2016 History Matters

FACULTY NEWS Roger Des Forges retired in January 2015 after more than forty years on the UB History faculty. With support from across campus, the Department organized a symposium to commemorate his scholarly career, including his work as a thoughtful and caring instructor and adviser. The symposium, “Globalism in Chinese Perspective: China’s Roles in World History and Historiography,” took place on October 2 and brought together many of Roger’s former and current students and colleagues to reflect on a manuscript that he is working on in which he lays out a framework for understanding world history that extends his conceptualization of the spiral pattern of Chinese history. The symposium and a reception that followed featured many stimulating conversations on Chinese and world history. Former UB students Julia Burke (BA ‘09), Qiang Fang (Ph.D. ‘06), Anne Csete (‘95), and Luo Xu (Ph.D. ‘95) shared their memories of studying with Roger, and several bicycle-commuting anecdotes were told. Roger flew to China shortly after the symposium to continue his research on the history of the MingQing transition in the seventeenth century. In addition to continuing work on his writing projects, he relocated to the Boston area to “return to his roots as a would-be gentleman farmer.” Victoria Wolcott’s op-ed “Why the Shocking Video of the Police Attack on Black Kids at a Pool Shouldn’t Shock Us” appeared on the History News Network. In the piece, Professor Wolcott reminded readers that “swimming pools and beaches [have been] among the most segregated and fought over public spaces throughout the country, in the North and the South.” Even after “decades of persistent activism,” and the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, segregation of these communal spaces has not ended. Instead, “recreational facilities in American cities have been defunded and apartheid continues to mark the recreational landscape.”

Susan Cahn has been named one of the winners of the UB Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender’s inaugural Excellence in Mentoring Award. The award was created to promote and recognize outstanding achievements by faculty and staff in cultivating the professional potential of their colleagues and students. A university-wide research center founded in 1997, the Gender Institute promotes research and teaching related to women, gender, and sexuality. The award was presented April 8, 2016 as part of the Institute’s “Gender Across Borders: Forging Alliances / Vive les differences.” Conference. Patrick McDevitt won the UB Life Raft Competition hosted by University Honors College and The Academies. In the Life Raft Debate, we imagine that there has been a disaster threatening all of humanity. The survivors (the audience) are setting sail to rebuild society from the ground up. There is a group of faculty vying to get on the raft, and only one seat is left. Each professor has to argue that his or her discipline is the one indispensable area of study that the new civilization will need to flourish. At the end of the debating, the audience votes and the lucky winner climbs aboard. Each professor gets to give an introductory account of his or her discipline, then give a brief rebuttal to the others, and, finally, the audience votes all but one panelist off. Professor McDevitt single handedly saved humanity from a future with no history by besting colleagues from the Departments of Geology, Pharmacy, Experimental Learning, Visual Studies and English. Ndubueze Mbah carried out community engagement ethnography with the OhafiaIgbo of southeastern Nigeria, from June 1 to July 15, 2015, during the society’s annual homecoming festivals. Through the medium of film documentary, he shared the findings of his historical ethnography with his community research partners. At the end of his 1-hour presentation, Dr. Mbah received glowing affirmations of his thesis from the community, namely, that the society’s concerted engagements with the Atlantic world through slave production, legitimate commerce, colonialism and Christianity between 1750 and 1920, shaped the demography of the African forced Diaspora, transformed local gender ideologies, and ushered a shift from a pre-colonial period characterized by female breadwinners and more powerful female political institutions, to a colonial period of male political domination.

Patrick McDevitt wins Life Raft Debate.

History Matters 2016

Ndubueze Mbah with the Ohafia-Igbo, 2015

RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS Hal Langfur. Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500-1900. University of New Mexico Press, 2014.

Liana Vardi. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2012 (paperback, 2014).

Victoria Wolcott. Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Michael Rembis. Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, University of Illinois Press, 2013. Susan Cahn. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport, 2nd edition, University of Illinois Press, 2015

Tamara Thornton. Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life, University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Carol Emberton. Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence and the American South after the Civil War, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Jonathan Dewald. Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550-1715, Penn State University Press, 2015.

Gail Radford. The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, 2013. Andreas Daum. The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians, Berghahn Books, 2016.

