2013-2014 UNL Department of History Annual Report

GLOBAL. INNOVATIVE. MENTORSHIP.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN 2013-2014 ANNUAL REPORT HISTORY.UNL.EDU

WELCOME

It is a pleasure once again to recognize the achievements of our faculty, staff, and students and to present the news of the Department of History to our alumni, friends, parents, current students, prospective students, and colleagues.

The 2013-2014 academic year was one of energy and purpose in the Department of History, as we renewed our commitment to the undergraduate program, designed new courses around subjects of interest to today’s students, and expanded the reach of Phi Alpha Theta with a new campus-wide History Club.

As we look forward to the 2014-2015 academic year, we are focusing on the qualities that define our program: innovative research, excellent mentoring, and global engagement.

All three of these defining qualities were evident this year when the History Department won Fulbright Scholar awards at each level of the competition--faculty, graduate student, and undergraduate. Professor Carole Levin will be studying and teaching at the University of York in the United Kingdom in Spring 2015. Both graduate student Paul Strauss and undergraduate history major Emily Heineman won Fulbright awards to study in Germany.

The department also won a Kelly Funds grant from the University of Nebraska system to expand The History Harvest project in Spring 2014 in collaboration with University of Nebraska at Kearney and Chadron State College.

In the coming year Professor Gerald Steinacher will lead The History Harvest (historyharvest.unl.edu) with a special focus on the Germans from Russia community in and around Lincoln, Nebraska.

Our major continues to be in high demand. We have had a record number of prospective students visiting the campus interested in the History major. We are continuing to restructure many of our undergraduate courses and to add new courses.

We want our students to be grounded in the liberal arts, to gain the research and communication skills necessary for the 21st century, and to master the discipline of historical inquiry and thinking. These skills are more important than ever in today’s economy and society.

One reason for our success in attracting students is the high quality and dedication of our faculty. In the last three years History faculty members have published new books with Harvard University Press, University of Nebraska Press, Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, W. W. Norton & Co, Palgrave, Standford University Press, and Duke University Press. This year our department will welcome three new faculty members: Dr. Sean Trundle, Dr. Alexander Vazansky, and Dr. Laura Muñoz.

We will host the Pauley Lecture on October 23, 2014 when Professor Emily Rosenberg, University of California at Irvine, will speak on the effect of globalization across the twentieth century, including its transnational character and its legacies today.

On October 25, 2014 we will convene our third annual meeting of the department’s Alumni Advisory Council.

I want to thank all of the donors and supporters of the department for their leadership and generosity. These gifts have supported faculty research. They have provided crucial aid for undergraduates as scholarship support and for graduate students as fellowships. I hope that you will consider supporting the Department of History with a gift. You can find details about giving to all of The University of Nebraska Foundation’s Department of History funds on the inside back cover of our annual report. Again, thank you to our donors and supporters!

Best,

William G. Thomas

TABLE OF CONTENTS GLOBAL

THREE UNL SCHOLARS RECEIVE FULBRIGHT AWARDS

2

DR. DAWNE CURRY REPORTS FROM SOUTH AFRICA

3

DR. PARKS COBLE REVOLUTIONIZES CHINESE HISTORY

4

ECKSTROM PRESENTS IN SWITZERLAND

5

MALLORY WINS UDALL

6

INNOVATIVE HISTORY HARVEST CONTINUES

7

DR. WILLIAM THOMAS WINS NEH GRANT

8

TEACHING WITH PRIMARY SOURCE

9

PAULEY LECTURE REPORT 10 RAWLEY CONFERENCE REPORT 10

MENTORSHIP NEW FACULTY ANSWER QUESTIONS

12-14

NOTES FROM GRADUATE CHAIR

15

NOTES FROM UNDERGRADUATE CHAIR

15

FACULTY NOTES

16-17

GRADUATE NOTES

17-18

NOTES FROM HGSA PRESIDENT

18

ALUMNI REPORT

19

BOOK NOTES

19

DONORS 2013-2014 20 HISTORY FUND 21

CREDITS EDITOR: William G. Thomas III DESIGN & CONCEPT: Mikal Eckstrom CONTRIBUTERS: Alyson Alvarez, John Buchkoski, Jessica Coope, Dawne Y. Curry, Mikal Eckstrom, Deann Gayman, Mandy Heurta, Margaret Jacobs, Courtney Pixler, Leslie Reed, and Brian Sarnacki PHOTOGRAPHY: Craig Chandler, Dawne Curry, Mikal Eckstrom, Troy Fedderson, and Greg Nathan COVER: Selected photographs from the March 15, 2014 History Harvest, Lincoln, NE. Used with permission from individual donors.

THREE UNL SCHOLARS RECEIVE FULBRIGHTS The history department has three Fulbright winners this year. Willa Cather professor of History Carole Levin, Ph.D. candidate Paul Strauss, and undergraduate German and history major, Emily Heineman, demonstrate how UNL continues its global reach.

As a scholar of early modern English history, Carole Levin has crossed the historic streets of England many times. But one encounter near Westminster Abbey in 2009, inspired her latest research that earned her a Fulbright to the University of York.

Coming out of an underground train stop, Levin was struck by the beauty and nobility depicted in a statue of Celtic queen Boudicca and her daughters riding a chariot.

“I’d seen the statue before, but seeing it that way made it so powerful,” Levin said. “It made me want to learn more about her.”

Boudicca was a first-century queen of the Iceni tribe and was a leader in the fight against Roman invaders.

Though Rome eventually defeated the tribe, Boudicca’s story did not go unwritten.

Some medieval and early Tudor historians described Boudicca as a violent pagan woman, but in the reign of Elizabeth, Boudicca — who also fought invaders of a different religion — became an early historical example for the queen as England feared a Catholic invasion. Throughout the proceeding Stuart

GLOBAL

dynasty, Boudicca, Elizabeth, her mother Anne Boleyn, and her half-sister Mary I, were used in political and religious discourse, drama and popular culture to point out the importance of strong Protestant rule, and that it could be provided by a woman.

Levin, a Willa Cather professor of history and chair of the medieval and Renaissance studies program, plans to further research how Boudicca’s leadership affected England’s future queens and her connections to contemporary female political leadership.

“To me, it’s a fascinating topic, because I’ve always been really interested in female representation and so I’m researching this early Iceni leader who was presented in fighting the Romans and then making the comparisons between her and Queen Elizabeth, who was also fighting invaders: Rome and Spain and Catholic invaders, as a protestant country,” Levin said. “I think there are wonderful connections with questions about women and political leadership today as well.”

Levin will spend the spring 2015 semester in York. Besides conducting research, Levin has made arrangements to give several workshops and lectures on her past and current research to add a teaching component.

“One of the delights I find in research is that I often find things that I can add to what I teach,” she said.

“That’s really thrilling to me, to see how much my research and teaching can interconnect.”

She will also continue her personal tradition of being a mentor and ambassador for students by leading workshops on academic careers — which, she said, she hopes gives University of York graduate students an upper hand if they want to teach in the United States.

“I suggested doing workshops with graduate students to help them gain an American view on academics and jobs,” Levin said. “How they do job interviews in England is very different from how they do interviews here.”

Levin said she also wants to bring back fresh ideas for UNL’s program and to build relationships with faculty at English institutions.

