[Editor's Note: Clarence Mohr was named Chair of the History Department effective August 15, 1998. He is the third Chair in the Department's 35-year history. Professor Mohr was a member of the History Department at Tulane University from 1981 to 1998, and is a specialist in the history of the U.S. South, 19th-century U.S. history, and the history of American higher education.]
Custom dictates that a Chair's contribution to the Departmental newsletter should begin with a review of developments during the previous year. As a historian I am anxious to respect tradition and to maintain the high standard of intellectual content established by Professor Dan Rogers in his capacity as editor of the present publication. But at this juncture--after only three months at my post--tradition must give way to expedience in the matter of an annual report. Let me begin therefore with a few observations about recent events followed by some personal thoughts concerning the challenges and opportunities facing us in the years ahead.
When my wife Janet and I reached Mobile last August we were gratified to find a special summer issue of the Newsletter containing a biographical sketch of the new chair. My thanks go to Professor Richmond Brown for preparing the sketch, which ended by announcing the beginning of a "Mohr era" in Departmental affairs. While I accept Rich's compliment in the sprit in which it was offered, I feel obligated to add a brief disclaimer. Academic departments, like universities, possess a unique institutional culture or "personality" which evolves over many decades and constitutes an independent variable in the equation of long-term accomplishment. Anyone who is brash enough to accept administrative duties in modern university should thus have sufficient foresight to employ the accumulated experience of colleagues as a chart and compass for plotting a course into the future. As Chair I will try to help the Department move forward in a manner that takes cognizance of our past successes--believing with Thomas Wolfe that in professional as well as personal strivings "Each of us is all the sums he has not counted."
Having said this much I hasten to add that Professor Brown and I are in full agreement about the cyclical nature of change. For reasons which are unrelated to my appointment, the summer of 1998 may very well emerge as a transitional moment in the history of the University of South Alabama. My arrival last August coincided with the retirement after a 34-year tenure of Dr. Frederick Palmer Whiddon, South Alabama's founding president. The following months brought a new president in the person of V. Gordon Moulton, along with news of the University's impending reclassification as Doctoral II institution in the 1999 Carnegie ratings. Plans were also announced for the adoption of the University's first undergraduate honors program to take effect in the 1999-2000 academic year. These changes, along with the conversion of our academic calendar from a quarter to a semester schedule and the implementation of new state-mandated curricular requirements increasing the amount of history and English instruction for entering freshmen, have made the past semester a time of learning and creative adaptation for everyone. As a historian who writes about Southern higher education I am happy to have begun my duties as Chair during a semester when history was being made.
Thanks to the careful planning of my predecessor, Professor Leonard Macaluso, the transition to a semester schedule went off flawlessly. History majors can have confidence that a full range of upper-level courses will be offered and that graduation plans will remain on track despite changes in teaching schedules and credit hours. For students seeking introductory level classes the outlook is slightly less favorable. Although the University as a whole experienced a small enrollment decline as a result of moving to a semester system, demand for entry level history classes has burgeoned in response to the new state curriculum requirements mentioned above. During the present semester we experienced a 44% increase over fall 1997 enrollments, with even larger increases in HY 101-102 and HY 235-236 courses. With faculty resources already stretched exceedingly thin, the Department must find ways to accommodate a rising tide of survey-level students while continuing to offer the wide assortment of upper-level and graduate courses necessary for our majors and for our flourishing masters degree program.
The problem is serious but amenable to solution in several ways. During the fall semester of 1999 we hope to offer several large survey sections on a trial basis. If the large sections are deemed pedagogically sound we will schedule them routinely in subsequent years within the limits of available classroom space. Offering a few large classes will help avert an immediate crisis over access to required survey classes, but the services of at least one additional full-time faculty member will be essential if we are to meet our new obligations without diluting quality or shortchanging our majors and graduate students. The Dean is aware of our situation and I am optimistic that the necessary assistance will be made available.