Mark Nathan, (co-edited with Redwood French). Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

2016 History Matters

GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Prof. Kristin Stapleton, Director of the MA Program, and doctoral candidate David Strittmatter won an AHA Career Diversity Department Grant which will fund a one day symposium exploring career possibilities beyond academia for historians with graduate degrees in history. The goal of the symposium is to bring in historians, including many alumni, working in public history, museums, government, and business to speak with students about the ways in which their history degrees are daily put to use in fields outside teaching. This marks a significant contribution to our continuing efforts to help our graduate students expand their horizons of career choices in an ever-changing work environment.

Dr. Jake Newsome defended his dissertation, ““Homosexuals after the Holocaust: Collective Memories, Identity Politics, and Gay Rights Activism in Germany and the United States, 1945-2008,” in April. He has accepted a full-time position at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as the new Campus Outreach Program Officer. He will be responsible for developing an enhanced strategic campus outreach program that takes the lessons of the Holocaust beyond the Museum’s walls and inspires new generations to engage with the history and contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. Dr Newsome worked with Prof. Andreas Daum.

Two MA students, Tommy Buttaccio and Alyssa McQuirns, have been working with The Buffalo History Museum and Buffalo Place to create historical signage for downtown Buffalo. The newest signs are now up at Fountain Plaza and the 500 block of Main St. detailing the history of the Theater District and the Plaza. As Buffalo continues its renaissance, it is ever more important that its past is remembered and preserved.

History Matters 2016

Doctoral candidate Marissa Rhodes has had an amazingly good year for fellowships and recently has been awarded a whole string of fellowships including: • Lapidus-Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture Fellowship for Graduate Research in Transatlantic Print Culture • UB College of Arts & Sciences Dissertation Fellowship • The American Historical Association’s Michael Kraus Research Grant • The Library Company/Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Marissa is working on a dissertation entitled “Body Work: Wet-Nurses and Economics of the Breast in EighteenthCentury Philadelphia and London” under the co-direction of Profs. Claire Schen and Erik Seeman. She also holds an MLS degree from UB and a BA in history from Niagara University.

Meredith Cotter, an MA student in the Department, has been selected to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar “Rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressivisms”. NEH seminars bring professors, graduate students, and secondary teachers together to intensely study a particular subject with the help and guidance of world renowned scholars. Participants for this seminar were chosen via a competitive process and will include K-12 educators from all over the US. The seminar will be located at UIC and has been organized by the Chicago Metro History Education Center, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago. Awardwinning historian Robert Johnston (UIC) will guide the institute’s academic content, with the help of experts in history, art, and architecture. Charles Tocci (Loyola University Chicago) will direct teaching application discussions, along with master teacher Michael Biondo (Maine South High School).

Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins defended her dissertation “A Physical Wreck of His Former Self:’ Gender and Disability in the Post Civil War North” in April and was recently published in the Journal of the Civil War Era. Her article, ‘Wrestling at the Gates of Death:’ Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post Civil War North,” is available on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/619321. Dr Handley-Cousins worked with Prof. Carole Emberton.

Doctoral candidate David Strittmatter was awarded a Research Bursary from the Society for the Study of Labour History to support a research trip to Manchester, England. David is investigating the meaning attached to the physical site of the Peterloo Massacre, where in 1819 English cavalry charged a crowd -- who were demonstrating for parliamentary reform -- killing 15 and wounding hundreds. This will form a chapter of his dissertation, entitled “In Sites of British History: The Revival, Creation, and Unmaking of a National Narrative” under the direction of Prof. Patrick McDevitt

Doctoral candidate Kathryn Lawton was recently named an Advanced PhD Fellow for 2016-17 by the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute. Her dissertation project in entitled “Deinstitutionalization and Disability Rights: Policy and Activism in New York State” under the direction of Prof. Michael Rembis.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Phi Alpha Theta

Undergraduate Report:

Phi Alpha Theta, the national undergraduate history honor society, has been very active under the leadership of Prof. Tamara Thornton in recent years. Honors students Shaina Ahmed and Anthony Field (below), accompanied by Prof. Thornton, presented their research at the Phi Alpha Theta conference at Penn State-Erie this spring. Ahmed gave a paper entitled “Free at Last? The Transition of Black Loyalists from American Enslavement to Canadian Resettlement” and Field’s paper was titled “Policing Public Disorder during the Civil War in New York City” Field’s paper won a prize, and both students gave polished performances based on original primary source research, forwarding sophisticated analytical arguments.