“Their center is very impressive and I’m hoping I find some new ways to enrich our medieval and Renaissance studies program,” she said. “I’m hoping I get more ideas that will be helpful in working with my undergraduates and graduate students.”

More than anything, though, Levin said she wants to be a strong ambassador for Nebraska and the university.

BELOW: PAUL STRAUSS

BELOW: EMILY HEINEMAN

continued on page 11

BELOW: CAROLE LEVIN

UNL GOES TO SOUTH AFRICA South Africa is a thriving African nation neighbored by Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho.

Boasting a multi-lingual and ethnically diverse population, South Africa is a country of contrasting geographical terrains of beaches, deserts, mountains, and the seas. Skyscrapers tower its major cities and its rural areas provide a glimpse of South Africa’s pristine past.

From May 18th to June 5th 2014, I took five students: Amy Soderquist, Deborah Embree, Elyse Lyons, Kelsie Vanderkolk and Mirvat Al-Hajj, to South Africa on the History Department’s first study abroad summer course. These students represented not only history majors but also majors and minors of Ethnic Studies, Global Studies and Psychology.

Students visited four museums.

LEFT TO RIGHT: AMY SODERQUIST, ELYSE LYONS, DAWNE Y. CURRY, MIRVAT AL-HAJJ, DEBORAH EMBREE, AND KELSIE VANDERKOL

One of the museums, District 6, commemorates the history of a Coloured area completely demolished by apartheid’s bulldozers in 1969. This museum brought the history of that terrible time to life with its many original street signs, and a street map on the floor where former residents sign where they used to live. The infamous “Alcatraz of South Africa,” Robben Island was also a featured historical stop. President Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years on Robben Island. Today it is a World Heritage Site that offers tours led by former political prisoners.

Students also saw the contrasts between African townships and Coloured residential areas, noting not only the difference in housing structures, but also how a single street separated the two racial groups. In the African township of Gugulethu, students stayed with a local momma, where they experienced township life, African cuisines, attended church, and visited a local shebeen (tavern) for a braai (barbecue). They performed service learning in the African township of Nyanga as part of the Amy Biehl Foundation. Biehl was an American Fulbright Scholar killed in 1993. Her parents started this foundation in her honor. At the end of each day, when we had dinner, I asked students to describe the day in one word, the following words defined our safari experience at the Aquila Game Reserve: amazing, awe-inspiring, serene, stimulating, and photographic. Those words usually led to a wonderful, insightful conversation about the comparisons and contrasts between South Africa and the United States. These students saw both the beauty that they left behind on American soil and witnessed on the African continent. South Africa left not only an indelible impression, but also provided

the students with a supplementary educational experience.

Writer: Dawne Y. Curry

KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORY

FREES US TO BE CONTEMPORARY. -LYNN WHITE, JR. [3 ]

WAR & MEMORY IN CHINA

Q&A: Parks Coble’s forthcoming monograph, China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2014) explains the complex relationship and tensions between those who reported during the Sino-Japanese War and how re-remembering the war was used to advance various goals of the Chinese nation-state. China’s War Reporters demonstrates the relationship between war memory and how it distorts historical scholarship. By showing how nuanced portrayals of Japanese collaborators remain essentially non-existent and that Chinese collapse was possible during certain times of the war, Coble provides a complex narrative that goes beyond the “rape of Nanjing.”

Wartime transformed both the news and those who wrote it. After the war ended, the rise of the Communist Revolution upended the complex histories associated with the war. As Coble deftly asserts, Chairman Mao and the rise of the communist resistance dominated the “official history,” while the true complexities and economic collapse of nearly all Chinese citizens were left at the margins. Ultimately, Coble pulls from the margins to show that the Communist Party relied on strategic biographies of wartime journalists to advance the needs of an emerging nationalistic narrative. In doing so, Coble illustrates how historical scholarship can help us understand geo-political issues of the present.

Q & A CONDUCTED VIA EMAIL & EDITED BY MIKAL ECKSTROM

PARKS COBLE Q: Often when referring to war time technology, one immediately thinks of military innovation. Yet, during this period there was considerable advancement in the newsroom. Did the evolving news desk allow various “official” remembrances to occur?

A: At one level the technology of the newsroom actually regressed in wartime China. Before the conflict began, China’s publications industry was centered in coastal cities such as Shanghai. The Japanese destroyed or occupied most of these areas in the first two years of the conflict so the technological level of Chinese newspapers and magazines printed in the interior was of low quality. Wartime publications often had poor quality paper and smudged printing. On the other hand, the official press in China became much more globally savvy during the war. In 1937 they vied with the Japanese propaganda machine to gain Western support, particularly in the United States. Chiang Kai-shek (Nationalist Party Leader) tapped into a number of reporters with Western training to present China’s case to an international market. Their techniques became increasingly sophisticated and increased support for China in the West. Interestingly many of these individuals were trained at the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. continued on page 9

UNL TAKES CATHER GLOBAL AND DIGITAL How closely does the narration of Willa Cather’s novels match the personal voice in her private letters? Which unsigned and pseudonymous newspaper and magazine articles did Cather pen during her journalism career? And did Cather’s writing change after she wrote a 1922 manifesto that championed a more spare style for novels?

These are questions recently

investigated by University of NebraskaLincoln students working in a newly established laboratory for digital

MATTHEW JOCKERS, COURTNEY LAWTON, AND MIKAL ECKSTROM

literary studies. Their findings have been selected for presentation at

world to gain a place at the conference.

just to Cather, of course, but to literature

the prestigious Digital Humanities

and literary study broadly,” Jewell said.

Conference in Switzerland in July.

analysis enabled students to closely

“It’s a way to ask big questions that are

compare 15 novels and hundreds of

not manageable without a computer.”

nation, the Nebraska Literary Laboratory

letters and journalism articles by Cather.

opened in the fall semester. The bright

Their findings: Cather’s writing style did

Lab allows students -- many of whom

space in Love Library, equipped with a

not perceptibly change after her 1922

have little computer programming

giant monitor and a chalkboard, allows

manifesto, “The Novel Demeuble,”

experience -- to take advantage of one

students to gather to develop research

which suggested a spare approach. A

another’s strengths and compensate

strategies, write computer code and

student team of Mikal Eckstrom, Caterina

for their weaknesses. It is a setting

analyze data.

Bernardini, Rebecca Ankenbrand and

where humanities majors can make the

Alex Kinnaman studied the question.

important cultural shift from solitary study

professor of English and trailblazer in

to collaboration, he said.

digital literary analysis, created the lab.

was largely consistent throughout her

Jockers, in his second year at UNL, was

entire career,” Eckstrom said. “It really

a lab like this is really quite important,”

co-founder of the Stanford Literary Lab in

allows us to get some closure through

Jockers said. “It results in better research

2009.

computational analysis because the data

and better learning.”

stands for itself.”

The second of its kind in the

Matthew Jockers, assistant

Students in Jockers’ fall

Computer programming and

“We found that her style

microanalysis class dove into UNL’s

extensive Cather Archive with a goal

Cather Archive and associate professor

Jewell, director of the digital

of shedding new light on the author’s

in UNL Libraries, said the macroanalysis

work. Now, 10 students are to travel to

methods employed by the students hold

Lausanne, Switzerland, to present their

promise in discovering new insights into

findings. The students competed with

authors’ works.

established scholars from around the

Jockers said the Nebraska Lit

“The diversity of experience in

Writer: Leslie Reed, University Communications

“These techniques apply not

[5]

ALEX MALLORY WINS UDALL University of Nebraska-Lincoln student Alex Mallory has earned a 2014 Udall Scholarship. Mallory, a junior history and political science major, is the first UNL student to receive the award.