When I interviewed for the Chair's position last spring I emphasized my desire to consolidate and build upon the Department's impressive record of accomplishment in teaching, research, and public service. Although a full discussion of Departmental strengths must await a less crowded issue of our Newsletter, a few key points deserve mention. By the most generous reckoning, our Department contains fourteen permanent members--twelve if those with administrative, archival, and editorial assignments are excluded. During the past decade this group (excluding the current chair) has published seven scholarly monographs and several edited works while engaging in a list of professional activities that ranges from the sponsorship of summer teacher seminars to participation in transatlantic policy conferences. The summer and fall of 1998 witnessed several notable achievements, including Larry Holmes's elevation to the post of president-elect of the Southern Conference of Slavic Studies, Betty Brandon's election as president of the Alabama Association of Historians, the appearance of an article by Aaron Fogleman in the Journal of American History, and the selection of an article by Michael Monheit to receive the Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas during 1997.
This impressive record of scholarly and professional achievement has paid rich dividends in the classroom. Good teaching requires personal dedication, hard work, and a willingness to take students seriously as participants in their own education. These qualities abound within our ranks, but they do not fully explain our success in attracting talented history majors. The Department's long established reputation for excellent teaching rests, in no small degree, upon the active engagement of our faculty with the craft of history and the ability of individual instructors to infuse their teaching with the sense of the excitement and discovery that flows from original research. In a variety of imaginative and creative ways, individual professors in all subfields have worked to cultivate a pedagogy of intellectual participation extending from the freshman introductory course to the final draft of the M.A. thesis. As we embark upon an era of required survey classes and occasional large sections we must strive to keep the "spirit of the seminar" alive at all levels of instruction.
One way of pursuing the latter goal is through intellectual activities which occur outside the classroom. Under the energetic leadership of Professor Richmond Brown, the local chapter of Phi Alpha Theta has played an active role in sponsoring guest speakers on a variety of historical topics and in arranging for students to present papers at a number of regional meetings. Already this semester we have hosted lectures by Professor Robin Fabel of Auburn University and Walter B. Edgar of the University of South Carolina. More events are planned for the spring semester.
In history as in other academic fields "learning to learn" constitutes a principal aim of undergraduate education. As teachers we succeed most fully when we encourage students to sharpen their critical faculties and develop the capacity to reach independent conclusions. The library, in both its physical and its "virtual" manifestations, is the first stop on the road to intellectual emancipation. Late last year Professor Aaron Fogleman was asked to represent the Department on a University-wide committee charged with developing new opportunities in undergraduate research. Coming at a moment when the Department is making provision for thesis-type senior projects as part of the new honors curriculum, the University's increased emphasis on undergraduate research could scarcely be more timely. Taken together the honors program and the work of the undergraduate research committee represent an important opportunity for the History Department to enhance its instructional activities in a manner which strengthens student retention and contributes directly to the University's larger mission.
Important developments are also taking place in the area of graduate education. As previous issues of the Newsletter have indicated, the past six years have witnessed a steady growth in the size of our M. A. program and a corresponding enhancement of academic quality. More students are electing to write theses, to pursue doctoral studies, and to enter careers in archival, museum, or historic preservation fields. The lion's share of credit for these developments belongs to Aaron Fogleman, who has worked tirelessly since 1992 to recruit good students and keep the program running smoothly in an administrative sense. At present some thirty-five students are actively enrolled in the program and we expect to award between six and nine M. A. degrees during the current academic year. During the next few months we will be holding meetings and discussions with a number of local archivists, archaeologists, museum curators, and leaders in historic preservation to explore ways of organizing our current courses and internships into an official public history track for interested M.A. students.
Formalizing public history instruction represents an enlargement of our intellectual mission rather than a shift in emphasis or a change of direction. As we make a concerted effort to serve the local need for rigorously trained professionals in history-related fields we will continue to seek out promising students who may wish to pursue M. A. work as a prelude to doctoral study at other institutions. We can and should pursue both objectives with equal vigor. "Pure" and applied history (like teaching and research) are best understood not as polar opposites, but as contiguous bands on an unbroken spectrum of intellectual endeavor. In history, as in other professional fields, theory and basic research provide the intellectual underpinning for classroom instruction and practical application. In an era when the knowledge claims of traditional academic disciplines are subject to frequent challenge, and when Americans are increasingly preoccupied with the nature of historical memory, any serious graduate program must adopt a broad view of its ultimate mission. Whether our graduates become public historians or university professors, they will serve the public best by acquiring the skills and habits of mind necessary to frame questions which enlarge the scope of historical inquiry.