Carole Emberton, Director of Undergraduate Studies ›› I recently read this sentence from a recent History major in the comments section of an academic blog, “Instead of graduating with one set skill, I graduated with the infrastructure to build skill sets over the course of my career and life.” It is an apt metaphor for the History major as we seek to give students the skills to research, think critically, write effectively, and work collaboratively. The website LinkedIn, which has 165 million users, published a study showing what former history majors are doing today that supports this vision. Of the over one million history majors in the study, the largest group was employed by the United States military. Many also work in the private sector including IBM, the banking industry, Google, and Apple. Clearly employers ranging from the federal government to your local bank recognize the applicability of a history degree for twenty-first century jobs. Thanks to the leadership of Claire Schen and Victoria Wolcott, the two previous Directors of Undergraduate Studies, we have begun to rethink some of the infrastructure of our major. Our rigorous and stimulating seminar classes exemplify our commitment to teaching and mentoring students in the department. Capped at fifteen students, these classes allow students to delve deeply into a subject and work closely with a faculty member. In order to ensure that our undergraduates have ample opportunity to engage with upper-level classes we now require seven, as opposed to five, courses at the 300 and 400-level. In addition we no longer accept the World Civilization general education

Phi Alpha Theta students also took a field trip on March 23rd to hear Dr. Richard S. Newman deliver a talk at the Buffalo Historical Society titled “Love Canal: A Toxic History.” After the talk, Dr. Newman met with the students and signed a poster, dedicating it to our PAT chapter. Not only is Dr. Newman who completed both his BA and PhD at UB is the author of three books in AfricanAmerican and environmental history and the director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, a research institution founded by Benjamin Franklin. ‡

At the Smithsonian

requirement to fulfill History course requirements for students who declared their major after February 1, 2014. This change allows History majors to take more courses taught by History faculty and to explore department offerings more fully. One reflection of our faculty’s commitment to undergraduate education has been the organization of a new series of pedagogical brown bags to discuss teaching innovations and strategize how best to reach our students. Graduate students and faculty have met to discuss use of on-line resources, how to most effectively run a seminar, and how to implement effective assessment. In our conversations we also recognized that in these challenging economic times our students are often working twenty hours or more a week, on top of their course work. How to help them navigate the balance between school and work while keeping our expectations high is crucial to their success and the strength of our program. These conversations about teaching will continue in the next academic year. In addition, this year we will be working to reinvigorate some existing programs. Our honor society, Phi Alpha Theta, will be revitalized under the leadership of Prof. Tamara Thornton. Students will be encouraged to present at Phi Alpha Theta conferences and submit their work for publications. We also will expand our public internship program, which offers students the opportunity to work at local historical organizations and explore future employment opportunities. These experiences will provide even more infrastructure for our ambitious undergraduates outside the classroom, giving them the skills they need when they leave UB and enter the workforce. ‡

History major Joe Gardella spent last summer working as an intern at the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American History and Culture. As a part of the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition team, Joe worked to collect, catalog, and display items related to the Reconstruction era. The museum opened to the public on September 24, 2016. ››(nmaahc.si.edu)

2016 History Matters

ALUMNI PROFILE | Dr. Douglas Bacon, MA ‘94 Dr. Bacon is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Mississippi. His medical career includes work at the Mayo Clinic as well as the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. Dr Bacon completed a Master’s Degree in History UB focusing on the History of Anesthesiology. Please tell us about your career since your graduation from UB: My first job was at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. In 1995 I became Chief of Anesthesiology at the Buffalo VAMC. From 2000-2012 I worked at the Mayo Clinic becoming a professor of anesthesiology and a professor of medical history. In April of 2012 I started as professor and chair of anesthesiology at Wayne State University in Detroit. In August of 2014 I assumed the role of professor and chair of anesthesiology at the University of Mississippi. In 2012 I received the Wood LibraryMuseum Laureate of Anesthesiology— the 6th person so honored. It is an international competition every four years which seeks to find the best historian in anesthesiology. https://www.woodlibrarymuseum.org/ laureate/