Established in 1992, the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation provides $5,000 scholarships to students who have shown a commitment to careers related to the environment and to Native students who have demonstrated a commitment to tribal public policy-related careers.

Scholarship recipients demonstrate leadership, academic achievement and a strong record of public service. The 2014 Udall scholars will assemble in Tucson, Ariz., in August to receive their awards and meet policymakers and community leaders in environmental fields, tribal health care and governance.

“I am so excited for Alex,” said Laura Damuth, director of national and international fellowships, who worked with Mallory to complete his application.

“The Udall Scholarship is such a strong confirmation of the work for Native Americans that he has already done while an undergraduate at UNL. We are so proud of him and this achievement.”

Mallory, a junior from South Sioux City and the grandson of a former Winnebago tribal councilman, is a recipient of the Susan Thompson Buffet Scholarship. He is dedicated to a career in public service specifically focused on serving Natives and is a page in the Nebraska Legislature. Mallory has previously worked as an intern in the Nebraska Legislature office of nowU.S. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and as a corporate intern at Ho-Chunk Inc.,

a company owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska that promotes economic development.

Victoria Smith, associate professor of history and ethnic studies and Mallory’s research advisor, said that Mallory’s academic accomplishments “serve as an inspiration to all UNL students, and reflect the high standards Native American in academia set for themselves.”

To be named a recipient for the Udall Scholarship is an honor and privilege, Mallory said.

“I am so proud to be able to represent the University of NebraskaLincoln,” he said. “I am so incredibly thankful for all the support and encouragement from all my professors and peers and absolutely thrilled to be joining the Udall community of

ALEX MALLORY

scholars.”

Mallory said he hopes to pursue a law degree from the Sandra Day O’Connor Law School at Arizona State University, which has a nationally acclaimed Indian Legal Program. He said he aims to earn an Indian Law Certificate, which would certify him to specialize in the field of Indian law.

Mallory said his post-graduate career goal is to work for the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to ensure that state and federal governments uphold their respective legal obligations while also providing assistance and legal representation to Indian tribes. He said he also plans to become involved in local politics.

Writer: University Communications

HISTORY HARVEST INNOVATES The past year has been one of growth for the History Harvest project, including the expansion of the web-based archive, interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), and the expansion of the project across Nebraska.

During Spring 2014, Professors William Thomas and Ian Cottingham (Assistant Professor, CSE) collaborated with the Nebraska State Historical Society to yield a harvest of over 150 artifacts.

While successful in replicating the project from years previous, the professors also strove for innovation, offering the course jointly as either history or computer science credit. This interdisciplinary approach challenged the students to think deeply about the questions we can ask of our sources once historians embrace the methods of computers scientists. Similarly, this format challenged the computer scientists to grapple with the problems of incomplete historical data.

As the project pushed the bounds of interdisciplinary innovation, the 2013-2014 History Harvest also capitalized on conversations it began with institutions the previous year. Notably, Chadron State College and the University of Nebraska-Kearney conducted History Harvest courses simultaneously with UNL. Artifacts from these harvests will be included in the History Harvest Archive. Meanwhile, the project continues to make ties to other universities and colleges, and plans to introduce a

INNOVATIVE

History Harvest community site in the coming semester that will feature syllabi, descriptions, and links to History Harvest projects at other institutions.

Supported by this growing record of success, Professors Gerald Steinacher and Patrick Jones will teach History Harvest courses during the 2014-2015 academic year. The Fall 2014 course, taught by Professor Steinacher,

in the coming years.

Writer: Jake Friefeld

AMY SODERQUIST

“ALL KNOWLEDGE THAT IS ABOUT HUMAN SOCIETY, AND NOT ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, IS HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THEREFORE RESTS UPON JUDGMENT AND INTERPRETATION�

-EDWARD SIAD

will collaborate with the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia headquartered in Lincoln, and will focus on peoples of German descent in Nebraska. This is an exciting time of expansion for the History Harvest project, and we look forward to its continued growth

[7 ]

THOMAS WINS NEH GRANT In the early 19th century, a Maryland slave petitioned the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., for her and her daughter’s freedom based on her purported lineage from a free woman.

Francis Scott Key was her lawyer, and appeared before William Cranch, a powerful district judge whose decisions sent repercussions across the early United States.

The story of Mima Queen, her family and their fight for freedom has all the drama, significance, and fabled forebears to give it historical prominence.

Yet the case files, and the stories they tell, have been hidden away among the stacks of the National Archives.

A project led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln historian William G. Thomas seeks to uncover these court files, and with them their observations of a young United States, Washington’s social circles and perhaps, most notably, the family trees of enslaved and free blacks.

The Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family Project has been building for years. Now it’s ready to go full speed ahead thanks to a two-year, $200,000 Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which begins this month.

Thomas, chair of the Department of History and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and professor of history, is the principal investigator on the project. He’s partnering with researchers at the University of Maryland to find and digitize some 4,000 court case files from 1800 to 1820.

Scholars will analyze the files to study social and family networks of both blacks and whites in early Washington.

One family network that Thom-

WILLIAM G. THOMAS III as will research thoroughly is the Queen family and its petitions for freedom.

The case of Mima Queen is significant in American history, he said, because of the people involved and because it set several precedents for slaves petitioning the courts for freedom.

“The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and was one of the earliest petitions to go to the court,” Thomas said. “That happened in 1813, but her petition for freedom was denied.

“In a way, I think, it sets in place an understanding that slavery is presumed for people of color and freedom is not petitionable. It’s very difficult to succeed in a petition for freedom after this case. But families don’t stop trying.”

The case also laid the foundation for the rule of hearsay in American courts, disallowing any testimony where the witness does not have direct knowledge of the facts but was told them by someone else. Hearsay evidence or “out of court” statements in freedom peti-

tions had been allowed in many earlier cases in Maryland, in large part because the stakes in these cases -- freedom or enslavement -- were so high.

The Queen case turned on the status of her ancestor, as described by witnesses who were not alive at that time but heard stories about her from others.

It is these family networks that Thomas wants to uncover and document in the petitions and case files.

The NEH grant will allow Thomas and his fellow scholars to create a digital archive of the District of Columbia court case files, present the information through webinars and publish several journal articles based on the findings.

Thomas is working with UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

Thomas said he is writing a narrative history of the Queen case and the families involved, using the case as a window on the problem of slavery from (continued on page 14)

TEACHING WITH PRIMARY SOURCES College history departments often wonder if they are imparting skills of historical thinking to all students who pass through their classrooms, whether majors or non-majors. During spring 2014, four graduate teaching assistants (John Buchkoski, Mikal Eckstrom, Holly Kizewski, and Courtney Pixler) developed a Primary Source Analysis (PSA) Project that sought to test students’ abilities to engage in historical thinking and develop a thesis based on primary sources and critical analysis. In addition to testing the students, the PSA team wanted to create an exam with new assessment tools and training materials for future American survey courses.