Service to Mobile and the Gulf Coast is, of course, nothing new to members of the South Alabama History Department. Where community outreach is concerned we are fortunate in having Professor Ellwood B. Hannum strategically positioned as Associate Dean of the School of Continuing Education. His efforts are instrumental in insuring a steady flow of returning adult students who add depth and maturity to our classes and give us a valuable link to the daily life of Mobile and its neighboring communities. We are equally fortunate in having Professor Michael Thomason who, through his dual role as Director of the University Archives and editor of the Gulf South Historical Review, gives the Department a highly visible presence across the state and throughout the Gulf Coast region. As this is being written Professor Thomason is completing final revisions on Mobile: A Tricentennial History, a multi-authored book manuscript scheduled for publication by the University of Alabama Press in 1999-2000. In addition to Thomason, Professors Richmond Brown and Henry M. McKiven of our Department have contributed chapters to the volume, which aims to synthesize the city's history from colonial times onward and pave the way for further research. A project of this kind, growing more or less directly out of the teaching and research interests of our faculty, attests to the organic relationship between public service and the many varieties of intellectual activity that take place within an academic setting. Indeed, a strong case can be made that in giving serious attention to state and local topics South Alabama historians render public service of a very high order.
At the beginning of this message I referred to the idea that every academic department exhibits a distinct personality. In addition to breadth and intellectual vitality, our faculty can lay claim to one additional quality that counts for a great deal in the daily give and take of academic life. We are by any standards a friendly department in which the norms of respect and collegiality prevail at all levels. The air of openness and professionalism, so evident during my initial visits last spring, has manifested itself repeatedly this semester in the warmth displayed by individual colleagues during casual conversations as well as through innumerable courtesies extended to Janet and me from the time of our arrival. I am especially grateful for the expert and willing assistance that I have received from our secretaries Helga McCurry and Carol Sibley. As I have struggled to learn the procedural ropes their timely intervention has averted many blunders. Janet and I are delighted to be in Mobile and I feel exceptionally fortunate to have joined a department which represents the historical profession at its best.
Joe Brent is the Civil War Sites Preservation Coordinator at the Kentucky Heritage Council in Frankfort. He has recently authored "Remembering the Civil War in Kentucky" in Kentucky Living (June 1998); "Preserving Kentucky's Civil War Sites: Grassroots Efforts and Statewide Leadership," The George Wright Forum (1998, vol. 15, no. 2); and "Preserving Kentucky's Civil War Legacy" in Cultural Resource Management (1997, vol. 5, no. 20).
William Burch is a first lieutenant serving in the U.S. Army in North Carolina.
John Carson is now serving in the U.S. Army in Kansas as a second lieutenant.
Jonathan Hilton spent 4 years in the US Army in Panama, and is an MA student in Latin American studies at Tulane University.
Marjorie Hilton is in her third year of the Ph.D. program in Russian history at the University of Illinois. She hopes to spend the upcoming academic year conducting research for her dissertation in the libraries and archives of Moscow, Odessa, and St. Petersburg.
Aaron Kruger has entered the Ph.D. program in Russian history at Michigan State University.
Margie Law received an MA in Spanish language and literature from Penn State and teaches Spanish at USA. She is also at work on a Ph.D. in instructional design and development from USA.
Michael Mansfield has entered the Ph.D. program in American history at the University of Alabama.
Stephen Murray is a local attorney (and a University of Alabama Law School graduate).
Lynette Parker is an MA student in Latin American studies at Vanderbilt.
Robert Payne, Jr., a captain in the U.S. Air Force, is now finishing a tour at Maxwell AFB, and is being reassigned to California.
Jireh Seow returned to his native Malaysia and has been teaching in Jakarta.
Donna Shaw is an attorney in Tallahassee.
Angela Powell Smith completed her M.A. in history at Auburn University and currently works for Southeast College of Technology.
Artemesia Stanberry is a history Ph.D. student at Howard University.
