Past, Present, Future: the 2015 Report from the UMass Amherst History Department

Past, Present & Future THE

2015 R E P ORT F ROM T H E DE PA RT M E N T OF H I STORY

‘Migration Matters in the Modern Americas’

2014–15 Feinberg Family Distinguished Every two years, thanks to the generosity of alumnus Lecture Series Kenneth R. Feinberg ’67 and associates, the Department

Keynote speakers Mae Ngai (top) and Donna Gabaccia.

of History hosts a yearlong lecture series exploring a contemporary issue in historical perspective. During the 2014–15 academic year, the Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series offered “Migration Matters: Rethinking Immigration in the Modern Americas.”

“The series brought in some of the nation’s top scholars to help engage UMass and the broader public in difficult discussions around these issues,” explained Julio Capó Jr., a member of the planning committee. “With immigration there are all kinds of questions, including those of human rights, labor, neoliberalism, transnationalism, children’s rights, and the very meaning of the nation-state and human freedom.”

Our first keynote speaker, Professor Mae Ngai of Columbia University, asked us to rethink common frameworks for understanding undocumented migration—for example, how undocumented migration is generally understood as a “problem,” and how too many of us see undocumented migrants as the cause of that problem, and more law enforcement as the solution. Ngai made the case that in the U.S., undocumented migration was a direct corollary to the nation’s immigration restrictions, and she offered examples from the past to help us rethink approaches to this issue in the present day. The lecture was live-tweeted by Julio Ricardo Varela of LatinoRebels.com, who shared Ngai’s insights with “Dream Activist” by Santiago Uceda (santiagouceda.com). tens of thousands throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Our second keynote speaker, Donna Gabaccia from the University of Toronto, asked: “Why, when so many nations admit foreigners to live and work on their territories, is the United States almost alone in the world in pronouncing and celebrating itself as a nation of immigrants?” Like many of our speakers, Gabaccia took a transnational approach, exploring this question in global and comparative context through comparisons with Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

Throughout the year, other leading scholars in the field came to campus, including Claire Andrade-Watkins of Emerson College, Neil Foley of Southern Methodist University, María Cristina García of Cornell University, Jeffrey Lesser of Emory University, Ana Raquel Minian of Stanford University, and Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz of the University of New Mexico. Their insights were profound. García questioned the changes and continuities of the status of “refugee” following the Cold War. Minian’s analysis of Mexican migrants in the U.S. looked beyond the →

LETTER FROM THE CHAIR

Angélique Kidjo.

nation-state to understand how migrants define their own sense of belonging.

The series also hosted several cultural events on the topic of migration. Screenings and discussions of the film documentaries Mother of George (2013) and “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”: A Cape Verdean American Story (2006) broadened our analysis to African immigration. The series also featured a conversation and concert with Grammy Award–winning artist Angélique Kidjo, who discussed her use of music as a tool for activism.

The audience for these events included students, faculty, and the general public as well as local K-12 teachers participating in the 2014–15 History Institute, the Department’s annual professional development series for teachers. To

coincide with the Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series theme, teachers spent the year exploring new approaches to teaching immigration history. Participants attended workshops with UMass Amherst immigration historians Julio Capó Jr., Jennifer Fronc, and Jessica Johnson and developed lesson plans to bring these histories and ideas into their classrooms.

Our students engaged with the lecture series in critical and creative ways. Students in Sam Redman’s oral history course conducted nearly a dozen oral history interviews with local immigrants from Korea, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Yemen, and the Philippines. Rob Weir and Jennifer Fronc offered undergraduate courses on U.S. immigration history to accompany the series. The classes filled to capacity and earned rave reviews. Students interested in becoming teachers also attended the teacher workshops to learn more about the field. Graduate students formed meaningful connections with visiting scholars. We are proud to report that Janelle Bourgeois ’15MA began a Ph.D. program this year at Cornell to study with Feinberg speaker María Cristina García; the two first met at UMass.

Speaking on this campus during the 2010 series, Ken Feinberg ’67 asserted that the study of history is instrumental in understanding and analyzing contemporary events. We in the History Department could not agree more. In this spirit, we are excited to announce the theme of the 2016–17 Feinberg Distinguished Lecture Series: state violence and mass incarceration in historical perspective. This series responds to ongoing protests and debates nationwide and weighs in on an issue that has risen to the forefront of concern in the field. The schedule will be posted during summer 2016 on the Department website, www.umass.edu/history. We hope to see you there.

Filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins (third from right) with students and faculty following the screening of her film “Some

Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”: A Cape Verdean American Story.

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D

uring academic year 2014–15, the Department of History managed both to survive an especially grueling winter and to thrive!!

Joye Bowman speaking during the Graduate

As I noted in last year’s report, the winds of change are swirling through higher education, and we are trying to stay in front of them.

Our goal is to provide our undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities that prepare them for life beyond Amherst and UMass. We firmly believe there to be a role for history and humanities in our world.

As this report shows, our faculty and students are on the cutting edge of higher education’s evolution. We are proud of our accomplishments and are committed to continuing to provide our students with experiences that they will remember fondly as they venture out into the world.

The articles herein offer a glimpse of life in Herter Hall over the past year. You’ll read about everything from our Annual Lecture with historian Thomas Foster, author of Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past, to our Writer-in-Residence Program featuring Amy Wilentz, who writes for The New Yorker and The Nation and is the author of several books, including Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti. We were privileged to facilitate an amazing lecture with Professor Angela Davis, “Sustaining Social Justice Movements and Intersectional Struggles.” It captured the imagination of 1,300 students, faculty, and community members who packed the Fine Arts Center. They were a diverse group in every sense, including everyone from people who supported Davis in the 1970s to current students who knew little about her or her career. The Department also sponsored the sixth Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture

Series, “Migration Matters: Rethinking Immigration in the Modern Americas.” As you’ll read in our cover story, it was a real success, as was the Graduate History Association’s annual conference, which brought scholars from across the country.

This fall the Department welcomes two new faculty members, Garrett Washington, who specializes in Japanese history, and Kevin Young, who works on Latin America.

Their energy and enthusiasm promise to capture the imagination of our students, and we look forward to working with them. We are losing our beloved colleague Carlin Barton, who has decided to retire. It’s hard to imagine the sixth floor of Herter without her energy and pizazz. We wish her well as she continues to work on her many research projects, her music, and her garden. We hope she’ll come back and teach for us on occasion.

My thanks go out to my colleagues who continue to support me in this position. I must say a special thank-you to Anne Broadbridge, who stepped down as associate chair, and Jennifer Heuer, who rotated out as Undergraduate Program director. Their dedication and devotion to the Department and our students over the past several years made my job easy. I will miss them but wish both well as they devote their full energy to teaching and research. I am grateful that Brian Ogilvie and Alice Nash have agreed to take over as associate chair and Undergraduate Program director, respectively. I look forward to working with them in what will be my final year as chair. Barbara Krauthamer will continue to direct the Graduate

Student Awards Ceremony.

Program, which her dedication and innovative spirit are helping us rethink. I want to express my gratitude to Jason Moralee for being the Honors Program director this year, helping to guide our thesis writers and their faculty sponsors through their research projects. Jennifer Fronc has stepped into that role and we are grateful to her. I also thank our outreach director, Jessica Johnson, for her significant contributions to the Department, many of which are detailed in the following pages. The front-office team of Amy Fleig, Suzanne Bell, Adam Howes, and Mary Lashway continue to make it possible for faculty and students to get things done in an efficient, productive way. Words cannot express the debt we owe them for holding us together and moving us forward.

Our relationships with our alumni continue to grow. This year we instituted a new model for a career night for students (see page 5). In these complicated and changing economic times, we have to help facilitate our students’ transition to the work world. Our alumni can play a role in that process. Sincere thanks to all of you who have reached out, whether by offering your services or internship opportunities or by giving back in other ways. Your support matters in very real ways. Please stop in to see us if you find yourself on campus. Send us your news updates at newsletter@history.umass.edu, and feel free to contact me directly at chair@history. umass.edu.

—Joye Bowman 3

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One of my enormous privileges as director of undergraduate studies is to be able to boast about our students’ accomplishments. The list of awards and fellowships our students garnered this year is truly impressive.

First of all, two of our students won the prestigious William F. Field Alumni Scholar Award, which recognizes juniors throughout the University who have been particularly involved in leadership and community outreach.

Kaelan Burkett, a double major in History and the History of Art and Architecture, has maintained an impressive academic record while putting his historical and artistic training to work in the museum world. He is also a talented musician and has been actively involved volunteering for organizations serving the homeless. Brian Pastore similarly combines an outstanding academic record in history with a deep engagement in education and community outreach. He has been tutoring at Amherst Middle School, writing for the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), and working as a bus driver.

We are also delighted to report that Ryan Walsh was awarded the Honorable John T. Sweeney Scholarship, which recognizes an outstandingly strong junior or senior majoring in History or Political Science.

We are very proud of our students’ achievements as researchers and writers.

The Department presented two Louis S. Greenbaum History Writing Prizes for outstanding papers written for History Department courses. The winner for the Class Essay Division (8 to 12 pages) for the 2014 calendar year was Grace Keane for “The Women Who Went to the Field: Exploring the Collision of Gendered Spheres of Work in the American Civil War.” Grace was nominated by Alice Nash and composed this paper in Alice’s fall 2014 “U.S. Women’s History to 1890” course.

The winner for the research essay was Joy Silvey for “Living in a Sci-Fi World: Americans’ Response to a Post-War Nuclear Reality through Science Fiction.” Nominated by Emily Redman, Joy wrote this paper for “Ideas that Changed History” in spring 2014.

Our own Joshua Castillo won the Friends of the Library Undergraduate Research Award, sponsored by Special Collections and University Archives, for his essay “A Life Well Lived,” written for Steven Platt’s course “China and the United States.”

We also strongly encourage students to consider studying abroad. History majors have gone everywhere from Ireland to Mexico and Australia to Japan. Undergraduate Carl Forgo, who spent the spring semester in Spain, described the experience as “magic” in the way that “history quite literally comes alive.” He explained, “As I visited sites like the Alhambra Palace, I was very appreciative of the knowledge I carried with me from classes like [Johan Mathew’s] ‘Slavery in the Muslim World.’ It made the connections so rich.”

We are happy to be able to offer scholarships for programs that help students discover the world. Specifically, we were delighted to award the Potash Travel Grant for Latin America, Spain, or Portugal to Rebecca Shailor, a double major in History

and Political Science who spent the summer studying Spanish culture and history at the University of Granada. The grant is administered jointly by the History Department and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies.

We are also thrilled that the wonderful UMass Oxford Summer Seminar, under the final year of Anne Broadbridge’s direction, was able to award six scholarships enabling History majors to spend summer 2015 at Oxford: Sarah Benson, Jack Fitzgerald, Owen Kerrigan, Michael Lombard, Indira Rao, and Francis Schulze.

The David H. MacDonnell Scholarship is given to a History major, preferably one specializing in Irish or British history. This year’s recipient, Dennis Kane, has completed several projects on aspects of Irish history ranging from the Vikings to Michael Collins and will study abroad in 2015–16 at Trinity College in Dublin.

We awarded five Richard W. Bauer Scholarships for students completing summer in-

KAYLA PITTMAN

The Undergraduate Program

Students in History 388, “U.S. Women’s History to 1890,” taught by Alice Nash in fall 2014, tried their hand at sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery projects. They received guidance and inspiration from quilt expert Lynne Basset, who gave three lectures to the class, and from a visit Historic Deerfield, Mass., where Anne Lanning and Barbara Mathews explained the work of women entrepreneurs who developed handicrafts into lucrative businesses.

Undergraduate Internship and Career Office

Internship and Career Advisor Mark Roblee.

Undergraduate award winners.

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Mark Roblee will begin his second year as Internship and Career Advisor this fall. In addition to helping History majors find internships, polish their résumés, and practice their interviewing skills, he teaches a career-development practicum and produces career-development events for students considering careers in education, law, and other history-related fields. This year Mark inaugurated an alumni mentoring program through the new UMass History Alumni and Friends LinkedIn group. He also organized a spring dinner event with nine alumni from a variety of fields who met with over 25 students for an evening of conversation and networking. History alumni in attendance included Ashley Jahrling Bannon ’10, Kevin Delaney ’86, Jennifer D. Jordan ’91, Bob LaRussa ’76, Anne Manning ’80, Amanda Goodheart Parks ’10MA, Mark Popovsky ’72, David Sullivan ’69, and Henry Turner ’01. (See photo, page 33.)