Administering the exam to introductory level courses allowed us to test a wide range of students across different disciplines. Students read seven to eight short documents, both textual and visual, and answered a question about the documents, using the documents as evidence. The PSA team prepared the students for the exam with an in-class workshop that modeled a sample question and documents, focusing on how to write an effective essay, with a thesis statement and a cohesive structure. To ensure that online or absent students could review the information covered, the project team used Camtasia, a digital audio recording tool, to record a podcast of the workshop, which the team provided online along with a PowerPoint.

The exams offered encouraging results in the way our students are thinking about and using primary sources.

We were pleased to discover that the students were focusing on creating a precise, argumentative thesis, an orga-

nized essay, and attempted to utilize the majority of the documents provided. The PSA also indicated to our department what areas could use the most improvement in the classroom. The analysis portion resulted in the lowest scores, because students struggled to connect the context of the documents to their argument.

Overall, the PSA project provided our department with valuable information for our future introductory courses. It successfully helped the department emphasize to our students the importance of primary source analysis in the historical profession. We discovered that our students need to improve their analytical skills, but were encouraged by their overall performance.

Writers: John Buchkoski and Courtney Pixler

AT THE 2013 GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANT RETREAT, KYLIE MCCORMICK, SAMANTHA BRYANT, & JOHN BUCHOWSKI continued from page 4 (Coble)

Q: Describe how you gathered information about a government that is not often associated with access to its archives?

A: The major archive in China relating to the war period is the Number 2 Historical Archives in Nanjing. This was virtually closed to outside researchers during

the time I worked on this project. Historians of modern China are used to adjusting projects to fit the political reality of China and I did likewise. I primarily used publications by journalists and writers published during or shortly after the war. The largest group of these I found at the Gest East Asian Library at Princeton. I was fortunate to receive a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study for a semester and accessed these materials at that time.

Q: In your monograph, you, like many other historians often grapple with “can the past serve the present?” What is your conclusion on this matter?

A: This phrase resonates strongly in Chinese history. Confucius who lived c. 500 bc believed that the answers to society’s ills could be found by study of the ancient classics from a “golden age” about 1000 bc. Since Confucianism came to dominate government and officials were selected based on their achievements on civil service exams on these classics, political debate in China was usually phrased as historical debate. Mao continued this tradition. The lead up to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, for instance, was a long standing front page debate about a Ming dynasty official who had been dismissed from office by the emperor. This was a covert debate about Mao having purged a key official in 1957. This enormous emphasis on discussing the past is quite at odds with the American approach to things. That is one reason why it appears so odd to American leaders that the legacy of World War II is front page news on a regular basis in East Asia, even seven decades after the war was over. And yes, the past can serve the present, particularly a society that sees the past as a guide for the present.

[9 ]

RAWLEY REPORT

R. PAUL THOMPSPON

PAULEY LECTURE REPORT Professor, author and consultant R. Paul Thompson discussed the current state of food security and technology and the history behind food and water challenges during the Department of History’s 2013 Carroll R. Pauley Lecture.

R. Paul Thompson delivered the lecture, titled “Water, Food Security, and Agro-technology: Current Challenges Placed in Historical Context,” on Oct. 3 in the Great Plains Art Museum.

At the University of Toronto, Thompson is a member of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy.

He has published extensively on evolutionary theory, population genetics, mathematical modeling in biology, theory structure in biology, philosophy of medicine, and ethics. He is the author of three books (The Moral Question, The

Structure of Biological Theories, and Agro-Technology), and he has edited Issues in Evolutionary Ethics. He has held numerous consulting positions with governments and industry.

He is Past President, and a director of the Green Door Alliance Inc., a registered charity, dedicated to preserving agricultural land. He has worked for many years on agricultural capacity and poverty relief in Kenya through Rural Outreach Program.

The Pauley Lecture is named for a UNL alumnus who graduated in 1930.

Thompson’s visit is sponsored by the Department of History, the UNL Research Council, the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Daugherty Water for Food Institute.

Writer: Deann Gayman

This year the History Graduate Student Association hosted the Ninth Annual James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities, titled “The Impact of Interaction: Exploring Cultural Convergence,” began on March 14th. The broad theme of the conference allowed for scholars from across disciplines to gather in Nebraska and share their work.

Dr. Bernadette Andrea, a professor of English at the University of Texas-San Antonio gave the keynote address Friday evening at the Center for Great Plains Studies. Dr. Andrea’s scholarship focuses on early modern cross cultural exchanges between the West and Islamic world. Dr. Andrea’s talk, titled “‘Travelling Bodyes’: Theorizing Subaltern Women’s Movements in(to) Protoimperialist England, c. 1560-1580” focused on the English depictions of native women in early modern travel narratives. About fifty conference attendees, faculty, and students attended the talk and the dessert reception that followed.

Paper and panel presentations began Saturday morning. The HGSA program committee created a number of interesting and dynamic panels that represented the overall topic of this year’s conference. During the luncheon, provided by the HGSA, Dr. Margaret Jacobs read pieces from her forthcoming book and also talked about some of the methodological hurdles that she faced through the writing process. The conference concluded with a student reception at the Marz Lounge.

The success of the Rawley conference can be attributed to the hard work of HGSA members and our generous sponsors.

Writer: Alyson Alvarez

continued from page 2 (Fulbright Award Winners)

“I’m very proud to be at the University of Nebraska and very proud as a University of Nebraska faculty to have the wonderful opportunity to be a Fulbright scholar in England,” she said.

“I can let the people in England know that the United States is not only New York and L.A., that there are these amazing and wonderful states in the middle of the country.

“I’d love to be able to give talks about life in Nebraska in addition to talks about my research topics.”

Paul Strauss, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of NebraskaLincoln, has been awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to conduct dissertation research in Germany during the 2014-15 academic year.

Strauss, a native of Bellflower, Mo., who earned a master’s degree in education from Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., said he plans to study 16th-century Christian sermons and texts, identifying the ways in which Muslims and Jews are portrayed. Strauss said he believes that examining earlier Christian texts is important in understanding the identity formations of Christian denominations. His research will be conducted at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel, where Strauss said he hopes to engage with the community through use of research discussion groups and through musical and educational activities offered by Wolfenbuettel’s Catholic churches.

Strauss said he was excited to go to Germany for his dissertation research. This was his second time applying for the Fulbright and he said it was “very satisfying to know that other people find my research valuable and are willing to support it.”

Strauss said religious studies in Germany are especially important and

crucial to understanding the complexities of early European history.

At the same time that Strauss learned of his Fulbright award, he also found out that he received a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, a private national agency that offers competitive, merit-based grants for study and/or research at accredited German institutions. Strauss has also received the Rolf and Ursula Schneider Stiftung Stipendium, a summer research grant through the Herzog August Bibliothek, to support his project.

Amy Burnett, professor of history and Strauss’ dissertation advisor, said it has been a pleasure to see Strauss develop as a teacher.

“The fact that he has been offered two prestigious year-long fellowships shows just how strong his record is,” Burnett said. “This is a marvelous opportunity for him to work in one of Europe’s most important research libraries, and I’m looking forward to what he’ll discover during his research in Germany.”

Upon his return to the United States, Strauss said he plans to write his dissertation and attend academic conferences, where he will present his research findings. He said he anticipates completing his dissertation in 2016.