Douglas Weisberg is a second lieutenant serving in the U.S. Army in Germany
James Willmann, after completing
his MA in history, continues teaching at Baker High School
E. Lewis B. Curtis Certificate for Outstanding Scholarship
1998: Heather Guidry, Margaret
Lockwood, Yanna Tatum, Christopher Houston, Rachel Loreto, Martha Joan
Layne
1997: Joan Layne, Margaret
Lockwood, Ana Millard, Dorothy Gill, John Carson, Jr., Suzanne Paul
1996: Yoshiko Ogura, Cheryl
Buch, April Philips, Cindy Beck, Kimberly Wright, David Mancuso
1995: Margie Law, Lawrence
Hyland, April Philips, Kristen Gartman, Gaines Stubblefield, Michael Mansfield
1994: Teresa Bowers, Joelene
Brown, Rebecca Gaines, Jireh Seow, Jeffrey Chambliss
The Howard F. Mahan Award for the Outstanding History Major
1998: John Harbin, John Carson
1997: Lynette Parker, Gaines
Stubblefield
1996: Yoshiko Ogura, Jireh
Seow
1995: Joelene Brown, Margie
Law
1994: Donna Shaw
The Robert L. Brunhouse Award to the Outstanding M.A. Graduate
1998: Peter Wilson
1997: Nicholas Cillo
1996: Bill Patterson
1995: Marjorie Hilton
1994: Rebecca Boone
The Rod Hickman Service Award
1996: Beau Robert M. Doolittle,
II
1995: Marjorie Hilton
The Richard Meikle Scholarship Award for the Outstanding Junior History Major
1998: Robert Kirkpatrick
1997: Ana Millard
1996: Martha Joan Layne
1995: April Philips
1994: Margie Law
Brown remains faculty adviser to our chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta national history honorary. He has served as a panelist at scholarly conferences held by the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and by the Alabama Association of Historians. He was named "Teacher of the Year" twice in succession in a vote of history students (1997-1998).
Professor Chuang continues his research on the Chinese democratic and liberal movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has conducted research in the Library of Congress and has been at work on a manuscript entitled Hundred Days of Wu Hsu Reform in 1898: The First Stage of Chinese Modernization or Westernization? He has also been at work on a project entitled Alabama's Eastern Asian Connection.
Professor Chuang wrote a lengthy essay review for the Journal of Asian and African Studies in 1995 and has also reviewed for China Review International. He spoke at the University of Mobile on "The Contrasts Between Chinese Religions/Philosophies and Western Religions/Philosophies" and served as a specialist and resource for Columbus State University's "Seminar on Tradition and Transformation in China" in 1997. Professor Chuang also conducted a workshop on Chinese history and culture at Silverhill School in Baldwin County and has served as an interpreter for various community organizations in and around Mobile.
Fogleman was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, Germany, where he worked on his new book about German religious culture in early America. He also worked on this project in Pennsylvania during the summer of 1996. He has made presentations at several conferences: Salt Lake City (German Studies Association, 1998), Harvard University (International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1996 and 1997), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1997), Halle, Germany (Interdisciplinary Center for Pietism Research, 1997), and Chicago (Social Sciences History Association, 1996).
Fogleman was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow, Göttingen in 1996-97; a Fulbright Honorary Senior Scholar in Göttingen in 1996-97; and an Atlantic Seminar Fellow at Harvard University in 1996. Back at USA, Fogleman has been teaching the new graduate research seminar in American history, HY 580, in addition to his usual courses: HY 235, U.S. to 1865; HY 236, U.S. since 1865; HY 432/532, Colonial America; and HY 433, American Revolution.
Holmes published Teoriia i praktika trudovoi shkoly v Rossii (1917-1932 gg.) (The Theory and Practice of the Russian Labor School, co-authored with N.V. Kotriakhov) in 1993. His article "Part of History: The Oral Record and Moscow's Model School No. 25, 1931-1937" appeared in the Slavic Review in 1997, and he edited and wrote the introduction to a special edition of East /West Education in 1997 -- and has done the same for an issue in 1998 that is soon to appear. He has reviewed books in the Slavic Review, History of Education Quarterly, Canadian Slavonic Papers, and the American Historical Review.