Jennifer Jordan was especially impressed by the event. “At a school as large as UMass Amherst,” she wrote, “it’s often hard to corral alumni and find meaningful ways to connect them to students and the campus community. This dinner is precisely the kind of experience I would have benefited from when I was a student 25 years ago. I knew I loved history, but was unsure how to translate my interests into the adult world of work.

I wish I’d had the chance to meet archivists and librarians, museum directors, lawyers, nonprofit professionals, teachers, principals, journalists, public-policy experts, and doctors—the professions of the invited alumni—when I was in my early twenties and struggling to figure out what I wanted to do.

Everyone who came offered a different perspective, a different life trajectory, a different story to share with today’s students.

I came away impressed with the students, the alumni, and the History Department. It would be great if we as alumni could play a more active role to help current students get their footing—in grad school, internships or jobs. After all, we all need a helping hand now and again, and UMass students deserve our support.”

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Richard W. Bauer Scholarship recipient Julian del Prado with his internship supervisor Michelle Candiano at the Northampton District Attorney’s office, where he compiled information related to the Sonya Farak case. Upon the completion of this summer internship, Julian was offered a paid fall internship to continue his work on this case.

Charlie Yates takes a trip to Italy while studying abroad in Amsterdam last spring.

ternships. This year’s awardees and their posts were Andrew Marton and Samantha Lombard, at the National Park Service John Fitzgerald Kennedy Historical Site in Brookline, Mass.; Brooke Parziale, at the Sexual Minorities Archives, in Northampton, Mass.; Julian del Prado, at the Northampton District Attorney’s office; and Matthew Alexander Smith, who worked as a trench assistant in the Poggio Civitate Field School Program in Vescovado di Murlo, Italy.

Over the course of the year History students completed internships of note: Anna Meyer at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate; Austin Roche at the U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Public Affairs; Matthew Collins at the Springfield Rescue Mission; Colleen O’Regan at the Canton Historical Society; Kerube Gonzalez at the UMass Student Legal Services Office; Kelsey Furey at North Middlesex Regional High School; Elena Rousseau at Boston Cares; a student, name withheld, at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; and Emily Esten at the John Brown House Museum of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

We were also pleased to be able to recognize myriad students for their academic achievements in history, including Guilherme Rangel, who received the Paul Giguere Scholarship for History majors who have served or are currently serving in the military. Guilherme is serving in the National Guard while preparing to be a history teach6

er. Bryan Gosciminski and Julian del Prado received a History Department Opportunity Award; established by Professor Emeritus Ron Story, it honors History majors who have made a particularly outstanding contribution to the Department’s Undergraduate Program.

Victoria S. Burns received the Harold W. Cary Prize, which honors the late Professor Cary and is awarded to the graduating senior History major with the highest GPA in History Department courses. Graduating seniors Caitlin A. Andersch and Joy M. Silvey received the Robert H. McNeal Scholarship, which honors the late Professor McNeal, the History Department chair in the early 1970s.

This scholarship is awarded annually to the graduating senior History majors with the highest overall GPAs. For a full list of our awards, including a long list of Simon and Satening Ermonian Scholarships for academic accomplishments, see www.umass. edu/history/about/awards.html.

In other news, several accomplished undergraduate students supported the Undergraduate Advising Office as peer mentors. In the fall of 2014 Victoria Burns, Daniel Cabral, and Bryan Gosciminski served; in spring 2015 Nathan Feshbach-Meriney and Hailey Cherepon joined Bryan. Mentors have direct experience with the complexities of student life and can give firsthand advice on such issues as being a transfer student, juggling multiple majors, studying abroad, and balancing study with work, athletics, and activ-

ities. They offer a perspective not available from faculty advisors or our incomparable Undergraduate Program assistant, Suzanne Bell. We strongly encourage students to talk to next year’s peer mentors.

Our History Club continues to be amazing, with regular movie and trivia nights. This year they organized a Haunted Campus tour and arranged trips to Amherst and Springfield museums. For more on them, see www. facebook.com/groups/2250671126/.

We have also instituted a new set of student orientations every semester to help majors discover all of the resources available to them. We are looking forward to meeting even more students with a passion for the past and a curiosity about how history might guide and console us in the future.

—Jennifer Heuer, director

Note to Alumni Student internships can be just a few hours per week or can last a semester or a year. We seek options both for during the academic year and over the summer. If you’d like to mentor a History Department intern, let us know. And if you’d like to come talk to our students about career options, please let us know that too.

Thomas Foster delivers the Annual Lecture.

Thomas Foster on ‘Sex and the Founding Fathers’ On September 29, Thomas Foster delivered “Manhood without Issue,” the 2014–15 Five College Annual Lecture, as part of the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecture Series. Foster is professor and chair of the Department of History at DePaul University. He is author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past. Foster’s work examines how popular depictions of the Founding Fathers’ sexuality have changed over time and what those depictions reveal about broader cultural ideals surrounding sexual intimacy. He argues that the cultural connections between sex and the public memory of the founding fathers have been used to forge a nationalized masculinity.

Barbara Krauthamer praises Foster’s work, saying that his “lively history of the Founding Fathers offers scholars novel and engaging ways of rethinking familiar archives, sources and narratives. In all of his work, Foster’s attention to the history of gender and sexuality, especially masculinity and male identities, yields important new insights that continue to shape the fields of gender history and early American history.”

Foster’s talk concentrated on depictions of George Washington’s sexuality. Despite the fact that historians know surprisingly little about Washington’s private life and he never fathered any children, popular representations depict him as a distinctly virile male figure. This is pervasive in visual art and in the stories that writers and, yes, even historians tell about him.

“Military hero and successful politician,” Foster explained, “Washington was without question a successful model of American manliness as a public figure. Through the careful handling of artists and writers, in national memory the private Washington as well truly did achieve manhood without issue.”

Foster left no doubt that ideas about sex and gender have crafted perceptions of America’s most fabled national icons. —Charles Weisenberger 7

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2015 Writer-in-Residence Amy Wilentz Thanks to the generous support of Five Colleges Inc., the UMass Writer-in-Residence program annually brings to campus a renowned writer whose historical writing engages a broader public audience. She or he spends the weeklong residency visiting with undergraduate and graduate classes to discuss the challenges and strategies of quality writing. This year the History Department and the Five College community welcomed Amy Wilentz, author of several books on Haiti including Farewell, Fred Voodoo, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wilentz teaches in the literary journalism department at the University of California Irvine and is a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.

During her residency, Wilentz visited several classes, including Stephen Platt’s graduate “Writing History” course, Julio Capó Jr.’s undergraduate “Caribbean History” course, and even a local high-school history class. Capó reported that his students “thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Wilentz’s experiences on the ground in Haiti” and said “how much they appreciated being introduced to people like Wilentz, whose work engages deep historical questions but reaches far broader audiences than those traditionally associated with the professional academy.”

On March 24, Wilentz delivered her public address, “Haiti’s Earthquake and the Limits of Charity,” at the Cape Cod Lounge in the Student Union. The lecture was also simulcast at the UMass Springfield Center.

Wilentz placed the relief efforts following the 2010 Haitian Earthquake in the context of colonial policies

From left to right: Honors students Eric

The Honors Program

Albino, Joshua Castillo, Joy Silvey, and Leah Pinsky meet to discuss their work at

that have plagued Haiti for centuries. She cautioned against the “Sean Penn theory of development”—the tendency of people living in the developed world to assume that there are quick-fix solutions to complex problems confronting the developing world. Wilentz noted that less than one percent of relief aid went to the Haitian government; most funding raised by charity went to outside consultants or aid workers rather than the Haitian people.

The History Department is pleased to announce that the 2016 Writer-in-Residence will be Rebecca Onion, Slate magazine’s history writer and the editor of the site’s history blog, The Vault. We look forward to welcoming her to campus for what will be the tenth Writer-inResidence program. In celebration of that milestone we are convening a two-day workshop on the future of the emerging field of history communication. It will feature leading figures from a range of history venues and colleagues in journalism and the media, publishing, marketing, and activism. As this newsletter went to press, Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association; John Dichtl, president and CEO of the American Association for State and Local History; and Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, were confirmed participants. —Charles Weisenberger

I had a highly stimulating first year. I learned about our students and programs from the inside out, most especially by serving as Honors Program director. In the spring, the voluntary “Thesis Writing Forum” gave some of our brightest students a chance to tell one another and me about their research ideas, writing processes, and lightbulb moments. I saw firsthand how they wrestled with different types of sources, from Roman law, early modern diaries, and newspaper articles to poetry, speeches, archaeology, and eyewitness accounts. It was impressive to me that, no matter the focus, all of the students used history to interrogate issues of power.

Along with Suzanne Bell, the Undergraduate Program coordinator, I had the pleasure of organizing the annual History Department Thesis Symposium. Held April 22, it brought together eight undergraduate presenters, six to present honors theses and two to share their independent research projects. About forty faculty members, students, friends, and family members helped celebrate the completion of these projects. After presenting their work, the students expertly fielded questions from faculty and peers.

—Jason Moralee, director

regular Thesis Writing Forums.

Supporting History Students New Scholarship Funds The History Department is pleased to announce the addition of two new scholarship funds: the Richard Gassan Memorial Scholarship and the James and Cynthia Redman Scholarship.

The Richard Gassan Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Richard Gassan, a 2002 Ph.D. alumnus of the History

2015 HONORS THESES Eric Albino, “Jesus Give Us the Wheel: How and Why Western Leaders Built the Christian Ideology as an Instrument of Control”

Department. Established by his friends and family, it supports research by UMass Amherst graduate students.

Victoria Burns, “The Atomic Bomb: The Role of Science and Technology in the 20th Century”

The James and Cynthia Redman

Joshua Castillo, “Patrice Lamumba and Congolese Independence: The Brief Life and Tragic Death of a Nation”

Scholarship celebrates the life of James

Michael Moreshead, “No Longer a Favor but a Right: State Medicine in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1970”

Redman and father-in-law of Professor

Leah Pinsky, “Senators and Common Whores: A Study of the Affairs between Elite Men and Low-Class Prostitutes in the Roman Empire”

students at UMass Amherst.

O. Redman, father of Professor Sam Emily Redman. It supports history

Joy Silvey, “Queering the Institution: An Analysis of LGB Communities and Higher Education in the Pioneer Valley” Dimitrios Xanthopoulos, “Did Aristotle Murder Alexander the Great? The Death of Alexander through the Analysis of an Ancient Fabrication”

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The Graduate Program fessor Foster spoke about the material presented in his award-winning Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Temple University Press, 2014).

He also visited with History 691, giving students a chance to “meet the author” and ask a range of probing and insightful questions about the challenges and rewards of archival research and writing for a wide audience.

The Public History program hosted a session for graduate students, “Best Foot Forward: Personal Skills for Professional Success.” Students got to meet and talk about networking, personal branding, and other professional-development issues with Dan Yaeger, executive director of the New England Museum Association.

A number of graduate students and faculty organized a lunchtime discussion, “Integrated Lunch Counter.” Students and faculty gathered in the Hampshire Dining Commons to share a meal and discuss issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom.

Thanks are due to Alice Nash, who organized a lunch to introduce our graduate students to Professor Philip Deloria of the University of Michigan. An award-winning scholar of Native American history and American environmental history, he is the author of a

2015 M.A. THESES Thamyris Almeida, “Araguaia: Maoist Uprising and Military Counterinsurgency in the Brazilian Amazon, 1967–1975” Janelle Bourgeois, “Who’s Hiring the Indochinese Worker? Your Competition, Probably: Work, Welfare Dependence, and the Resettlement of Southeast Asian Refugees in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1975–1985” Matthew Herrera, “An Eerie Jungle Filled with Dragonflies, Sniper Bullets, and Ghosts: Changing Perceptions of Vietnam and the Vietnamese Through the Eyes of American Troops” Mike Jirik, “Combating Slavery and Colonization: Student Abolitionism and the Politics of Antislavery in Higher Education, 1833–1841”

2015 Ph.D. THESES Jeffrey Kovach, “Nantucket Women: Public Authority and Education in the EighteenthCentury Nantucket Quaker Women’s Meeting and the Foundation for Female Activism” Seanegan Sculley, “Good Gentlemen and Dirty Nasty People: The Formation of Military Tradition and Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783”

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number of books, including Playing Indian (1999) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2004). Students had lunch with Professor Deloria and attended an on-campus meeting of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Review Committee.