Emily Heineman, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln student with majors in German and history and a graduate of Norfolk High School, has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Scholarship to Germany for the 2014-2015 academic year.

the culture, she said.

Heineman said she hopes to help bridge the gap between American culture and German perception of Americans during her stay. One way she hopes to do this is to build on her previous UNL study-abroad experience when she volunteered in an anti-war museum.

She hopes again to be able to volunteer in this way and to serve as a museum tour guide.

Upon her return to the United States, Heineman said she plans to pursue a master’s degree in German education. This will build upon her tutoring experience with Lincoln Literacy Council, as well as her time in the German classroom during her Fulbright experience.

She said she hopes to share her enthusiasm for language learning as a basis for cultural learning with future students.

“I’m excited to go back to Europe and revisit places I’ve been and see places I haven’t,” said Heineman, who spent seven months in UNL’s Deutsch in Deutschland program. “I love travel and I’m thrilled to do something I wouldn’t have gotten to do without a Fulbright.”

She said she attributes her success in part to Laura Damuth, UNL›s director of national and international fellowships.

Writers: Kirsten Clawson, Deann Gayman, and Mandy Hu.

Heineman will be an assistant language instructor in an English classroom in a German school. She will also be able to reinforce her own skills in German and further her knowledge of

[11]

NEW FACULTY

Q & A CONDUCTED VIA EMAIL & EDITED BY MIKAL ECKSTROM

LAURA MUÑOZ

VISITING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Q: Describe how your own life experience shapes how you teach history?

A: My own life experiences pushed me to ask “what if.” I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, a town on the mouth of the Nueces River, which marked the disputed border with Mexico from 1836 to 1848. Every time my family crossed the Nueces my parents would say (either in melancholy or with relief): “We could have been born in Mexico if this had been the border.” Listening to my relatives talk about the land and what could have been made me recognize the transiency of place and position rather quickly as a young person. With or without knowing it, my relatives trained me to think historically. When I teach I want students to think about how people make decisions (agency)—consciously, unconsciously, as part of institutions or governments—and how those decisions have ramifications for generations.

Q: Many historians try to unpack the rich and sometimes troubling aspects of intersectionality. How does social history help students understand that process?

MENTORSHIP

A: Social history allows students to see multiplicity and context. It helps them see how an individual or group experience is shaped by many different factors simultaneously in play. I often ask firstyear students to think and to write about themselves as historical figures. Many find that it is impossible to encompass one’s total life experience in the limited structure (e.g. one photo or a short autobiography) of a primary source.

Social history, thus, helps students value, not only personal connections to the discipline, but also the complexities and dilemmas of the historian’s craft. Ideally, they learn that people’s experiences are much more complicated than the evidence on the page, and that the elements of those complications must be extracted and explained.

Q: What artists might one find in your iPod?

Q: How has sitting on Texas Social Studies Standards shaped how you teach history?

Q: There are competing definitions to what digital history is. How do you define digital history and describe its importance to your own work?

A: Before 2010, no Texas high school student was “required” to learn about any person of color except for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 11th grade U.S. History. This meant that entering college students had no understanding of the historiographical shifts and contributions that emerged within the profession since the 1970s (unless, of course, they had well-trained history teachers who went beyond the standards). Now, my goal is teaching for recovery—selecting texts that diversify social and political history, and focusing on themes (e.g. race, class, gender, sexuality, and place) that broaden notions of American history, while simultaneously emphasizing disciplinary tenets (e.g. change over time and significance). Writing the standards compelled me more than ever to consider “uncoverage,” so that students can focus on the skills of “doing history” while learning new content.

A:I have two iPods with over 4,000 songs. The artists range from Aaliyah to Marc Anthony to Wynonna Judd.

SEAN TRUNDLE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE

A: Briefly, I see the practice of digital history as falling into roughly three areas: 1) the use of digital technology to conduct historical research (e.g. cliometrics, GIS analysis, etc.); 2) the use of digital technology to present historical information or analyses through new or alternative mechanisms (e.g. blogs, podcasts, digital video, Omeka collections, etc.); and 3) the study of the history of the digital age. These are not mutually exclusive, but they don’t necessarily overlap, either. For example, a given scholar might use digital tools to conduct quantitative analysis (1) and still publish the results in a traditional academic monograph.

Likewise, students might use digitized collections of archival material (2) in the pursuit of qualitative historical research.

In general, my philosophy within my own work is not to embrace technology for technology’s sake, but rather to use the

best set of tools for the task at hand. For example, I use a great deal of new media tools within my classroom, particularly with my introductory courses, because these forms are the communication tools younger students are used to communicating through. These tools may not be the best fit for a more sustained research effort intended for an audience of professional historians, but they are excellent mechanisms to spark interest and engagement with history. So, while I composed my dissertation within the framework of an orthodox monograph, my classroom abounds with interactive assignments designed to get students to develop the connection between historical analysis and their everyday life.

Q: How has coming from an American Studies background shaped your history courses? What does this add to the student experience?

A: American Studies has been foundational for my approach to history in two ways. Firstly, it has pushed me to always consider the question of culture in any engagement with the past. While politics, material conditions, and military encounters have undoubtedly had a tremendous impact on the shape of human experience, it is through culture that we make sense of and draw meaning from these events. Secondly, as a field, American Studies is incredibly self-critical: consistently questioning its own relationship to its object of study. Thus, I try to begin each of my courses from this same point -- not to simply describe a particular period or content area, but to ask why those of us in this class at this time would study this, and how our own position within a given historical moment will shape our understanding as we proceed through the course. I’ve found that these basic questions help to transform the classroom from the drudgery of forced studying and memorization to a space of

mutual inquiry.

Q: After 1945, television took hold of the American imagination and thrust it into areas that seemed unimaginable. How do you see popular culture shaping how American’s understand and demarcate the frontier?

A: Stuart Hall is central to my own thinking on popular culture here: to paraphrase, popular culture is both the field on which the game is played and the prize to be won in that game. Popular culture is often a site not just where American ideas are reflected or represented, but where the terms of that debate and the framework for understanding it are set. It provides the language -- both verbal and visual -- through which we engage with an abstract mythology like the frontier. At the extremes, consider the difference between the terrifying wilderness imagery often found in the works of early European settlers against the heroic motifs of pulp motifs of Cooper. More recently, a number of popular cultural works (Avatar, The Last Samurai, HBO’s Deadwood) have frequently framed the frontier as a site of invasion or pollution by the West. While each of these may engage in certain common elements of a “frontier myth,” they also provide distinct lenses through which we conceive of that myth.

Q: What can digital history teach us about humanity?

A: Like history at large, digital history is a quest for understanding where we came from and, by extension, who we are: to construct meaning and narrative out of the raw material of the past. The forces of the print age meant that these narratives were dominated by the written word, because in a print world this was the format best suited to transmitting and storing information. While I suspect it’s premature to declare the end of the written word (see this email for an example), I think it’s also fair to say that we can expect to see the written word supplemented by other forms as we embrace the array of available and affordable media. Additionally, digital history will undoubtedly allow us to continue probing questions about the threshold between humanity and technology that have haunted us since at least the dawn of the industrial age (and arguably much, much earlier than that).