Where are you from and how did you end up at UB? I was born and raised in Buffalo. My father worked at UB for almost 40 years, and my mother was on faculty. It seemed like a natural place to be. I also knew that I wanted to be a physician, and that medical school was very costly. UB offered a fantastic educational opportunity at a reasonable cost. I turned down Johns Hopkins undergraduate to come to UB! What initially motivated you to pursue a degree in History? How do you feel these motivations continue to inform you today? I have always been interested in history— since grammar school days. History tells a story about the past, and attempts to understand why events occurred in the manner in which they did. It is a fascinating thing to study. In medicine, we seek to understand a patient’s story, and in many ways, that search is very similar to history. It’s all about how you put the pieces of data together. What do you feel was the most valuable for you in your experience at UB? The professors that I worked with along the way. Clifton K. Yearley inspired me to study the history of the world wars. Orville T. Murphy taught me how to be an historian, how to use the historical method, and how to write. I never would have gone this far without Dr. Murphy. You have a very dynamic educational background. Please tell us a bit about how your focus widened from History to Medicine. Also tell us a bit about how you incorporated your work as an anesthesiologist into your Historical Research: In medical school, we had a history of medicine reading group. We were invited to the school’s History of Medicine Society and met many of the faculty members in a much more informal setting. Thus, my own emphasis shifted from modern European history to the history of medicine. Anesthesiology as a specialty has a very rich historical tradition including the best specialty specific library and museum in the Wood

History Matters 2016

Library-Museum in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was easy to use my interest in the history of anesthesiology as the research component of my academic career. Also, the writing skills I learned helped me as the editor of the American Society of Anesthesiologists Newsletter— having written an editorial a month for over eight years. https://www. woodlibrarymuseum.org/ What are you working on now? I am trying to develop a curriculum to use history to teach elements of professionalism to medical students and residents. I am also working on a book that describes the rise of the specialty of anesthesiology in the first half of the twentieth century. Can you tell us something about yourself that isn’t on your resume/CV? I am a lifelong passionate Bills and Sabres fan. I play a little ice hockey (very badly!). I’m the father of four fantastic young men (26, 25, 23, and 17) and I have a 4 year old daughter. My eldest son is about to become a UB alum! ‡

BACON’S BACKGROUND ›› BA History UB 1981 cum laude and with departmental honors 1981 ›› BS Medicinal Chemistry SUNYAB cum laude 1981 ›› MD SUNY Stony Brook 1985 ›› MA History UB 1994 ›› Internship in Internal Medicine at Millard Fillmore Hospital 1985-6 ›› Residency in Anesthesiology 1986-89, Chief resident 1988-1989

ALUMNI PROFILE | WAYNE BERMAN Wayne Berman is the Senior Advisor for Global Government Affairs to The Blackstone Group. He was appointed the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Policy by President George H.W. Bush and served as the Senior Advisor for the Bush-Cheney Transition (2001) as well as the Deputy Director of the Reagan-Bush Transition Team (1981). Please describe your career since your graduation from UB: I started off working at CSIS under the tutelage of Dr. David Abshire. After a few years in a small lobbying firm, I formed a lobbying business with several other Republicans. From there, I worked at the Department of Commerce under President George HW Bush as Counselor to the Secretary. I have continued to work as a political advisor in several different companies and currently serve as a Senior Advisor to The Blackstone Group, advising them on portfolio company business. Where are you from and how did you end up in Buffalo? I’m from Rochester and ended up in Buffalo because of the four SUNY schools I applied to, it was the one that accepted me. What originally motivated you to pursue a degree in History? How do you feel that those motivations continue to inform you today? I wanted to be a history teacher. I continue my lifelong interest in history by reading about it and in my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to witness some of it firsthand. What are some of your fondest memories of UB? Having a group of friends from high school that lived with me in the Governors dorm in Roosevelt Hall. Playing pickup basketball in the bubble. Getting lost, wandering around Ellicott complex looking for Dr. Naylor’s office. How do you feel your education at UB prepared you for your future career in government and as a policy advisor in the private sector? My professors taught me to be curious about the underlying causes of historical outcomes and skeptical about the presentation of events by authors with different viewpoints and agendas. This led me to always be curious

about motivations and bias, both of which are critical in judging the intent and outcome of policy debates. You have a most impressive record of participation in presidential politics. Can you describe some of the highlights of working on eight presidential campaigns? Seeing Presidents and Presidential candidates in unguarded moments has given me a deep appreciation for the intensity of running for President and serving as President. It’s been an ongoing source of inspiration sprinkled with a sense of awe about the scale and weight of responsibilities involved in seeking the presidency. What would you say to a student who might be interested in a career in government or politics? My advice to someone interested in working in government is to go to work for a local city councilman or Member of Congress that you respect as a person --- someone whose integrity you can count on and whose values are consistent with your own. For someone interested in a career in politics, I would suggest finding a job working on a campaign for a candidate that you admire. Commit yourself to the cause of that individual’s election.