Throughout the year, students from our program presented research papers and poster sessions at conferences held across the United States and abroad by the American Historical Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the History of Science Society, the National Council on Public History, the Social Science History Association, Harvard Divinity School, and SUNY Binghamton.

Presenting at conferences is, of course, an important component of graduate education and professional development. The Graduate Program is fortunate to have funds available to help offset the cost of students’ conference travel and expenses. Contributions from our alumni make these opportunities possible.

The spring semester was a whirlwind of activity. The History Department helped coordinate Professor Angela Davis’s lecture on mass incarceration and state violence. Many graduate students contributed their time and energy to this event, helping with the planning and logistics. Professor Davis spoke to a full house in the Fine Arts Center theater and her lecture energized and inspired many of us.

“Transcending Borders and Disciplines: The Global Importance of Transnationalism,” the Graduate History Association’s annual conference, was a wonderful success, as always. The GHA hosted graduate students from a wide range of schools and disciplines.

Student papers examined issues of transnationalism in historical research and in such other disciplines as political science, sociology, and philosophy. Faculty from the Five Colleges attended the conference and participated in a variety of ways; some delivered formal comments on panel papers, others attended the presentations and offered feedback from the audience. The conference included a special panel discussion, “Teaching for Social Justice,” with professors Julio Capó Jr., Richard Chu, Libby Sharrow, and

M.A. students Julie Peterson, Natalie Sherif, and Kathleen Mahoney speak with Dan Yaeger, executive director of the New England Museum Association.

GHA Officers Janelle Bourgeois, Marwa Amer, Emily Pipes, and Felicia Jamison at the 2015 GHA conference.

JOHN SOLEM

This was a great year for the Department’s Graduate Program.

Our students participated in a wide variety of events on and off campus. The second-year master’s students showcased their work by presenting their portfolios during the spring, when two doctoral students defended their dissertations. As always, our graduate students have been hard at work on their own research projects and professional development while balancing the demands of teaching, working in the libraries, interning at local historical sites, and taking on a range of other work and activities.

In the fall I had the pleasure of teaching History 691, “Introduction to the Study of History,” the required course for incoming graduate students. Of course, that meant that I got to know our 13 first-year master’s and Ph.D. students very well. They were a great group who made each week’s seminar unpredictable and lively. We were happy to welcome into the class Neroli Price, a visiting graduate student from Cape Town, South Africa, who spent the fall semester on campus.

Also in the fall, the Graduate Program hosted Professor Thomas Foster from DePaul University, who delivered the Annual Five Colleges Distinguished History Lecture. Pro-

History Department faculty and the 2015 M.A. graduating class.

Angela Davis at her lecture “Sustaining Social Justice Movements and Intersectional Struggles.”

Barbara Krauthamer. Professor Jennifer Guglielmo from Smith College delivered the keynote lecture, “Writing History for a World in Crisis: The Radical Possibilities of a Transnational Lens,” in which she presented her research on Italian-American women’s radical politics in the early twentieth century.

This year’s Writer-in-Residence was Amy Wilentz, the acclaimed author of many books, including Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti; The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier; and I Feel Earthquakes More Of-

ten Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is a professor of English at the University of California-Irvine and a contributing editor for The Nation who also writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The London Review of Books, and many other media outlets.

Professor Wilentz spent a week on campus, visiting graduate and undergraduate classes at UMass, Amherst College, and Mount Holyoke College. In her keynote lecture, “Haiti’s Earthquake and the Limits of Charity,” she

spoke about the intersections of U.S. and Haitian history and the lasting consequences of U.S military and aid policies in Haiti.

The Department’s spring semester ended on a high note with the Graduate Awards Ceremony. As always, it was a great pleasure to recognize our students’ tremendous achievements.

Finally, heartfelt congratulations to • Justin Burch, who received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the American Indian Graduate Center in Albuquerque, N.M. 11

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The Public History Program

Professors Libby Sharrow, Julio Capó Jr., Richard Chu, and Barbara Krauthamer share their thoughts on teaching for social justice at the 2015 GHA conference.

• Canaan Asbury, Jenna Febrizio, and Sarah Lavallee, who received awards from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) to study in Germany during the summer • Seanegan Sculley and Jeffrey Kovach, who defended their dissertations.

It has been my great pleasure to serve as the Graduate Program director this year, and I’m looking forward to getting to know this year’s new students and faculty. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mary Lashway, Jessica Johnson, Suzanne Bell, Adam Howes, and Amy Fleig, whose hard work and good cheer keep the Program running smoothly and effectively every day.

—Barbara Krauthamer, director

2015 graduate student award winners.

The Public History Program advanced on a number of fronts during 2014–15. In September, we welcomed the new group of students with a boat ride on the Connecticut River, and we closed the year in June with the annual Massachusetts History Conference in Worcester. Here are some of the highlights in between: The heart of the Public History Program remains our graduate courses that combine classroom instruction with field experience through service projects. In fall 2014, Jon Olsen’s “Introduction to Public History” class completed a project for the German Department marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as an historic preservation and interpretation project for Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Amherst. Sam Redman’s “Museum and Historic Site Interpretation” course in Spring 2015 included projects for the Goodwin Church, Old South Meeting House in Boston, an online project exploring disability history for the Smithsonian National Museum of American

History, and the early stages of a veterans oral history project, a collaboration between the UMass Oral History Lab, New England Public Radio, and UMass Veterans Services.

Thanks to the generosity of UMass Amherst alumnus Dr. Charles K. Hyde ’66, six graduate students received scholarships to support public history internships as Hyde Fellows in summer 2015. Additionally, the Dr. Charles K. Hyde Visiting Practitioners Program animates our curriculum by bringing real-world perspectives into our seminars and helping students envision careers beyond the degree. During 2014–15 we invited 20 visiting practitioners to our public history classes, more than ever before.

The Department also offers undergraduate courses in public history. In the fall, Sam Redman taught “Introduction to Public History,” exploring campus monuments, buildings, and exhibitions. A visit to the UMass Special Collections and University Archives proved especially informative. In the spring a team of students in David Glassberg’s “Public His-

tory Workshop” worked with the Mill River Greenway Initiative on a wayside exhibit in Florence, Mass., exploring the river’s environmental history.

Two new Public History Program initiatives in 2014–15 merit special attention. One is the successful implementation of a two-year grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for a Five College faculty and staff seminar exploring ways for undergraduate students majoring in the humanities to bridge to public humanities careers. Co-directed by Marla Miller and David Glassberg with the assistance of Jessica Johnson, the project is managed by Ph.D. student Cheryl Harned.

Cheryl taught the January-term “Applied Humanities Learning Lab,” in which students developed new approaches to increasing public awareness and engagement for the Joseph Skinner Museum in South Hadley, Mass. The students presented their ideas to the public in March at an elegant evening gala at Smith College that culminated in an inspiring address by Dr. Patricia West

Public History students Kathleen Mahoney, Julie Peterson, Gabby Chapman, Neroli Price (University of Cape Town), Olivier Roger (Amherst College), and Natalie Sherif present their project for the Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church.

GRADUATE STUDENT DEPARTMENTAL AWARDS Dr. Charles K. Hyde Intern Fellowships (See the listing on pages 14–15).

Frederic Gilbert Bauer Research Fellowship In support of Erica Fagen’s research travel to Berlin, Germany, for her dissertation, “Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory in the Age of Multimedia.”

Hands-on Grant In support of Marwa Amer’s participation in “Black History 360°,” the Schomburg Center’s Summer Education Institute.

History Department Travel Grants and Graduate School Travel Grants In support of Amy Breimaier’s research travel to the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston for her dissertation on the relationship between young people and printed materials in New England from the 1750s to 1810s. Also in support of Miriam Wells’s research travel to archives in New York City for her dissertation, “Sinophiles: Five Artistic Journeys.”

Joyce A. Berkman Endowed Fund in Women’s History and Women’s Studies In support of Destiney Linker’s research travel for her dissertation on 20th-century Black women’s internationalism.

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Jumpstart Grants for Dissertation Research In support of Amanda Tewes’s dissertation research on Old West theme parks in California, and Miriam Well’s dissertation research on individuals involved in bringing Chinese artistic culture to the United States. Tewes traveled to research sites in California; Wells visited archives in Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

Simon and Sateng Ermonian Graduate Awards for Excellence in Graduate Teaching Nominated by Joel Wolfe, Thamyris Almeida was honored for her outstanding work as a teaching assistant in courses ranging from “Modern Latin America” to “History of Baseball.” Nominated by Laura Lovett, Julie de Chantal was honored for her excellence as a teaching assistant and instructor in courses including “History of Sexuality” and “U.S. History since 1876.”

Theodore Caldwell Writing Prizes To Michael Jirik for his M.A. thesis, “Combating Slavery and Colonization: Student Abolitionism and the Politics of Antislavery in Higher Education, 1833–1841,” and to Emily Pipes for her paper “The Evolution of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

The History Department thanks its generous donors whose support makes these awards possible. For more information on these awards, see www.umass.edu/history/programs/GraduateAwards.html.

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Panelists Mary Dougherty, Sam Redman, and Charles Hyde at

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“Publishing Local Histories: Challenges and Opportunities.”

Participants at this year’s Oral History Crash Course.

Felicia Jamison and Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University at the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, Mass.

Professor David Glassberg (left) with (from left) Samuel Harrison Society trustees Marlena Willis, Churchill Cotton, and Pat Cotton at the grand opening of the Harrison House on Saturday, June 20, 2015. In the background are the exhibit panels that Public History alumni Amanda Tewes, Sarah Marrs, Michael Holmes, Kelli Morgan, Andrew Grim, and Peter Blackmer developed in 2012–13.

McKay of the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. Cheryl will teach another such lab in 2015–16, and we can’t wait to see what she has the students do next. For more information, visit www.appliedhumaniteslearninglab.com.

The other new initiative was the “Oral History Crash Course” that Sam Redman organized in April. Along with Sam, the daylong workshop featured Joyce Berkman; Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky; Laura Lovett; Emily T. H. Redman; and Aaron Rubenstein, digital archivist at UMass Amherst’s Special Collections and University Archives. They offered an introduction to oral history theory and methodology geared toward beginners, including those with no prior experience and those first developing projects of all kinds. Participants learned about interviewing technique, project planning, archiving, oral history ethics, and recording technologies. Wildly successful, the event drew a wide variety of participants, including graduate students, undergraduates, and community historians from throughout the area.

Several awards further enhanced the regional and national reputation of the Public History Program. At the New England Museum Association Annual Meeting in November, David Glassberg received an Award of Excellence for his contribution (along with many others) to the development of the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite into a significant

tourist destination. At the National Council on Public History’s annual meeting in April, Emily Pipes was recognized with a Travel Award, and the UMass Press Public History series edited by Marla Miller won two more NCPH Book Award nods, one for Andrea Burns’s From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (winner) and another for Susan Reynolds Williams’s Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America (honorable mention). Since 2005, the NCPH Book Award has been presented 11 times, and the UMass Press or UMass Amherst faculty have had a hand in four of the winners and two of the honorable mentions. Another book in the series, Jessie Swigger’s “History is Bunk”: Assembling the Past at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, won this year’s Henry Ford Heritage Association Book Award. Marla Miller and Jon Olsen received the Artstor Digital Humanities Award for the Historic Dress project (www.historicdress.org), which provides online access to American women’s clothing from 1780 to 1930 in collections across the United States, as well as to related archival primary source materials.

Congratulations are also due to current and former students and faculty for their career advancements in 2015. During 2015–17 Margo Shea will be at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., as part of a collaborative research project in place-based education funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Matthew Barlow, who taught Public

History at UMass Amherst in 2014–15, is beginning a tenure-track position at the University of Northern Alabama, joining alumna Carrie Barske, director of the school’s public history program. Kate Preissler is now executive director of the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, Mass. Deborah Kalman is the new business manager at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Mass. Amanda Goodheart Parks is now director of education at the New England Air Museum, and Ph.D. student Amanda Tewes is directing a new oral history initiative at the San Diego History Center.

Congratulations to the unusually large and talented class of Public History students who graduated in May: Charles Weisenberger, Emily Hunter, Emily Pipes, Rebecca Schmitt, Kayla Pittman, Katie Garland, and Matt Coletti. We wish them every success in their future endeavors.