KATRINA JAGODINSKY & BRIAN SARNACKI

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Q: Describe the similarities and differences between teaching at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Heidelberg.

ALEXANDER VAZANSKY

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

Q: How has the fall of the Berlin Wall shaped how you view history?

A: It has made me very wary of predicting outcomes based on past events.

While in hindsight the fall of the Wall looks like the inevitable outcome of the steady economic and political decline of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nobody saw this rapid turn of events coming in 1988, despite some signs of change.

Q: Your family comes from Sudetenland (now Czechoslovakia) something that you did not find out until you were 16. Did your own familial past shape how you teach history? Why or why not?

A: My family’s origins in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (aside from my own dual citizenship) certainly reinforced the tenuous and fluid nature of national or ethnic identity. The division between ethnic German and Czech was far less clear in the 19th Century than it appears now.

The increasingly strident nationalism around 1900 and the two World Wars forced my family to choose sides leading them to participate in and experience the conflicts and trauma that was visited upon that region as a result of National Socialist Germany’s annexation and occupation. Their experience has certainly taught me to mistrust notions of ethnic, national, or racial predetermination, exclusivity and exceptionalism.

A: When comparing the two in the present day it is easy to forget that U.S. universities modeled themselves after the German system in the 19th Century. They feel very different now. I am not sure I can provide an adequate comparison, since my teaching at Heidelberg was limited to a course per semester. I also taught in an English language program which was still a rarity then, but has become more common now. So my experience in Heidelberg was not entirely typical. Generally speaking at Heidelberg (and in Germany) academic rank plays an important role in who can teach what.

Only full or associate professors can hold lectures or teach graduate seminars. Lecturers and assistant professors are limited to undergraduate seminars.

Accordingly my teaching load was pretty small. I taught one 3-4 hour seminar that met once or twice a week. Had I been an assistant professor I would have taught two seminars per semester. I never had more than 20 students at a time. Here at UNL I have taught 2 or 3 courses every semester with 60 to 200 students.

Moreover, expectations of studentteacher and engagement are much higher here. While Germany has introduced more structured BA programs, German students carry much more responsibility for their education and can expect a lot less help from their professors.

Q: What influences from Germany or German culture on America/ American culture might surprise American students?

A: I am not sure I have an answer to that. I can offer a few pop culture references. Do people here realize that Baywatch was cancelled after one sea-

son here in the U.S. and only revived because of its great popularity in Germany (and probably some other European countries)? Or that boy bands such as the Backstreet Boys or N’Sync were first tested on the German market, before making it big in the U.S. I am not sure that throws a particularly flattering light on German pop culture preferences.

from page 8 (NEH Grant)

the American Revolution to the Civil War.

Descendants of American slaves may feel the work’s greatest impact, since family records of slaves were scarce. That’s changing, Thomas said.

“Scholars are trying to document African American history from roots in Africa through the period of slavery in a much more detailed way, which had not been thought possible because of lack of resources or because the names aren’t there. But the names are there in these files,” he said.

“Many institutions are developing large databases of African Americans and their relationships to one another, which is uncovering a history that has largely been hidden.”

Writer: Deann Gayman

GRADUATE CHAIR REPORT In the spring semester, 2014, a team of four graduate students designed and carried out an innovative project: a Primary Source Analysis exam for all introductory US history courses. The students created a workshop on Working with Primary Sources, which they gave to all the classes and made into a podcast.

They wrote and administered the exam to over 400 undergraduates. This proj-

ect gave us a glimpse into how well we are teaching this essential historical skill to our undergraduates. (Scores averaged around a B-; students’ analytical abilities proved to be their greatest weakness.)

The Project also provided our graduate students with a valuable experience in devising and implementing such a project. We may repeat this project again with the introductory European history classes. In the next year, we also plan to re-examine the MA and PhD programs to make them more streamlined and effective at training our graduates for the variety of historical careers in the twentyfirst century.

Writer: Margaret Jacobs

MARGARET JACOBS

GRADUATE AWARDS Sheldon Dissertation Fellows: Terry Ahlstedt, Mikal B. Eckstrom, and Brian Sarnacki Albin T. and Pauline Anderson Award: Andrea Nichols

UNDERGRADUATE CHAIR REPORT The department began this past academic year with a faculty retreat that focused on the History undergraduate program. At the retreat we made plans to develop 100-level courses for non-majors dedicated to issues of contemporary interest. Courses under development include the History of Hip-Hop, the History of Crime and the Underworld, and Law and Society in American Culture. Throughout the year we used a series of events as opportunities to ask majors’ advice about how to improve our program. Events included a well-attended open house at the beginning of the year, and, for students in our methods class (HIST 250), lunch with the department Chair. History students’ accomplishments this year were impressive as always. Brittny Ofstedal and Markus Schoof won our Glenn Gray Award for outstanding majors, for their high GPAs and creative undergraduate theses. Another graduating senior, Emily Heinemann, received a Fulbright award to spend next year in Germany.

Our majors have also served the department by helping with recruiting events; this year we were the only department in the College of Arts and Sciences whose students were invited to participate in the Big Red Road Show, which they attended in the costumes and personas of historical figures, including Frederick Douglass and Queen Elizabeth I. Writer: Jessica Coope

BRITTNY OFSTEDAL, WINNER OF THE GLENN GRAY AWARD WITH JESSICA COOPE, UNDERGRADUATE CHAIR

UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS Glenn Gray Award: Brittny Ofstedal and Markus Schoof History Department Service Award: Felicia Nehl Ed Hirsch Scholarship: Griffen Farrar and Alexander Mallory Allen P. Gerlach Scholarship: Jason Lybarger Larry R. Gerlach Scholarship: Matthew Mickelson Gaughan Center Award for Academic Research: Chance Counts Phi Beta Kappa Inductees: Phoebe Gydesen and Brittny Ofstedal.

Helen & Perry Moran Scholarship (American heritage): Jake Friefeld Dov Ospovat Award: Susana Geliga-Grazales

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FACULTY NOTES Tim Borstelmann published two articles in 2013-14: “Conclusion: More Equal and Less Equal since the 1970s,” in Winning While Losing: Civil Rights, the Conservative Movement, and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama, ed.

Kenneth Osgood and Derrick E. White (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014) and “A Worldly Tale: Global Influences on the Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations,” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, 2nd edition, ed. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is also the Vice President and President-Elect of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), with his one-year term as President to begin Jan. 1, 2015.

Amy Burnett co-led an NEH Summer seminar with Karin Maag, of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, on “Persecution, Toleration Co-Existence; Early Modern Responses to Religious Pluralism in July 2014. While she was in Grand Rapids she gave a public lecture, “Seven Myths about the Reformation Debate over the Lord’s Supper.” She will be presenting a paper on “Exegesis and Eucharist: Unexplored Connections between Calvin and Oecolampadius,” at the International Calvin Congress in Zürich, Switzerland, in Aug. 2014.

David Cahan is working on a biography of the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94), as well as on the general topic of the relations of science, technology, and economic growth from about 1840 to 1914. To research this project, he traveled to Munich, Germany, and to Vienna, Austria.