Holmes presented papers on Soviet education at the Fifth World Congress for Central and East European Studies (Warsaw, August 1995); American Historical Association (Atlanta, 1996); Southern Conference on Slavic Studies (Asheville, NC, April 1996); and at a conference on "Knowledge and Power" (Halle, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, May 1996). He had a fellowship from the American Council of Teachers of Russian Research Scholar Program for research in Moscow, from June to August 1995; a short-term travel grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board for research in Moscow in March 1996; and was a Research Associate of the 1997 Summer Research Laboratory on Russia and Eastern Europe at the University of Illinois.
Holmes is president-elect of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies (a regional affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) and continues to make an amply illustrated presentation on contemporary Russia to the U.S. Air Force's course in cross-cultural communications (since 1994 he has done so at military bases in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, England, and Japan).
If all that weren't enough, he still has time for sports: he reports a dramatic mood swing for the better ever since Mobile acquired a professional hockey team and the AA farm team baseball franchise that has played well most of the time.
Professor Houston has reviewed books for the Florida Historical Quarterly, the Journal of Mississippi History, and Military History of the West. He has talked to several local groups about terrorism, and has appeared on WKRG-TV twice regarding national security policy. In 1999 Professor Houston will offer two of his long-running courses, HY 205, Warfare & Society in the Modern World and HY 215, The Military History of the U.S. Civil War.
Macaluso served as a commentator for a session of the 1998 Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (Tallahassee) on aspects of the Napoleonic Empire.
Professor McKiven presented a paper at Pensacola last year entitled "Am I a Nigger? Race and Irish Assimilation in New Orleans and Mobile." This year he presented "Labor and Race in Reconstruction Mobile" at the Gulf Coast Historical Conference in Hammond, La. His current research project involves secession, war, and Reconstruction in New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston.
McKiven attended the U.S. Army's Camp Challenge during the summer of 1998, in which professors from the eastern United States go to Fort Knox, Kentucky in order to participate in some of the training ROTC cadets undergo (rapelling, water survival, stream crossing, and mock field exercises). The program lasted a week, and McKiven thought it provided participants some insights into what the Army tries to accomplish with its leadership training.
McKiven has reviewed books in Southern Cultures, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Mississippi History, H-Urban, the Journal of Southwest Georgia History, and Labor History. For the last three years he has spoken to the Pensacola Civil War Round Table. His topics have included Civil War prisons, speculation in Confederate Mobile, and a discussion of Alan Nolan's book Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History.
Monheit's research interests center around Calvin's early years as a reformer, his personal relationships, his developing criticism of those who shared his beliefs inwardly but remained within the Catholic church, and his emerging views on religious statues and religious imagery.
Monheit published "Young Calvin, Textual Interpretation and Roman Law," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, T. LIX, No. 2, 1997, 263-282; "The Origins of the edictalis-decretalis bonorum possessio Distinction in a Renaissance Defense of Scholastic Hermeneutics," Quaderni Fiorentini per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno (Florentine Studies in the History of Modern Legal Thought), vol. XXV, 1996, 469-83; "Guillaume Budé, Andrea Alciato, Pierre de l'Estoile: Renaissance Interpreters of Roman Law," The Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. LVIII, No. 1, Jan. 1997, 21-40, which won that journal's Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article of 1997.
Monheit has recently researched at the Bibliothèque Nationale and other libraries in Paris on Calvin's activities and personal and professional relationships in his early years in Geneva, and he gave a paper entitled "Calvin and Two Calls to the Ministry: Geneva 1536, Strasbourg 1538," at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, October 24, 1998, based on this research. The research will also contribute to his book-in-progress, The Calling of Calvin: The Formation of a Reformer, 1528-41.
Nigota has traveled to London for research every summer since this Newsletter was last published in 1994. He researches in the Public Record Office, British Library, Guildhall Library, and the Institute of Historical Research Library of the University of London.
Nigota was named "Teacher of the Year" in a vote of all history students in 1995, and he continues to teach his courses on medieval and Renaissance history.
In the summer of 1997 Rogers was a Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Jewish Civilization and the Holocaust at Northwestern University, and in the summer of 1998 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, taking part in the German Studies Seminar in Bonn, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Prague, and other cities in Germany and Poland.