Finally, we wish to thank our Public History graduate assistant, Kayla Pittman, for the many tasks she performed during 2014–15.

We’ve been extremely fortunate to have extraordinary students in this position, and look forward to having Julie Peterson continue the tradition while Chelsea Miller joins the team as communications assistant.

—David Glassberg, acting director

DR. CHARLES K. HYDE PUBLIC HISTORY FELLOWS AND VISITING PRACTITIONERS, 2014–15 Dr. Charles K. Hyde Intern Fellowships

Visiting Practitioners

Rose Gallenberger, Historic St. Mary’s City, Md.

Erin Blasco, Education Specialist, National Museum of American History

Emily Genatowski, Founder, History of Wine and the Vine

Dan Yaeger, Executive Director, New England Museum Association

Felicia Jamison, W. E. B. Du Bois National Historic Site, Great Barrington, Mass.

Doug Boyd, Director, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History

Michael Kelly, Head of Archives and Special Collections, Frost Library

Bruce Watson, Author of Freedom Summer

Kathleen Mahoney, WGBH, Boston, Mass.

Trudie Cole, Archaeologist and Learning & Access Manager, Poole Museum

Kathy Kottaridis, Executive Director, Historic Boston Inc.

Patricia West McKay, Martin Van Buren National Historic Site

Julie Peterson, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Philadelphia, Pa.

Mary Dougherty, Director, University of Massachusetts Press

Anne Lanning, Vice President for Museum Affairs, Historic Deerfield Inc.

Caroline White, UMass Special Collections

Natalie Sherif, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

Andreas Etges, Cold War Museum Association

James Woolsey, Superintendent, Springfield Armory

Sean Smeland, American Precision Museum, Windsor, Vt.

Megan Harris, Senior Reference Librarian, Library of Congress Veterans Oral History Project

Steve Lubar, Former Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center, and Chair, Division of the History of Technology, National Museum of American History

Bill Hosley, Independent Museum Professional

Barbara Mathews, Public Historian, Historic Deerfield Inc.

Charles K. Hyde ’66, Historian, Wayne State University; Series Editor, Wayne State University Press

Katherine Ott, Curator, Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History

Check the Public History Program Facebook Page (www.facebook.com/ UMassPublicHistory) and the History Department’s blog, Past@Present (www. umasshistory.wordpress.com), for accounts of the Hyde fellows’ exploits.

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Hyde Funds also enabled the Public History Program to support a public forum and a graduate student session organized by the Native American Indian Studies Program. The events featured tribal representatives from throughout the Northeast and Midwest assessing the federal government’s implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

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Ph.D. student Amanda Tewes at the “1931 Project Exposition” gala.

Team Communication—Garen Sahagian, Jessica Ratcliffe, Indiana Massey, and their mentor Emily Devoe—at the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum with Aaron Miller.

of Public Humanists’ Success.” Harned and Mark Roblee facilitated open, imaginative engagement and dialogue while challenging students to reach beyond their comfort zones. They welcomed an array of local experts—from the directors of local museums, nonprofits, and funding agencies to theater designers, public-speaking coaches, and our very own David Glassberg, Caro Pinto ’07MA, and Applied Humanities Learning Lab participants at the Skinner Museum with Kate Preissler ’09MA—into Herter 601 to reveal something of what Linda McInernery, artistic director at Deerfield Productions. the public humanities have to offer. To embody these lessons, students worked with the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum of Mount Holyoke College and UMass Amherst graduate-student and alumni mentors, CUTTING EDGE: including historians Jill Dwiggins ’13MA and Christopher Benning, to complete “The 1931 Project” and present it publicly.

The performance was an art deco–themed extravaganza. Each of four teams—Team Advancement, Team Communication, Team Exposition, and Team Programming—claimed a corner and exhibited their best ideas for the Skinner Museum to a mingling public who devoured the atmosphere, hors d’oeuvres, and period costumes in equal measure, and left having seen the living exposition of student work on display right before their eyes.

After a seemingly interminable winter, Wednesday, 11 March 2015, In the words of UMass student Chloe Michaelidis: “For my classes, dawned sunny and clear, melting away much that remained of the cold I often find myself tucked away in books, curious but alone. The season, to the profound relief of many. No one breathed a bigger sigh AppHuLL intensive plucked me out of my library cubicle and taught of relief than the participants in the Applied Humanities Learning Lab (AppHuLL) who, after a weeklong January-term course and two months me the power of people. I’ve learned about the applied humanities through the words and experiences of those who work in a range of of further preparation, were finally presenting their work publicly.

Starting at 7:30 p.m., in an empty room in Smith College’s Campus fields; through our in-class activities, which taught us how to ask questions and engage; and through our projects, in which we’ve Center, a once-only performance took place. Eighteen Five College learned how to collaborate and the importance of doing so. This humanities undergraduates (including UMass Amherst History knowledge and these skills will follow me in whatever career in the students Kerube Gonzalez, Bryan Gosciminski, Jean Lawrence, applied humanities I eventually pursue, and I’m incredibly grateful Daniel Thomas McNulty, Jessica Ratcliffe, and Bianca Renzoni), and excited for all the opportunities I now see ahead.” six UMass graduate students, a special guest speaker, and a cadre of The Applied Humanities Learning Lab is a project of the supporters brought the humanities to life by presenting what they Mellon Foundation / Five Colleges Bridging Initiative in the Public called “The 1931 Project Exposition” and the Five College publication and Applied Humanities. This two-year initiative aims to help Collaborations called “student work on the cutting edge of applied undergraduates “bridge” their humanities educations with relevant humanities in action.” professions, particularly in museums, archives, nonprofits, and other The performance grew out of an experimental AppHuLL Januarypublic humanities fields. It is directed by David Glassberg, Jessica term course developed by History Ph.D. student Cheryl Harned. It Johnson, and Marla Miller, with graduate fellow Cheryl Harned. engaged students in career exploration and skill-building exercises, (See www.appliedhumaniteslearninglab.com) —Cheryl Harned networking opportunities, and a workshop series, “The Four Pillars

Applied Humanities Learning Lab

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The Outreach Office One of the many unique and impressive things about UMass Amherst’s Department of History is the commitment to community engagement shown by its students and faculty members. This past academic year the History Department once again outdid itself.

Our year was packed with a robust, exciting array of community projects and events. As outreach director, I had the privilege of supporting and collaborating on many of these projects. This column offers a brief snapshot of what we’ve been up to.

Public Events. You can read about many of this year’s largest public events in the pages of this report, including the Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, the Annual Lecture, events with our Writer-in-Residence Amy Wilentz, the Mellon Foundation Bridging Initiative in the Public Humanities gala, and not one, but two teach-ins. And it didn’t end there. In total, we hosted over one hundred public events, ranging from a statewide conference on Massachusetts history (the “Mass History Conference”) to an oral history workshop, from exhibit openings to film screenings to talks by scholars from across the U.S. and the world. In addition to bringing members of the public to campus for events, we also bring people who’ve witnessed or made history in distinct ways into our classrooms as guest speakers. Below, Loretta Ross, co-founder of SisterSong Collective for Reproductive Justice, speaks with students in Joyce Berkman’s Junior-Year Writing Seminar.

Programs for K-12 Educators. The History Department’s signature offering for local teachers is our annual History Institute. This year we teamed up with the Feinberg Distinguished Lecture Series to offer a yearlong series on immigration history. You can read more about it in this report’s cover

story. This summer Alice Nash directed a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on Native American history that brought two dozen teachers to campus from across the United States; see page 21 for details. The Department co-sponsored a second NEH institute for teachers—this one on Springfield’s industrial history—with the Collaborative for Educational Services.

Additionally, we are actively involved with Five College Partnership Programs, and every year our faculty work with dozens of undergraduate and graduate students interested in pursuing teaching careers.

In the image below, participants in Alice Nash’s NEH summer institute visit with Jessie Little Doe Baird, MacArthur fellow and director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project at the Old Indian Meeting House in Mashpee, Mass.

VINCENZA PARELLA, FIVE COLLEGES

FRANCIS PHAN / FIVE COLLEGES

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Engaged Scholarship and CommunityBased History. History faculty regularly publish in popular online and print venues.

In doing so, they bring their scholarship to bear on ongoing public conversations, weigh in on contemporary issues, and use history to offer a new lens of understanding. We regularly share links to new books and articles on our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ umass.history) and our blog, Past@Present (umasshistory.wordpress.com/).

As you can see from the faculty and student updates elsewhere in this report, Department faculty and students also work on a wide range of historical projects with community groups. To highlight those that the Outreach Office has worked with most extensively, this year Julio Capó Jr., Mitch

Boucher of UWW, and I co-directed a UMass Creative Economy Initiative Fund project with the Sexual Minorities Archives (SMA) in Northampton, Mass. Working with Ph.D. student Marwa Amer (pictured above), SMA volunteers, and five undergraduate interns, we created a walking tour of UMass’s LGBTQ history, an online exhibit on Northampton Pride, and a new SMA website. Undergraduate interns cataloged archival collections, increasing community and scholarly access to these materials, and transferred this massive collection to acid-free storage to ensure that the materials will long remain in good condition.

Marla Miller and I are joining a range of other UMass Amherst faculty and students—especially the 18 graduate students in her “Introduction to Public History” seminar—in collaborating with the Humanities Action Lab, a coalition of 20 universities from across the country coordinated by the New School, to create a large exhibit and web platform on mass incarceration. UMass’s portion of the exhibit explores gender and incarceration in Massachusetts. This initiative is supported by IMLS, the Open Society Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and other major donors. The exhibit will travel to western Massachusetts in the spring of 2017. For more information, visit www. humanitiesactionlab.org.

Online Courses. Our online courses, open to the public, reach students, alumni, and other learners across the U.S. and the world. This past year we offered more classes than ever 17

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COMMUNITY CONVERSATION:

Vietnam War Teach-In before, including old favorites like “Modern World History” and “Social Change and the 1960s.” We also added new courses, including a seminar on the history of health care and medicine. Joel Wolfe created an online version of his popular baseball history course, as did Barbara Krauthamer with her course on early African American history.

For a glimpse into online learning at UMass Amherst, check out the video podcasts Dan Allosso created for his course on U.S. environmental history: www.environmentalhistory.us/index.html Thanks! I want to express my gratitude to the 2014–15 communications assistant, Charles Weisenberger ’15MA, and the year’s Public History assistant, Kayla Pittman ’15MA. Together they wrote and sent numerous email announcements and press releases, printed posters, videotaped events, coordinated logistics, and more. Undergraduate assistants Samantha Lombard, Enjoli Pescheta, Julian del Prado, and Kiyanna Sully were also tremendous. Many thanks as well to the students, faculty, and organizations—too many to mention—who support and collaborate on the Department’s outreach projects. Finally, special thanks to Marwa Amer, Suzanne Bell, Joye Bowman, Julio Capó Jr., Amy Fleig, David Glassberg, Cheryl Harned, Jennifer Heuer, Adam Howes, Mary Lashway, Marla Miller, and Alice Nash.

—Jessica Johnson, director

In April, the History Department collaborated with the Veterans Education Project to sponsor a Vietnam War teach-in, “The Conflicting Legacies of the Vietnam War: Why They Still Matter.” The speaker panel included Cherie Rankin, a former Red Cross volunteer who served in Vietnam and went on to advocate for women, both veterans and civilians, deeply affected by the war; Wayne Smith, a former president of the Black Patriots Foundation, who served two tours in Vietnam as an army medic and now advises the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America; Randy Kehler, a peace activist who served a two-year prison sentence for draft resistance and helped inspire Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers; Tom Weiner, author of Called to Serve: Stories of Men and Women Confronted by the Vietnam War Draft; and myself, the author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.

The goal of the evening was to mark the 40th anniversary of the war’s end by raising awareness of its realities and myths and its impact on veterans, the national psyche, and the lives of Americans and Southeast Asians. A diverse crowd of more than 100 people attended, with many asking questions and making comments. A surprising number of people—including students, neighbors, colleagues, and people I hadn’t seen in years—came up afterward or emailed me to let me know how compelling the entire evening had been and how moved they were by the powerful ways that this long-ago history still resonates with the problems of the present. —Christian Appy

Left to right: Vietnam War Teach-In panelists Wayne Smith, Tom Weiner, Christian Appy, Cherie Rankin, and Randy Kehler, with moderator Tom Fricke.