Bedross Der Matossian was appointed

to the prestigious Dumanian Visiting professorship in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago for spring 2014. There he taught a graduate seminar titled “Armenians, Arabs, and Jews in Late Ottoman State and Society” and also gave a public lecture at the University of Chicago titled “The Demise of the Ancien Régime and the Beginning of the New Era: Ethnic Politics after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.” In late June Bedross travelled to Jerusalem to conduct research for his second book project in the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate. His first book Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire is forthcoming this fall from Stanford University Press. He is organizing a major international conference in Spring 2015 at UNL for the centennial of the Armenian Genocide titled: “Crossing the Centennial: The Historiography of the Armenian Genocide Re-Evaluated.”

Margaret Jacobs completed a new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World, which will be coming out with University of Nebraska Press this fall. She also cowrote “ Teaching American History as Settler Colonialism” with PhD candidate Mikal Eckstrom, which will appear in the volume, Why You Can’t Teach US History without American Indians with University of North Carolina Press in 2015.

Jeannette Eileen Jones served as the President of MAASA (Mid-America American Studies Association) during the 2013-2014 academic year. During her tenure, she co-organized the MAASA 2014 conference, which was held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and

co-sponsored by the Institute for Ethnic Studies. The History Department also supported the conference and many Americanist faculty and students participated. Dr. Jones also began her second research project, Locating Lord Greystoke: U.S. Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1841-1919, a digital project that visualizes American responses to the colonization of Africa refracted through U.S. concerns about race and their own empire building.

Ann Kleimola’s article, “The Road to Beloozero: Ivan IV’s Reconciliation with the ‘Devil in a Skirt,’” will appear in Russian History. Her review-essay, “Medieval Metaphors: Visual Imagery and Beasts Noble and Ignoble,” is forthcoming in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Gerald Steinacher is making good progress on his next book, Humanitarians in Crisis: The Red Cross and the Holocaust (working title), which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

The book examines the institutional crisis of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross following the Committee’s failure to speak out against the Shoah. In May 2014 Gerald participated in an international conference about the Waffen SS held at the Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland and conducted research in the archives of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. In June he was invited by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington D.C.) to participate in a workshop about Christian Churches and the Holocaust. Gerald is spending some of his summer working as a Research Fellow at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York. The “Fred and Ellen Lewis JDC Archives Fel-

lowship” is awarded each year to a scholar engaged in promising research about Jewish history and humanitarian affairs.

While in residence there, Gerald will give a public lecture at The Center for Jewish History in New York on the topic of “The Red Cross, Jewish Relief Agencies, and the Holocaust.”

William G. Thomas III received an National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research grant in 2014 to conduct research on the history of early Washington, D.C., using the case files of the D.C. Circuit Court held in the National Archives. He is working on a legal and social history of slavery in the early republic based on these cases. He served on the Program Committee of the 2015 American Historical Association Conference to be held in New York City in January 2015.

In addition, he has been appointed to the Executive Committee of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

GRADUATE NOTES This year Alyson Alvarez presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference in Tucson, AZ, where she received the Frances Drake Student Travel Award for her paper, The Widow of Scots: Examining Mary Stuart in her Widowhoods. Alyson also presented her paper, Queen’s Commands and Widow’s Ways: Examining the First Widowhoods of Margaret Tudor and Mary Stuart, at the University of Winchester in early July.

Samantha Bryant was awarded the Summersell Center Fellowship, Frances.

S. Summersell Center for the Study of

the South, University of Alabama (20142015) and presented her paper, “The Dixie Divide: An Analysis of Region, Identity, and Civil Rights Protest in Southern Jewish Communities, 1945-65,” at Brandeis University, during the American Studies Conference 2014: Blacks, Jews, and Social Justice in America.

Luke Chennell spent time teaching in Lille, France. There, Luke taught the course “Sources and Consequences of Technological Change: Globalization and Cyberspace” as part of the University of Lille Telecom 1’s Intercultural Week. The focus of the course was the way in which contemporary technologies mesh with the deeper history of human technological development.

Ph.D. candidate Mikal Eckstrom worked on the Primary Source Analysis team and completed his comprehensive exams in spring 2014. Under the direction of Dr. Matthew Jockers, Mikal and his colleagues presented their work on Willa Cather’s fictional corpus at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland. This year he was awarded the Pauley Excellence in History Award, the Sheldon Dissertation Fellowship, Sheldon Dissertation Travel Award, and the Dean’s Fellowship. For 2014-2015, Mikal continues as a Center for Great Plains Studies Graduate Fellow. His chapter co-authored with Professor Margaret Jacobs for the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies will be published by University of North Carolina Press in spring 2015.

Jacob Friefeld is a PhD. candidate who spent the summer working on the History Harvest Project. He is a Great Plains Graduate Fellow, and is currently

working on his dissertation dealing with transformations in the ideal of manliness during the Civil War Era. Susana Geliga was awarded the Othmer Fellowship and won the Dov Ospovat Memorial award for best graduate paper.

Clayton Hansen was named a Center for Great Plains Studies Graduate Fellow and a council member of the Western History Association Graduate Student Caucus.

Catherine Medici-Thiemann won the 2014 North American Conference on British Studies Huntington Library Fellowship to support a month of dissertation research at the library and received the 2014 Medieval and Renaissance Studies Dissertation Fellowship to support travel to England for dissertation research. She was also selected to participate in the Mellon Summer Institute in English Paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC and spent June 2014 learning to read early modern handwriting and researching at the library. Catherine presented papers at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, the Rawley Conference in the Humanities, and the South Central Renaissance Conference. She received a Stern Trust Travel Award from the Pacific Coast Conference for her paper “Inquire How My Deare Brothers Do: Mary Dudley Sidney’s Relationships with her Brothers and her Political Actions and Agency ”and accepted an award for the best graduate student paper at the South Central Renaissance Conference for her paper “More Than a Wife and Mother: Jane Dudley, the Woman Who Bequeathed a Parrot and Served Five Queens.”

[17]

Andrea Nichols recently completed a book review co-authored with Dr. Carole Levin for The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford University Press, 2013 and presented “’None haue behynde theim, left so greate treasure’: tracing intertextuality and paratextual development from manuscript to print in 15th and 16th century English chronicles” at the 49th annual International Congress for Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. Andrea took part in the 2014 Newberry Library Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, Graduate Student Organizing Committee member and will be the Selected Proceedings Editor for Volume 8. This past summer Andrea took part in the NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers: “Researching Early Modern Manuscripts and Printed Books.” Andrea will teach at Doane College during fall 2014 semester and will be using her Columbia University Libraries Research Fellowship in January 2015.

Paul Strauss will be spending a year in Germany thanks to a Fulbright Student Award and the Schneider Stiftung Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek, as well as the Paul Olsen Travel Award from the UNL Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. Paul presented the following papers: Bayreuther Historisches Kolloquium “Toleranz und Pluralismus zwischen Antike und Spätaufklärung,” Wolfenbüttel, Germany; co-leader with Dr. James Coltrain “Teaching About the Origins of Race,” in the UNL Department of History Workshop “Teaching About Race in History: New Perspectives and Pedagogies;”paper for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and a paper for the UNL Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. Additionally Paul was a teacher with the UNL William H. Thompson

Learning Community, HIST 101.