Alumni News: Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s award-winning lead political anchor and host of “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer”, is also an alumnus of the History Department at UB from which he received a BA in 1970. On September 20, 2016 he became the 44th recipient of the National Press Club Fourth Estate Award which recognizes a journalist who has made significant contributions to the field.

Philip Thomas, MA 2016, has accepted an offer to join Teach for America. Philip completed his thesis, ““British Legal Imperialism and Company Rule in Bengal 1765-1793,” this year and will be teaching in Buffalo for the next two under the auspices of TFA.

Dr Brian Marren has published his first monograph, We Shall Not Be Moved: How Liverpool’s working class fought redundancies, closures and cuts in the age of Thatcher with Manchester University Press. Dr Marren was a 2006 MA graduate of the department before moving to the University of Liverpool where he completed his PhD in 2012.

You were fundamental in the establishment of the History Department’s John Naylor Dissertation Fellowship. How did Professor Naylor come to be such an influence on your education and career? Dr. Naylor taught me the importance of getting as close to the original source material as possible because it allows you to weed out the bias of historians and contemporary observers. He also taught me the importance of clarity and brevity in writing and speaking. These tools were fundamental building blocks in my career and in my life.

UB History and Political Science major, Joseph Goldstein ‘13 is currently in his last semester at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and has just accepted a position as Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan DA’s Office. In December 2015, his article, “Taxing Legalized Marijuana: How Courts Should Treat Drug Tax Statutes in Light of the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause and Executive Non-Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act,” was published in the Cardozo Law Review.

Can you tell us something about yourself that may not be included on your resume? It’s not on my resume, but I am an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan and know the lineups and statistics of every Cardinals’ team since 1964. ‡

Recent graduate Stephen Rabent, a UB History and Political Science major and Environmental Science minor, will join the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as an Associate Analyst in the Natural and Physical Resources Unit.

2016 History Matters

MESSAGE FROM THE INCOMING CHAIR | VICTORIA WOLCOTT

tarting in August 2016 I face the daunting task of replacing my colleague, James Bono, as chair of the Department of History. Jim has been an exemplary chair, steering the department through the aftermath of the economic recession, adding distinguished new faculty and ensuring that we are ready for

Victoria Wolcott, Incoming Department of History Chair

the changes ahead. And, indeed, both the department and the university will be facing major changes in the upcoming year. Chief among them is the implementation of a new undergraduate general education program. History is poised to play a major role in this program with new course offerings, including the five freshman seminars we will be teaching in Fall 2016. Helping to steer us through the new curriculum will be the College of Arts and Sciences’ new Dean, Robin G. Schulze. Schulze was the Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware and is a leading scholar in modernist American poetry. She will no doubt bring an infusion of energy and innovation to the college and, of course, we are thrilled to have a humanist at the helm. The History Department was also thrilled to learn that Schulze’s partner, Adam Rome, is a distinguished historian of U.S. environmental history. This is a field in which we have long wanted to hire so Rome’s addition to the department is particularly welcome.

History Matters 2016

His first book The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional History. In 2013 Rome published The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation with Hill and Wang. This book received a significant amount of attention, including a lengthy review in The New Yorker. I am pleased to report that Rome is not the only faculty member to join us this fall. We will also be welcoming Yan Liu, who specializes in pre-modern China and the history of medicine. Liu earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and spent this past year at the University of Toronto with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Jackman Humanities Institute. Both Rome and Liu will offer graduate and undergraduate classes that will enhance our curriculum and broaden the scope of our research profile.

“And, indeed, both the department and the university will be facing major changes in the upcoming year.” Victoria Wolcott Of course not all change is positive. Sadly we will also be said goodbye to our long-serving Departmental Administrator, Gloria Paveljack, who retired this September. Gloria’s steady hand has run the department smoothly for many years and as incoming chair I will particularly miss her knowledge and skills. As Barack Obama has been known to say, “We are the change that we seek.” As we enter this new chapter at UB we look forward to living up to that sentiment. ‡

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HISTORY Matters 2016

2016 History Matters