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Audrey Altstadt reports: I spent 2014–15 as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. My project, “Why Unblooms the Hope: Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan,” was a longevity study of the nearly 25 years of post-Soviet independence in that oil-rich, strategically located country between Russia and Iran. It was based on presentations, briefings, and analyses I had produced, but not always published, since the early 1990s.

The end result will be a book with roughly the same title as the project. The Wilson Center itself, with its intense intellectual/political environment of scholars from all over the world, international journalists, former ambassadors, and other experts, was an ideal place to work. I made three presentations there, and one at the National Endowment for Democracy. I also testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats. I have reshaped my fall class, “Human Rights and Energy,” to reflect the things I learned during the year.

Christian Appy reports: By far the biggest professional news for me this year was the publication of my third book on the Vietnam War, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. Published

by Viking, it came out in February 2015. To help promote it, I gave talks at bookstores and universities (Oregon, NYU, Dartmouth, American, Wheaton, Adelphi) and did more than 45 interviews, mostly on radio. In June I spoke about the book at the UMass Alumni Weekend, and in September I was a featured author at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. My next project is a book about World War II in American memory; I look forward to teaching a First-Year Seminar on that subject this fall, followed next year by a GenEd lecture course.

Carlin Barton retired in May from teaching in the Department of History, but has not ruled out returning to teach on occasion.

She thanks all of the students who have taught her and enriched her life greatly over the past thirty years. They were the reason that the classroom was such a happy

Anne Broadbridge in London during the Oxford Summer Seminar.

Richard Chu with students from his course “Asian and Pacific American History.”

place for her for so long. She also wishes to thank the many colleagues who tolerated her otherwise shy and awkward presence in the department.

Carlin’s new book, Imagine No Religion, written with Daniel Boyarin of UC Berkeley, is scheduled to come out this winter. It deals with what you can see in ancient cultures if you stop looking for what is not there—i.e., “religion.” It includes a detailed study of the Latin notion of religio and all of the many (and, to us, contradictory) ways in which it was understood, none of which map onto our notions of “religion.” It traces the various trajectories of religio from the earliest Latin writings to the Christian Tertullian, showing the array of ideas and notions that were there. This book was the fruit of more than a decade of teaching courses on Roman and world “religions.” Carlin presented shortened versions of its thesis at Oxford, Brown, and Colgate.

“I’m hoping now to have some time to tackle a few of the myriad projects I didn’t have time for in the past,” Carlin reports. “But I won’t be too busy to enjoy hearing from any of my former students at any time.”

Anne Broadbridge has finished her third and final year as director of the Oxford Summer Seminar, guiding students from UMass Amherst and other schools spending six weeks studying with faculty at Trinity College, Oxford. The seminar, set to cele-

brate its 50th anniversary, is now under the accomplished directorship of Jen Adams of the English Department. Anne will spend 2015–16 on sabbatical, during which she aims to finish her second book, which deals with important social and political activities of Genghis Khan’s mother, senior wife, junior wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. She also plans to conduct short research trips to Oregon and Mongolia and hopes not only to travel to important Mongolian historical sites but also, if possible, attempt to milk a yak.

As part of his Five College joint appointment, Richard T. Chu taught at Smith College and Amherst College, where he offered a course on Asian/Pacific/American and Chinese Diasporic History, respectively. At UMass Amherst he taught his signature “Empire, Race, and the Philippines.” Chu was selected to be a Civic Engagement and Service Learning Fellow for 2015, enabling him to offer a course bringing UMass and Five College students to collaborate with Asian/Pacific/American organizations and communities in the valley. The book Chu recently edited, More Tsinoy Than We Expect (Vibal Publishing, 2015), was launched in August at the Kaisa Heritage Foundation. Chu also participated in the workshop “Death, Burial Rituals, and Cemeteries among Chinese Communities in Insular Southeast Asia, 16th–21st Centuries” at the Kaisa Heritage Center in Intramuros Manila, Philippines, where he presented 19

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his paper “Historical Notes on the Chinese Cemetery in Manila and Points for Future Research.” Chu will teach and conduct research in the Philippines under a Core U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program in spring 2016.

David Glassberg divided his research, teaching, and community-engagement work between public history, environmental history, and modern U.S. cultural history. He began developing his essay “Place, Memo-

ry, and Climate Change” (published in The Public Historian, August 2014) into a book project; he taught the upper-level undergraduate courses “The Conservation of Nature and Culture” and “Public History Workshop: The Mill River Greenway Initiative”; and he continued building the new W. E. B. Du Bois National Historic Site in Great Barrington, Mass., into an international tourist destination. Among the highlights of the year was serving on the selection committee for the first Stanton-Horton Award, given by the Organization of American Historians to the National Park Service history project that best exemplifies civic engagement and scholarly excellence.

John Higginson reports: In November 2014, Cambridge University Press published the hardback edition of my Collective Violence

John Higginson reading from his Collective

Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South

and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948. I gave “Looking for Evil in all the Wrong Places,” a lecture based on the book, in December at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, and in April at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. I used some of the contents of Collective Violence to foreground a discussion of the topic on which Joye Bowman and I are presently working: American engineers who assisted in opening up the deep-level gold mines of South Africa’s Far East Rand. Many of these men, such as William Lincoln Honnold, Herbert Hoover, John Hays Hammond Sr., and Fredric Burnham, shaped the economic trajectory of the United States until the advent of the Great Depression. Their activities also established a precedent that led to the sheer majority of mining engineers in South Africa coming from the United States until the latter part of the 1970s. The new project is tentatively titled Engineering Empire: The American Odyssey in South Africa.

African Apartheid, 1900–1948.

FRANCIS PHAN / FIVE COLLEGES

Marla Miller reports: I had a terrific year of research and writing, thanks to the support of UMass Amherst’s Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship, which provides faculty members with opportunities to focus on research and creative activities. The leave allowed me to travel to Scotland in September for the University of Glasgow workshop “Women’s Work across Time and Place: Foundations for Comparison in Pre-Census Europe”; to present on my most recent book, Rebecca Dickinson, at the Winterthur Museum conference “The Diligent Needle: Instrument of Profit, Pleasure, and Ornament”; and to join the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies for conversations about both my current study of women and work in Federal Massachusetts, and to explore intersections between traditional scholarship and public history practice. A real high

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Laura Lovett at the Digital Humanities kickoff event in September, hosted by the Five College Digital Humanities Program. Lovett presented on the Safe Passage oral history project with Dan Joslyn of Hampshire College and Amy Armstrong ’15.

point was sharing the stage at the International Festival of Authors with my colleague Stephen Platt. Another treat was co-authoring, with Elizabeth Sharpe, “Artifact Stories: Making Memories Matter for Amherst Seniors,” an essay sharing insights gained during a summer program (funded by a UMass Public Service Endowment Grant) serving local senior centers. The essay appeared in Hamish Robertson’s collection The Caring Museum (Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc).

Much of the spring was spent finishing up an ethnographic report, co-authored with Ph.D. alumna Laura Miller, for the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Site. Laura and I have learned so much, met so many great people, and had so much fun along the way. And I’m happy to report that my manuscript tentatively titled Knowing Your Place: Landscapes of Labor in a Massachusetts Town is now headed toward publication.

Jason Moralee reports: In the fall I taught “History of World Religions” and a Junior-Year Writing Seminar on Alexander the Great.

The 14 students in the latter wrote a history of Alexander the Great: 28 chapters, 300 pages, 735 footnotes. In the spring I taught an upper-level course, “Fall of the Roman Empire,” and “Race and Ethnicity in the Ancient World,” an honors seminar for both undergraduate and graduate students.

During the past year I presented papers here and there. Locally, I shared my thoughts with the History Club and the Five College Seminar in Late Antiquity. Last May I presented at the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Mich.

For the 2015 Congress I organized a panel to highlight the work of UMass Ph.D. students.

Participants included Mark Roblee (History) and Melissa Hudasko (English), as well as some from Purdue and NYU. Workwise, it’s been an amazing year.

My project on the Rome’s Capitol (the original Capitol Hill) in late antiquity is moving forward on various fronts. I co-authored a related article with architect Kiel Moe of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

I can happily report that my book, Capitol After Empire: The Capitoline Hill from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, is now under

Alice Nash leads K-12 teachers in a discussion of the contested history of the 1704 attack on Deerfield, Mass., at the town’s Memorial Hall Museum. The discussion was a part of the three-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute that Nash directed in July.

contract with Oxford University Press. Finally, I was awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for the 2015–16 academic year to complete the book and start new projects.

Alice Nash became director of the Certificate Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies in August 2014. She is co-editing, with Josef Raab and Stefan Rinke, Rethinking the Americas, the first volume of a five-volume reference work in the Inter-American Key Topics Series being produced by the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University in Germany (Ashgate Publishing, 2017).

In July 2015 she directed “Native Americans of New England; A Historical Overview,” an intensive, three-week Summer Institute for K-12 teachers funded by a $180,922 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and coordinated through Five Colleges Inc. Ph.D. student Adeline Broussan assisted with the Summer Institute and has played a key role in developing a new website, Teaching Native American History, launched this fall.

Jon Berndt Olsen was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor. He also published his first book, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). This past year, Jon assumed the role of co-director of the UMass Digital Humanities Initiative. He also presented a paper at the German Studies

Association meeting in October on the controversies surrounding attempts to build new monuments in Berlin and Leipzig honoring the 1989 revolution and the 1990 unification of Germany. In November, Jon was invited to give a keynote lecture at Northern Arizona University marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and officially open a new permanent exhibit about the wall in NAU’s student union building. In the spring, Jon presented at the National Council on Public History about his experiences with community-based undergraduate digital history research projects. He is on leave in Berlin this fall conducting research for a book tentatively titled Going on Vacation in a Socialist Land: Tourism and Leisure Culture in East Germany.

Sigrid Schmalzer has been putting the finishing touches on her new book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. It will be published in early 2016 by the University of Chicago Press and, thanks to a grant from the Office of Research Development, will sport color images. She also enjoyed traveling to Bangalore in May to participate in a collaborative research project on the history of science in modern China and modern India.

Heidi V. Scott guest-curated an exhibition, “Subterranean Worlds: Under the Earth in the Early Americas,” at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I., with the 21

FACULTY UPDATES

FACULTY AWARDS, 2014–15 Artstor Digital Humanities Award To Marla Miller and Jon Olsen, for the Historic Dress project (www.historicdress.org).

Civic Engagement and Service Learning Fellowship To Richard Chu, to create a course in which UMass and Five College students will collaborate with Pioneer Valley Asian/Pacific/American organizations and communities.

2014–15 Conti Fellow Marla Miller joined Stephen Platt and Christopher Manfredi, McGill University Dean of the Faculty of the Arts, at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, for the conversation “Processes in Non-Fiction.”

Professor Julio Capó Jr. and Feinberg lecturer Ana Raquel Minian.

from the UMass College of Social and Behavioral Sciences to begin this work.

An image from Sigrid Schmalzer’s forthcoming book Red Revolution,

Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China.

Heidi Scott.

assistance of Ken Ward, the library’s curator of Latin American books. The inaugural event in the series “Exploring the Four Elements,” it showcased the library’s rich collection of texts, illustrations, and maps that open a window onto the quest for metals below the surface of the earth in Latin America between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to reflecting the central importance of mining in colonial society, the displayed materials offered insight into the ideas and values that inhabitants of early modern Europe and the colonial Americas attached to subterranean realms and their metallic riches. In particular, the exhibition sought to bring the history of mining into conversation with the environmental history of the Americas. The exhibition was on display through August.

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A full-day symposium, likewise titled “Subterranean Worlds” and organized by Heidi and Brown Library Director Neil Safier, marked the opening of the exhibition on April 3. It included a workshop on an eighteenth-century Mexican mining manual recently acquired by the library, a guided tour of the exhibition by Heidi, and a multidisciplinary roundtable discussion on current and future trends in the history of mining in the colonial Americas. In addition to Heidi, the roundtable participants were Orlando Betancor of Barnard College, Allison Bigelow of the University of Virginia, Mary Van Buren of Colorado State University, John Demos of Yale University, and Kenneth Mills of University of Toronto.