Rebecca Wingo won the Annaley Naegle Redd Student Award in Women’s History as well as participated in the Western History Dissertation Workshop, Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. Rebecca’s paper on life on the Crow Reservation won Best Graduate Student Paper, Missouri Valley History Conference. She was elected to the Western History Association Graduate Caucus and continues her appointment as a Great Plains Graduate Fellow.

FROM THE HGSA PRESIDENT For the History Graduate Students Association, 2013-2014 was an academic year of continued success. The HGSA’s signature event, the James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities was well-attended and contained many engaging panels. The HGSA collaborated with the department on the “Teaching About Race in History

Workshop,” a vibrant discussion among graduate students and professors. With generous funding from the department, the HGSA was also able to run the “DH Bootcamp for Beginners,” an introduction to the Digital Humanities that drew participants from across campus. Attendance at monthly meetings stayed strong and a few of brave souls even sang at the HGSA’s karaoke night.

This past year was also a year of change.

We streamlined the HGSA constitution, eliminating the vice-president position and creating a new committee to oversee the Rawley Conference.

Additionally, the newest cohort of graduate students brought new blood into the organization. Many of these graduate students were constant figures at meetings and events. First year graduate students even swept the elections for the 2014-2015 school year.

With a new cohort poised to enter in the fall, I am quite confident that the HGSA will continue to be one of the most active graduate student organizations on campus.

Writer: Brian Sarnacki

AT THE 2013 ALUMNI ADVISORY COUNCIL MEETING, BRUCE PAULEY, ANDREA BJORKLAND, AND NATHAN SANDERSON

ALUMNI ADVISORY COUNCIL In 2012, William Thomas and Lloyd Ambrosius created the UNL History Department Alumni Advisory Council (“Council”) to help the Department enhance graduate and undergraduate students’ experience at UNL, encourage promising students to major in history, and support fundraising efforts. As its first chairman, I have been delighted with the Council’s progress and the generous participation of its members, which would not have been possible without the leadership of Will and Lloyd.

Already, the Council has created the Peter Maslowski Graduate Student Support Fund (“Fund”), in honor of one of the Department’s outstanding former faculty members. The Fund is to support student fellowships, assistantships travel and related expenses. In doing so, the Fund provides the Department a powerful recruiting tool to attract outstanding students. Also, the Council has held meetings with Department undergraduate and graduate students, offering guidance on career opportunities available to those who major in history, and has met with promising high school students to encourage them to major in history at UNL. In the coming years, the Council looks forward to further efforts in these and other areas to support the long-term enhancement and growth of the Department to make it one of the best programs in the Big 10 conference.

Writer: Jack Campbell

BOOK NOTES EARTH POLITICS WASKAR ARI DUKE UNIVERISTY PRESS OUT NOW

A LINCOLN DIALOGUE JAMES A. RAWLEY UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS OUT NOW

A GENERATION REMOVED MARGARET D. JACOBS UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS OUT SEPTEMBER 2014

SHATTERED DREAMS OF REVOLUTION BEDROSS DER MATTOSSIAN STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OUT FALL 2014

UPCOMING EVENTS PAULEY SYMPOSIUM “THE GREAT WAR & AMERICAN EMPIRE” DR. EMILY ROSENBERG, UC-IRVINE OCTOBER 23, 2014 It is the policy of University of NebraskaLincoln not to discriminate based on age, race, ethnicity, color, national origin, gender, sex, pregnancy, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, verteran’s status, maritial status, religion or political affiliation.

ALUMNI MEETING UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN OCTOBER 24, 2014

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2013-2014 DONORS

We thank these donors for their generosity and leadership.

Donations to all Department of History funds.

JULY 1, 2013- JUNE 30,2014

$10,000+ John M. Campbell Karen Campbell Larry R. & Gail Gerlach Bruce F. & Marianne Pauley Raymond P. & Roberta Schmidt

$1,000-$4,999 Margery G. & Lloyd Ambrosius Patrice M. Berger Shelley L. & Edward Bishop James W. Hewitt & Marjorie Barrett Hewitt Arthur H. & Patricia Hughes Andrew B. Koszewski Carole Levin Thomas P. Lynch & Margaret Jacobs Peter & Linda Maslowski Michael J. O’Hara Nathan B. & Tiffany Sanderson Nancy J. & Dennis Stara Karen A. Starr

$500-$999

Scott L. & Betty Gesell Allison B. Gilmore & Roger Nimps James O. Gump & Lee Ann Otto Gump Nancy Hayes Stephen S. Hilliard & Jessica Coope Leonard B. & EileenJacobson Linck Johnson & Susan Belasco Todd M. Kerstetter & Holly McFarland Virginia E. Knoll Elaine M. Kruse Pamela Laird Ellen M. & Joseph Macek Pamela J. Nickless Aubrey H. Polser David L. Ridenour & Laura Maurstad Ridenour Priscilla A. & Patrick Roy Raul & Ellen Saldivar Linda Shenk David R. & Heather Snyder Chad E. Stanley Gerald Steinacher Matthew J. Swanson Susan K. & John Wunder

UP TO $100 Sharon W. Brown Robert W. & Rebecca Cherny Hildegard Center For The Arts Ann K. Rawley William G. & Heather Thomas

$100-$499 Bernadette Andrea Claudine E. Barnes Ilona Bell Anna Bertolet Andrea K. Bjorklund & John Duggan Mark A. Clodfelter Carl B. & Janet Eskridge William B. Feis Laura M. Franz Don R. Gerlach

Tessa A. Alber Charles Beem Anastasia S. Bierman Dawn O. Braithwaite Stephen G. & Amy Burnett Rick Cypert Gary M. Czapla & Amy Goodburn Christine A. & Michael Dempsey Richard C. & Carolyn Edwards Daniel B. & Kim Einspahr Ruth Elwell Martin A. & Joye Fehringer Martha Gadberry George G. & Carol Gibson Robert J. & Vanessa Gorman Richard D. & Evelyn Guentzel

Susannah C. Hall Matthew C. & Faith Hansen Kristine M. Harris Erika A. Hepburn Lisa K. Hoffman Schuelke & Steven Schuelke Nancy Kassop Lindsay K. Kerns Alan R. Koenig Roy G. & Debra Koepp Theodore J. Kooser & Kathleen Rutledge Pippa G. & Craig Lawson Mary Ann Lee Catherine A. Loomis Julia T. McQuillan Louis Max Meyer Trust Joseph D. & Shari Nigro Lena C. & Glenn Orlin Lisa Pollard AdamRaffety Gerald M. & Beuna Reagan Rohana Elias Reyes Howard M. Solomon Lynn C. Spangler Pamela F. Starr Kirilka Stavreva Scott D. & Abigail Stempson Patricia Sullivan Amy Tan Marguerite Tassi Connie J. & Gary VanDoorn Jacqueline Vanhoutte Mary A. Villeponteaux John Watkins Ellen M. Weissinger & Wendy Birdsall

For corrections or questions regarding the list of annual donors, please contact the University of Nebraska Foundation 800-432-3216

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History Department Discretionary Fund (2586) James A. Rawley Research Fund (5002), supports research in American history Clay Thomas Memorial Endowment Fund (3968), supports research in American history Edward L. Homze Fund (10852), supports graduate student research in European History Peter Maslowski Graduate Support Fund (26400), supports graduate student research

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HISTORY history.unl.edu

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY 612 OLDFATHER HALL LINCOLN, NE 68588-0327