Under contract with Cambria Press, Heidi is currently working on a book manu-

script provisionally titled Mining Places and Subterranean Spaces in Colonial Spanish America: Nature, Government, and Moral Debate in the Exploitation of the Underground. Her proposal for the exhibition and symposium emerged out of her book-project research, which included a two-month research fellowship at the Brown Library in 2012.

Libby Sharrow received two research grants in spring 2015. She will be a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellow with the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2015–16, continuing work on her book on the politics of Title IX. She is also beginning a new project on the long-term policy-implementation effects of Title IX for “female athletes.” Sharrow received a research grant

Rob Weir had a busy year developing new courses on the history of American capitalism and an integrated-learning experience on American legends. He also published two articles, “Solid Men in the Granite City: Municipal Socialism in Barre, Vermont, 1916– 1931,” in Vermont History 83, no. 1 (Winter/ Spring 2015), and “Dark Chocolate: Lessons from the 1937 Hershey Sit-down Strike,” in Labor History 56, no. 1 (Spring 2015).

Joel Wolfe reports: Last academic year, I completed work on several articles and had two published. One is a reinterpretation of the 1930s in Brazil that appeared in The Great Depression in the Americas and Its Legacies, Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight, eds.

(Duke University Press, 2014). That book will be published in Spanish next year in Mexico.

I also published “Summer’s Food for Winter’s Table: Tin Cans and Tin Consumption in the Americas” in Tin and Global Capitalism, 1850–2000: A History of “the Devil’s Metal,” Mats Ingulstad et al, eds., (Routledge, 2014).

The latter is the first published work to come out of my research project on trade and society in the Western Hemisphere. I also spoke at McGill University, Binghamton University, and at the Potomac Center in Washington on my new work on the hemisphere in the 1920s.

Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Research and Teaching Award To Richard Chu, to enable him to teach and conduct research in the Philippines.

Five College Digital Humanities Grant To Julio Capó Jr. for his project “Timeline of LGBT Political Landmarks in the Americas,” which he designed with Javier Corrales, Gretchen Gano, and Kelcy Shepherd (Amherst College).

Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship To Jason Moralee, to complete his book Capitol after Empire: Rome’s Capitoline Hill from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Institute for Museum and Library Sciences National Leadership Grant, Open Society Foundation Grant, and Whiting Foundation Grant To the Humanities Action Lab, which, along with Marla Miller, Jessica Johnson, and the Public History Program, has received several grants supporting its current project, “Global Dialogues on Incarceration.”

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute During summer 2015 Alice Nash directed “Native Americans of New England: A Historical Overview,” an NEH Summer Institute for Teachers on Native American and indigenous studies.

New England Museum Association Excellence Award To David Glassberg, for his work on the team that created an interpretive trail and outdoor exhibition at the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, Mass.

New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellowship; UMass College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Grant To Libby Sharrow, to write her book on the long-term policy implementation effects of Title IX for “female athletes.”

UMass Creative Economies Initiatives Fund Award To Julio Capó Jr., Jessica Johnson, and Mitch Boucher (University Without Walls), to preserve archival materials on LGBTQI history and develop greater access to these resources.

UMass Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship To Marla Miller, to pursue research and creative activities.

Whiting Foundation Travel Award To Anna Taylor, to conduct research in Iceland.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship To Audrey Altstadt, to work on her project “Why Unblooms the Hope: Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan.”

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FACULTY UPDATES

Emeriti Updates

Our Newest Faculty Members

Kevin Young is a historian of modern Latin America.

He completed his Ph.D. at the University of New York Stony Brook in 2013.

He is currently completing his first book, Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia, 1927–1971. It argues that recent Bolivian social movements in defense of the country’s natural gas have their roots in the mid-twentieth century, when the quest for national control over mineral and hydrocarbon resources became the most important driving force in urban politics. It highlights the complex legacies of Bolivian resource nationalism, offering a reappraisal of the country’s 1952 revolution and the Cold War in the process.

Young’s other research analyzes social movements, coalitional politics, and political power in the Andes, Central America, and the United States. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Latin American Perspectives, Mobilization, and other academic and popular outlets.

Garrett L. Washington examines the impact of imported Western forms of space, knowledge, and discourse on late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Japanese society. He holds a B.A. from Rice University, a Diplôme des Études Approfondies from the Université de Paris VIII Saint Denis/Vincennes, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. Washington has published articles on the social and discursive space of Japanese Protestant churches in Tokyo (in Japanese Studies), Buddhism’s response to Protestant church space in Tokyo (in Crosscurrents: East Asian History and Culture Review E- Journal), and the role of St. Luke’s Hospital in the rise of public health in Tokyo (in Health and History). He has also published a book chapter on the national imaginary in Japanese Protestant pastoral discourse in David Yoo and Albert Park, eds., Negotiating the Global with the Local: Translating Christianity in Modern East Asia.

Washington’s first book project analyzes the role between 1898 and 1945 of the physical, discursive, and social spaces of Tokyo’s most popular Japanese Protestant churches in movements for social activism and change in the authoritarian context of imperial Japan.

Building on this research, Washington has begun new research on industrialist, women’s rights activist, and late-life Christian convert Madame Hirooka Asako (1849–1919). The research has been made possible by the generous support of the Association for Asian Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Purdue University, among other sources. Before coming to UMass Amherst, Washington taught at Oberlin College.

At UMass he will teach courses on modern and traditional Japan, Japanese women’s history, Japanese imperialism, U.S./Japan relations, and the interplay of race, religion, and nation in East Asia.

Joyce Berkman reports: If ever I thought retirement would bring a major lessening of my busy life, I was certainly (and happily) mistaken. My days are full with professional and artistic projects. As expected, I’ve had the time to convert past historical research into publications: two articles and a handbook will appear next year or the year following. I decided to teach a post-retirement course this spring, a research/writing seminar on the U.S. history of contraception and abortion. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then, too, I began the year with four of my doctoral students’ dissertations under way, one of which was successfully defended in March. And, finally, I continue to conduct oral histories for the Music Department and for the Valley Women’s History Collaborative and participate in oral history developments in the Department, most recently in a one-day crash course that Sam Redman initiated and organized. I’m thrilled that the Department has an oral history center in Herter Annex.

My plan to devote retirement time and energy to the joys of music is proceeding apace. Piano lessons and practice and music theory lessons and exercises occupy many invigorating hours each week. I remain a devoted participant in the Hampshire Choral Society as well. I’m keenly looking forward to our August week in Edinburgh, when I’ll have the opportunity to attend musical events of the celebrated International Arts Festival, as well as join my husband (and UMass Amherst Theater faculty member) at the plethora of plays performed in the long-acclaimed Fringe Theater Festival. After Edinburgh, we’ll visit several dear friends in England.

Apart from our weeks last spring and summer in Germany, where I gave various talks, most of my travel during the past months has been for family reasons. My family is widely dispersed, which poses a difficulty (including a Pennsylvania deer smashing into our car and the woes of plane travel during our long, harsh winter) but also the

opportunity to enrich my grasp of the nature of North America.

Finally, I again took immense pleasure in financially assisting graduate students in History and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. Go UMass students!

Mario S. De Pillis Sr., now 89, tells us that he has just surprised some Latter-day Saints by publishing a historical analysis of Mormon dreams and visions. That essay will probably be a chapter in a new book on five views of Mormon history. De Pillis says he does not believe in old people spending their money traveling, but he did go to Italy and Germany to make one last visit to scholars and friends of his generation, friends of 65 years standing, who not surprisingly are in their 90s. (For perspective, his oldest UMass Ph.D. student is now 76 years old.) He says that he follows the fortunes of the Department with great interest.

De Pillis was recently invited to deliver an endowed lecture before about one hun-

Joyce Berkman during the Q&A following Mae Ngai’s Feinberg keynote lecture.

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FACULTY UPDATES

Mario S. De Pillis Sr. keeps Mormon historians on the edge of their seats.

dred Mormon historians at an annual conference in Iowa. He spoke on the sensitive topic of Mormon spiritual practices, 1831 to the present. One of only three non-Mormons ever elected president of the Mormon History Association, he thinks of himself as an interloper.

Will Johnston reports: The past year has brought a flurry of professional activities at an age well past that of normal retirement.

After seven years of non-teaching, I returned during late 2014 to teach one semester of graduate church history. In a course focused on “turning points,” we debated “thwarted turning points,” i.e., might-have-beens that well-intentioned people desired but did not see realized (e.g., reconciliation of Europe’s warring nations during the 1920s, or a peaceful end to slavery in the United States during the 1850s). Unfortunately, the early twenty-first century will be remembered as an era of far too many such thwarted opportunities.

Teaching at age 77 alerted me to several changes in my attitude. For the first time, I grew irritated that from day to day few listeners remember what a teacher has said.

Because so few students know how to discern what matters in a text, I emphasized skill in critiquing texts and websites as a prerequisite for navigating academia’s glut of discourse. Too much is being said about 26

everything under the sun, but not enough about how to prioritize it.

My book on commonalities of high culture throughout the Habsburg Empire and its successor states came out in Austria in February 2015, a year later than I had hoped. As if to echo my autumnal mood while teaching, the book, Zur Kulturgeschichte Österreichs und Ungarns, discusses how other aging scholars have viewed the old age of Austrian and Hungarian culture. Introducing new phrases that express quirky perspectives, the book offers my final wrestling with the “network of networks” that was Habsburgia’s high culture. That culture delighted in “embellished parallel universes” embodied, for example, in operetta, codes of courtesy, and the workings of a “theater state.” In light of this bittersweet analysis, one can see that today’s access to the internet floods us with “embellished parallel universes” and that politicians worldwide behave like stage directors of the media.

Somewhat doggedly, I am preparing to teach Dante’s Comedy for a second time in Prato, outside Florence, during late 2015. I will use paintings of each canto to highlight the action and delineate how the poet’s attitudes toward his lifework evolved during the 15 years, 1306–1321, in which the poem was composed. Had he not succumbed to malaria in 1321, Dante probably would have written

his own commentary on the poem. Like me and those I study, the aging Dante could not help exploring how he had kept outgrowing earlier assumptions.

Gerald McFarland reports: I remain active as both a historian and a novelist. My post-retirement career as a novelist is progressing well. What the Owl Saw (2014), the second volume in my Buenaventura Series trilogy, became available in an e-book edition early in 2015. The third volume, The Last of Our Kind, should be in print from Sunstone Press by the time this report is in your hands. The protagonist in all three novels is a Spanish brujo who lives in eighteenth-century Santa Fe, N.M. I carefully researched the culture and history of early Spanish settlements in the Southwest in order to give the novels a base in historical reality. The other major element in them, however, is imaginative: the novel’s protagonist practices a form of benign sorcery that enables him to transform himself into hawks and owls, converse with animals of all kinds, and achieve feats of astonishing strength. For more, see www. geraldwmcfarland.com.

Putting on my historian’s hat, I gave lectures on United States history to visiting delegations from Argentina and Pakistan in the Civic Initiative summer seminars organized under the auspices of the Donahue Institute. I also served

Professor Carlin Barton.

Valediction for Carlin Barton This year the much-loved Carlin Barton retired after 30 years in the History Department. She will be missed in Herter Hall by all whose lives she touched. Carlin received her Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of California Berkeley in 1984. After teaching ancient, medieval, and early modern history at Berkeley and Stanford, she joined UMass Amherst’s Department of History in 1985 and taught courses on ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and world religions, among other topics. She received the College of Humanities and Fine Arts’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 1997 and the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003.

Carlin has given many conference papers throughout North America and Europe on the emotional life of ancient Romans, the construction of the sacred, and the origins of violence. Her articles have appeared in numerous academic volumes related to gender, sacrifice, martyrdom, and the body. She is the author of two pioneering and influential works on the emotional life of ancient Romans and the sacrificial system: The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (University of California Press, 2001). Her recent collaboration with Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion (University of California Press, 2015), is currently in press.

While her retirement will no doubt include time for piano, gardening, and supervising her graduate students, Carlin will be busy preparing two titles, one on sacrifice and the other on compassion. She will be remembered for her free spirit, iconoclastic thought, sly humor, love for animals, and passion for teaching. One undergraduate recently shared a feeling that many students have had over the years: that every word of every lecture Carlin gave seemed directed at her personally.

Carlin often ended her courses with the following quotation by Baba Dioum, posted on the Bronx Zoo’s exit sign: In the end, We will conserve only what we love, We will love only what we understand, And we will understand only what we are taught.

And so we wish her well and look forward to her new works. Vale Magistra.

—Mark Roblee, John Higgins, and Jason Moralee

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FACULTY UPDATES

STUDENT UPDATES COMMUNITY CONVERSATION:

Jane Rausch.

as historian of the campus chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at its annual initiation ceremony.

Robert A. Potash reports that at age 94 he still follows the Argentine scene on the Internet, reading several Buenos Aires newspapers every day, and receives and responds to requests for bibliographical help from students of Argentine history. This year, at the request of Argentine professorial colleagues, he signed a public demand for a full investigation into the charges made by Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor found dead just before he was scheduled to testify to Congress about the alleged involvement of the Argentine president and foreign minister in a cover-up of the role of Iranians in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. The list of signatories appeared in the Sunday, February 8, 2015, edition of La Nación and other newspapers, one month to the day after the discovery of the body. Potash is also pleased to report that the second chapter of his biography of General Alejandro Lanusse appeared in the March 2015 edition of Todo es Historia under the title “Conflictos militares: una interna caliente (1955–1963).”

Jane Rausch continues her research concerning Latin America and World War I. Her article on Venezuelan neutrality during that conflict appeared in the March 2015 issue of The Latin Americanist. At the XVII Congreso 28

Colombiano de Historia, held in Bogotá in October 2015, she presented a paper on the 1918 influenza pandemic’s impact in Colombia. During the past year she has also been researching a very different project, The Sound Choice: A History of the Holyoke Civic Symphony, 1967–2017. Jane has played flute in the Holyoke Civic Symphony since 2006. As the orchestra prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, she volunteered to assemble a history as part of the anniversary activities.

Working steadily through three bank boxes of documents, newspaper clippings, memoires, and emails, she has produced a 170-page manuscript tracing the changing relationships between the City of Holyoke, Holyoke Community College, and the orchestra. The ultimate fate of The Sound Choice is yet to be decided, but Jane reports that the project has been an exciting foray into local and institutional history.

Charles Rearick continues to live his second life as a Parisian (or expatriate) for months at a time twice each year. His paper on popular songs depicting riverside enjoyments is being published this year in the Actes du Colloque historique des Bords de Marne, La chanson populaire dans l’Est parisien.

On November 3, 2014, the Department invited the campus community to join History faculty for a lunchtime teach-in and community discussion about the history of racism and response in America. Organized in part as a response to recent unfortunate and conspicuous examples of racism on campus, the event was called “The Integrated Lunch Counter,” a reference to the famous civil rights activism in February 1960, when four African American university students helped spur a national movement to challenge racism and inequality through their peaceful sit-in at a non-integrated lunch counter in a North Carolina Woolworth’s store.

The event drew a crowd at the Hampshire Dining Commons.

Participants listened to oral history clips, heard from faculty on historical and contemporary issues about racism, asked questions of the panel, and initiated a community discussion. Throughout the event, participants considered the historical roots of this complex social, cultural, and political issue, working to better understand the larger context of racism and to develop sound responses to racism on our campus and beyond.

—Emily Redman

On March 12, 2015, Erica Fagen gave a talk, “Snap, Filter, and Post: Instagram and the Performance of Historical Memory,” as part of the Center for Heritage Studies Colloquium Series for which Professor Sam Redman was an organizer. Her presentation looked at how visitors use Instagram to document their visits to former Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau. Erica also won a Bauer-Gordon Fellowship and a Graduate School Travel Grant.

In April 2015 Erica attended “History on the Edge,” the NCPH Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tenn., where she presented on the panel “Selfies, Tweets, and Likes: Social Media and its Role in Historical Memory.”

Her co-panelists included Jennifer Evans, associate professor in the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Meghan Lundrigan, Ph.D. candidate in that department. Jon Olsen served as the moderator with David Dean, professor of history at Carleton. Their session was packed, and the panel received great questions and feedback.

Erica traveled to Nashville with Katie Garland ’15MA, Emily Pipes ’15MA, and Amanda Tewes. At NCPH, they were joined by many UMass History graduate students and alumni, including Richard Anderson, Carrie Barske ’11PhD, Christopher Benning, David Cline, Deborah Kallman, Jessie MacLeod, Li Na ’09MA, and Jill Ogline Titus.

A fun and productive time was had throughout the meeting.

Ph.D. students Adeline Broussan and Andy Grim at this year’s Oral History Crash Course.

Amanda Goodheart Parks inside the cockpit of the New England Air Museum’s fully restored B-29 bomber.

UMass Graduate students at the NCPH Annual Meeting in Nashville: (left to right) Erica Fagan, Katie

Chris Fobare reports: In June I presented my paper, “A Failed Equality: Central New York and the Politics of Free Labor, 1830–1877,” at the New York State History Association’s Annual Conference at Niagara University.

Amanda Goodheart Parks continues to make excellent progress on her dissertation while working full time in the museum field. Last fall, as part of a lecture series at the Springfield Museums, she delivered a talk based on her research, “Sweethearts at Sea: Love and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century New England Whaling Industry,” to over one hundred attendees. She also recently accepted a three-year appointment to the Westfield Historical Commission. Finally, Amanda is

Garland ’15MA, Amanda Tewes, and Emily Pipes ’15MA.

Ph.D. student Cheryl Harned at the “1931 Project Exposition” gala.

delighted to report that she has joined the team at the New England Air Museum as their new director of education. Her work will focus on creating opportunities for students, K-12 educators, and families to engage with the history of aviation in meaningful and innovative ways.

Cheryl Harned reports: This past year has been quite an exciting adventure, from moving from Ph.D.-student status into candidacy

FRANCIS PHAN / FIVE COLLEGES

‘The Integrated Lunch Counter’

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STUDENT UPDATES

Graduate students (from left) Sarah Lavallee, Adeline Broussan, Natalie Sherif, Liz Gunther, Jenna Febrizio, and Julie Peterson.

Students and faculty attend Erica Fagen’s talk “Snap, Filter, and Post: Instagram and the Performance of Historical Memory.”

Thamyris Almeida ’15MA presenting her master’s portfolio.

Ph.D. students Destiney Linker and Joie Campbell

M.A. student Julie Peterson (right) during her internship at

with Marilyn Campbell and Angela Davis,

the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia.

following Dr. Davis’s lecture “Sustaining Social Justice Movements and Intersectional Struggles.”

to fulfilling my role as graduate fellow for the Five College / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Bridging Initiative in the Public and Applied Humanities. Working under grant PI’s David Glassberg, Jessica Johnson, and Marla Miller, I helped coordinate the start of a two-year lecture series that brought Dan Yaeger, Steven Lubar, and Patricia West to speak to the Five College community, and facilitated an experimental Five College January-term intensive, the “Applied Humanities Learning Lab.” In June a History Department Hands-On Grant funded my participation in the American Antiquarian Society’s Summer Seminar, “Books in the Larger World of Objects.” It set the stage for this busy year and significantly enriched my understanding of books as objects and the material turn, both ideas that continue to inform my dissertation research.

Julie Peterson completed a summer internship at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic 30

Site in Philadelphia, which in May 2016 will open an exhibition about mass incarceration.

Julie worked with museum staff and visitors on developing and testing interactives related to contemporary criminal-justice issues.

She also coordinated and facilitated a focus-group session with Congreso de Latinos Unidos, a local community advocacy partner.

Mark Roblee reports: Last fall, at the Harvard Divinity School’s graduate conference on religion, I gave a talk on Apuleius and the cult of Isis. Over the winter I assisted Cheryl Harned with her January-term “Applied Humanities Learning Lab.” This year I continued to chair the Five College Faculty Seminar in Late Antiquity, whose second annual public lecture was presented by Michele R. Salzman from UC Riverside. As I write, I am about to head out to the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Mich., to give a talk about imagination and “technologies of self” in Augustine’s City of God.

This was a busy year for Amanda Tewes as she completed her comprehensive examinations and defended her dissertation prospectus. She also attended the National Council on Public History conference in Nashville to hear about exciting developments in the field and visit with Public History alumni. In May, Amanda moved to California to take an oral history position with the San Diego History Center while conducting research for her dissertation on Old West theme parks in California. She is very grateful for awards from the History Department and the Graduate School that will help her travel to archives and theme parks around California.

She hopes soon to reunite with her fellow UMass historians.

IN MEMORIAM Nicholas Carr Bergstein ’18, 20, died unexpectedly of a sudden illness on Tuesday, August 18, 2015. A graduate of Old Rochester (Mass.) Regional High School, he planned to become a high school history teacher. He had just finished his freshman year at UMass Amherst as a History major with honors and Nicholas Bergstein. was also involved with the History Club. For all four years of high school Nicholas served in student government and as a member of the debate team, and he was also vice president of his freshman class.

The family asks that donations be made to a memorial scholarship in Nicholas’s name at UMass Amherst. Gifts should be sent to: UMass Amherst Records & Gift Processing, Memorial Hall, 134 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003-9270.

Kirk Jonathan Frey, 31, passed away Wednesday, June 10, 2015, in Amherst. He was a 2001 graduate of Wyoming Seminary, where he was on the dean’s list, the football and wrestling teams, the model United Nations team, and the madrigal society. Kirk attended Wilkes Kirk Frey and his father, University and UMass Amherst, and Bruce M. Frey. received dean’s list honors at both institutions.

Kirk served in the U.S. Army from 2009 until 2013 at Fort Detrick, Md., as a satellite systems communication operator. He received Army Achievement, Army Good Conduct, National Defense Service, and Global War on Terrorism medals, as well as the Army Service Ribbon. Memorial donations can be made to Wyoming Seminary in Kirk’s name.

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ALUMNI UPDATES

Remembering Richard Gassan

his office at the American University of Sharjah, UAE.

Volume 7, nos. 1–2 (2015) of the Journal of Tourism History is dedicated to Richard Gassan’s memory.

It includes an essay by Gerry McFarland with further information on Richard’s scholarly contributions.

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Students, faculty, and alumni at the Career Advising Alumni Dinner, organized by Mark Roblee (see page 5).

Carrie Barske ’11PhD (left) is the founding director of the public history M.A. program at

Undergraduate alum Tamar Carroll ’00 has had her first book, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Julia Foulkes ’97PhD was selected to give a seminar in U.S. cultural history as part of the China Residency Program at Renmin University in Beijing in June 2015. The program is sponsored by the Organization of American Historians and the American History Research Association of China with funding from the Ford Foundation.

Colonel David Kobs ’93 completed an Army War College Fellowship at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and is now the U.S. senior defense official and defense attaché to the Republic of Yemen.

Margo Shea ’10PhD was awarded a twoyear Research Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation.

the University of North Alabama. Starting in the fall of 2015, she will be joined by Matthew Barlow (right), who was the UMass Amherst Department of History’s 2014–15 visiting lecturer.

Lisa Tendrich Frank ’94’s latest book, The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March, has been published by the Louisiana State University Press.

MATT MCKEAN / TIMES DAILY

Richard Gassan in

Richard H. Gassan ’97MA ’02PhD died March 2, 2015. He was struck and killed by a speeding motorist while cycling near his overseas home in Sharjah, UAE. Richard was born May 5, 1958, in Denver, Colorado. After serving in the U.S. Navy (1976–1984), he enrolled in Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, where he completed a B.S. in computer science (1988) and an M.A. in geography (1992). From 1995 to 2002 he was a graduate student at UMass Amherst, where he left a strong impact on the History community.

Richard’s friend and fellow graduate student Julia Sandy-Bailey remembers him fondly: “Community was very important to Richard, and the gatherings at his house were a way for him to create that community. From small dinners to large beginning-of-the-semester parties, Richard’s house was always a center of social life that included people from across the University and from town. It was open to us to stop by for coffee, to read, or to just hang out. His house was overflowing with books, records, and coffee. He also organized hiking days, biking weekends, and campouts.

When I think back on those I went to graduate school with, it is often a memory of sitting around his kitchen or porch, talking about politics, music, or class.”

In 2005 Richard accepted a position teaching history in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. At the time of his death he was an associate professor there.

Richard was an active, productive scholar whose work focused on the cultural history of tourism in New York State before the Civil War. He published articles in the Journal of Social History (2003), Book History (2005), and the Winterthur Portfolio (2010), as well as a chapter in Exploring Travel and Tourism (2012), a collection edited by Jennifer Erica Sweda. He also presented at least one paper every year at major conferences in the United States and abroad. His book The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830, a revised version of his dissertation of the same title, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2008. At the time of his death, he had completed most of the research and several chapters toward a book manuscript on the emergence of urban tourism in New York City prior to the Civil War. Richard was a traveler who collected scores of frequent-flier points (and, consequently, upgrades to business class) on the many flights he made each year between his residences in Amherst and Sharjah, as well as to his mother’s home in California, his aunt’s home in Belgium, and various destinations in Europe and the Middle East. He also enjoyed athletic activities. In his last email to me he reported that, having just returned to Sharjah after a winter break that included cross-country skiing in Vermont, he was planning to spend his spring break scuba diving and sea kayaking in Thailand. In his university website biography, he stated that he loved “bicycling, Scottish indie-rock bands, and movies of all types.”

He was known for his lively sense of humor and was admired by his students as a dedicated teacher who displayed genuine concern for their well-being. Everyone who met him was impressed with his great capacity for friendship. —Gerald W. McFarland

Jill Dwiggins ’13MA with participants at the Applied Humanities Learning Lab.

Ken Miller ’99MA has had his first book, Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence, published by Cornell University Press (2014). It went on to receive the Book of the Year Award from the Journal of the American Revolution.

Lee Drewitz ’14 was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Germany for 2015–16.

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ALUMNI UPDATES

Keeping in the Loop

Among Our Newest Alumni

To see and hear this year’s public talks, including all of the Feinberg Series lectures, the Writer-in-Residence address, and much more, check out the History Department’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/ user/UMass.

This marks the third year of our Department’s blog Past@Present, featuring posts by faculty, students, emeriti, and alumni. Follow us at umasshistory.wordpress.com.

Are you following us on Facebook? “Like” us at www.facebook.com/ umasshistory and www.facebook.com/umasspublichistory. For news and postings, hover over the “like” button and subscribe to our notifications.

The following are all proud #twitterstorians:

Amy Armstrong ’15 originally wanted to be a Psychology major but had her head turned in a course on African American history. She graduated with a double major in History and Afro-American Studies.

Amy took a creative, interdisciplinary approach to history, connecting it with art, literature, social justice, and more. This approach enabled her to engage with her subject matter critically and move beyond established interpretations.

Outside the classroom, Amy worked with the student-run collective Student Bridges, which works to increase college access and success for minority, low-income, and first-generation college students. In a service learning course Amy worked on an oral history project with Safe Passage, an organization that supports survivors of domestic violence in western Massachusetts. She then became a Safe Passage intern, work which helped her become the first HFA student to win the campus’s prestigious Rising Researcher Award.

Thanks to these various experiences, Amy landed a job immediately after graduation with the Northampton legal firm Curran & Berger, which specializes in immigration law.

There she assists immigrant families seeking green cards and other documentation.

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Nick Fernald ’15 declared as a History major with some trepidation. “I was worried,” he says, “that the decision would limit my career options.” Not so, he now sees.

“Majoring in History improved my research, writing, and teaching skills, while also providing me with a broad, diverse, content knowledge,” Nick explains. “These are attributes I can apply to any number of fields.”

At UMass, Nick enriched himself intellectually and culturally. Inside the classroom, he thrived in courses ranging from Latin American to LGBTQ history. Outside the classroom, Nick participated in the Shaha Diversity Theater group by writing scripts and performing plays centering on social-justice issues. During the summer after his first year, he travelled to Peru to teach English to elementary and middle-school students. These experiences enhanced Nick’s understanding of the world and confirmed his passion for education.

The Fulbright Program is a prestigious, highly selective international exchange program administered by the U.S. State Department. Today, Nick is a Fulbright Fellow in Colombia, teaching English there. After completing his fellowship, Nick plans to teach in the United States, ultimately becoming involved with educational policy.

Michael Moreshead ’15 caught the history bug in high school and came to UMass Amherst determined to learn about the widest possible range of histories and societies.

From Germany to China to the Caribbean, he studied histories near and far, learning to recognize and reevaluate the paradigms of his own culture and historical moment.

Michael studied in Oviedo, Spain, in 2014, living with a host family and studying at the University of Oviedo, where all of his courses were taught in Spanish. He honed his language skills and learned more about Spain’s art and culture.

Back at UMass, Michael used his mastery of Spanish to complete an honors thesis on public health in Revolutionary Cuba. It “uncovers a ‘revolutionary’ Cuban discourse that was at once tethered to a socialist ideology and, in recruiting workers throughout the island, often pragmatic,” notes Michael’s advisor, Professor Julio Capó Jr. In 2013, Michael interned with UMass Student Legal Services, sitting in on client meetings, drafting legal documents, and meeting with district attorneys and local judges. He is now attending the Northeastern University School of Law, pursuing an interest in immigration law.

Joy Silvey ’15 began to consider History as a major after taking women’s history courses with Joyce Berkman, Priyanka Srivastava, and Laura Lovett. For Lovett’s class, Joy found deep inspiration conducting primary source research at the UMass Special Collections and University Archives.

Joy converted her enthusiasm for archival research into an internship with the Sexual Minorities Archives (SMA) in Northampton, part of a UMass Creative Economies Initiative project. There she categorized periodicals, created finding aids, processed new materials into the SMA’s collection, and translated the SMA’s brochure into Spanish.

Building on what she learned the re, Joy completed an honors thesis on the emergence of the Pioneer Valley’s LGBTQ history during the late twentieth century. Professor Julio Capó Jr., her advisor, praised her “incredibly sophisticated work, mining various archives and depositories, that reveals the rich history of queer student organizations at UMass and the Five Colleges,” and especially noted her “beautiful and elegant prose.”

After graduation, Joy began volunteering with the Valley Women’s History Collaborative. She now serves on the board of directors of the Sexual Minorities Archives and is applying to graduate school.

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Susan Kaplan @radiosue

Jon Olsen @jonberndtolsen

Chelsea Miller @mille24c

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Julie Peterson @juliegpeterson

Sam Redman @samueljredman Emily Redman @mathhistory Joel Wolfe @jwwolfe

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Be sure to note “History Department” on the memo line.

We appreciate your support!

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NEW BOOKS

BY FACULTY Christian Appy

American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (Viking, 2015).

Examines the relationship between the realities and myths of the Vietnam War, and its impact on national identity, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.

Gerald McFarland William M. Johnston

Zur Kulturgeschichte Österreichs und Ungarns 1890–1938: Auf der Suche nach verborgenen Gemeinsamkeiten (Böhlau Verlag, 2015).

The Last of Our Kind (Sunstone Press, 2015).

The third novel in the Buenaventura Series seamlessly blends a realistic historical setting (eighteenth-century Santa Fe, N.M.) with the story of a Spanish brujo able to transform himself into hawks and owls.

Leonard Richards

Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Examines cultural commonalities throughout the Habsburg Empire and proposes a new perspective on the cultural history of the empire through literary-based research.

Richard Chu, ed.

Jon Olsen

Leading scholars explore how Tsinoys have helped shape the destiny of the Philippines and the surrounding region over hundreds of years while navigating the complexities of being both “Chinese” and “Filipino.”

Investigates the East German Communist regime’s use of public history to legitimize its rule. Examination of state-sponsored memory projects such as memorials, commemorations, and museums reveals how the regime’s approach to memory politics evolved. The party never gained full control over the public memory, and dissidents often used the party’s memory politics to challenge the regime’s authority.

Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Berghahn, 2015).

More Tsinoy Than We Admit: Chinese-Filipino Interactions over the Centuries (Vibal Publishing, 2015).

John Higginson

Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Examines how collective violence against South Africa’s rural population contributed to the rise of the country’s Apartheid regime. Uses sources not employed by previous historians to consider how Africans resisted the violence perpetrated against them, and offers original insight into the contingencies of the Apartheid government.

Focuses on the efforts of James Ashley, an obscure Ohio congressman, to overcome Northern opposition to abolishing slavery and get the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress. It was an uphill battle: after failing the first time by 11 votes, Ashley succeeded by just three votes—but only after deals, some unsavory, were made and President Lincoln offered last-minute help.

Bruce Laurie

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (UMass Press, 2015).

Profiles five essential figures in the abolitionist community in Northampton, Mass.: Sylvester Judd Jr., John Payson Williston, David Ruggles, Henry Sherwood Gere, and Erastus Hopkins. They and many others made Northampton a bastion of abolitionist sentiment and, unlike many of their abolitionist peers, often endorsed racial equality and avoided the doctrinal disputes that plagued the anti-slavery movement elsewhere.

Jane Rausch

Ronald Story

The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice (UMass Press, 2015).

Examines Edwards’s sermons and primary writings to portray the theologian as a compassionate, socially conscious minister.

Colombia and World War I: The Experience of a Neutral Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1921 (Lexington Books, 2014).

Explores the economic, political, and diplomatic effects of World War I on Colombia to demonstrate that neutral countries were not insulated from the war.

BY ALUMNI Tamar Carroll ’00

Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Draws on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post–World War II New York City to demonstrate the ability of grassroots community activism to bridge racial and cultural differences and effect social change.

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Eamon McCarthy Earls ’15

Twisted Sisters: How Four Superstorms Forever Changed the Northeast in 1954 and 1955 (Appia Press, 2014).

Examines the devastating impact of four “superstorms” that rolled ashore virtually backto-back in less than a year, causing serious coastal damage and inland flooding. The book reveals the devastation caused by the storms, examines their role in creating a New England “hurricane lobby” that pushed for huge flood-control projects, and documents the ongoing effort to prepare the region for superstorms caused by climate change.

Lisa Tendrich Frank ’94

The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March (Louisiana State University Press, 2015).

Frank’s first book explores home-front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman’s March. It merges gender studies and military history and highlights the distinction between damage inflicted on the battlefield and offenses in the domestic realm.

Ken Miller ’99MA

Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence (Cornell University Press, 2014).

Reveals how wartime pressures nurtured a budding patriotism in the ethnically diverse revolutionary community of Lancaster, Pa., during the War for Independence. As the Americans’ principal site for incarcerating enemy prisoners of war, Lancaster stood at the nexus of two vastly different revolutionary worlds, one national, the other intensely local.

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OUR DONORS

Barbara Seda Aghamianz & Dikran M. Kaligian Arlin & Marilyn B. Albrecht Barry M. Alman Melvyn W. Altman Jeffrey P. Andrews John J. Anzalotti David M. Aronson Alexander B. Austin Sylvia S. Avula Byron C. & Ginger I. Backus Richard A. & Patricia K. S. Baker Barbara J. Bartholomew Bassford Remele, P.A. Betty Beck Henry F. Bedford Beth A. Behn Albert H. & Susan K. Belsky Rebekah M. & Edward J. Benson Gwynn P. Bentley Christie L. Bergeron Charles W. & Jeanne H. Bergner Joyce A. & Leonard Berkman Therese R. & Donald P. Blood Suzane C. Blue Elda M. Bodelson Georgia Ann Bond Ellen R. Bosl Alfred G. Bou-Assi Jr. Karen J. & Jonathan S. Bourn Emily G. & Robert K. Boutilier Charles R. Bowlus Joye Bowman & John Higginson Kathleen A. Bradbury Pamela E. Brooks Virginia A. Brousseau Elizabeth May Brown F. Michael Brown Gregory W. Brown James E. & Sylvia M. Buchanan Kathryn G. Buckley Kevin E. Buckley Robert J. Burgess & Linda J. Lamont Mary Jane Burke

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BILYANA DIMITROVA

The Department of History depends on contributions from alumni and friends for many of its essential activities. We sincerely thank this year’s contributors. The following list covers donations made between July 2014 and June 2015. If we’ve missed you, please contact the Department of History so that your name can be added to next year’s honor roll.

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HISTORY ALUMNI:

What are you doing? Fill us in!

We’re always interested in getting updates from our graduates. Email us your news at newsletter@history.umass.edu, being sure to include your graduation year and degree, and we’ll be happy to include you in our next newsletter. If you have any pertinent and reasonably high-resolution photos, include them as attachments.

A rapt audience hears Antoinette Burton deliver the 2015 UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History Lecture.

Past, Present & Future is published annually by the Department of History, Herter Hall, 161 Presidents Drive, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-9312.

Send news to the editor or by e-mail to newsletter@history.umass.edu. For a PDF version of this report, see www.umass.edu/history.

Editors: Charles Weisenberger ’15MA and Chelsea Miller ■ Copy Editor: John Sippel ■ Designer: Michelle Sauvé ’84 40