Rogers continued his service as one of editors of H-German, a scholarly Internet forum reaching historians, archivists, librarians, and other scholars interested in German history. Since 1994 the network has grown from a few hundred members to over 1,600.
At USA Rogers offers courses on Western civilization, modern Germany, the Holocaust, Hitler and Nazi Germany, and now a graduate readings course on the historiography of Nazi Germany.
Thomason continues to serve as editor of the recently re-named Gulf South Historical Review, and as a member of the board of directors of the Gulf South Historical Association and of the Mobile Tricentennial Association. He continues a very active public speaking schedule, presenting around two dozen talks a year on the history of Mobile. His classes continue to cover the history of Alabama and Africa.
Rebecca and Chris Boone are the parents of Lucy Denham Boone, born on September 23, 1998.
Aaron Fogleman and Vera Lind were married on August 8, 1998, in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Vera is on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Universität des Saarlandes (Germany).
Robert Houston, son of Sandra and Bob Houston, graduated from the Florida State University with a B.A. in history and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army. Currently he is serving in Bavaria, where his mother and father visited him the summer of 1998.
Mel & Julie McKiven's household has expanded to include two new members, Tucker and Christina.
From the household of Michael Monheit: Mike's wife, Dr. Diane B. Garden, has been teaching gifted and International Baccalaureate students at Murphy High School since September 1996. Her chapbook, The Hannah and Papa Poems, will be published shortly by Negative Capability Press. Mike and Diane's daughter Hannah Garden-Monheit, now in 7th grade at Phillips Preparatory School, has received numerous academic awards lately, especially for math. Hannah has also excelled at Hebrew and taught Hebrew to younger students last year at Springhill Avenue Temple.
Dan Rogers and Kristen Gartman Rogers were married on August 6, 1997, in Telluride, Colorado. Kristen is now finishing law school at the University of Georgia.
Carol Sibley, Departmental secretary, left in December 1998 to take a teaching position at the Strickland Youth Center.
Philip and Jo Anne Theodore are now the parents of two sons: Alexander and Andrew.
The daughters of Michael & Marilyn Thomason have completed their post-secondary educations, with Caroline now an attorney in Mobile (having graduated from the St. Louis University School of Law) and Catharine an intensive care nurse at Providence Hospital (having received a B.S. in nursing from USA). As their daughters have begun to spend less and less time at home, an assortment of dogs and foreign four- and two-wheeled vehicles have received more of Mike and Marilyn's time.
Deborah Thomaston, Departmental secretary, left her position in 1997 to join the staff of Mobile Christian School.
Ellen Williams, former Departmental secretary, moved with husband Joe and daughter Elizabeth to Denham Springs, LA.
Professor Mel McKiven was promoted to associate professor and tenured in June 1996. Professors Aaron Fogleman, Michael Monheit, and Dan Rogers were each promoted to associate professor and tenured in June 1997.
Professor George H. Daniels retired from the University of South Alabama effective August 31, 1997. He and Sheila have moved to their new home in Silverhill, Alabama.
Professor A. Taber Green, a member of the Department from1965 until his retirement in 1991 (and an adjunct thereafter) died in November 1997. In our summer 1998 Newsletter, Professor Leonard Macaluso wrote that Professor Green's "generous spirit enabled him to contribute immeasurably to his colleagues' personal and professional lives. We turned to him when conditions were at their worst, because then he gave us his best" (photo by Michael Thomason from 1971).
Professor Michael Malek, the Department's specialist in Latin American history from 1972 until 1986, died in November 1995. Mike was a specialist in the history of the Caribbean, with an emphasis on the Dominican Republic, where he had served in the Peace Corps. He retired in 1986 due to the effects of Huntington's chorea, but remained a resident of the Mobile area. He died after struggling against cancer for two years. (photo by Michael Thomason from the early 1970s)
Richard Meikle, a 1994 B.A. graduate of the Department, died in his native Scotland in May 1997. In appreciation of his dedication to history and his selflessness, the Department's faculty had voted to name the award for outstanding scholarship by a junior history major in his honor.
As we went to press, we learned of
the death of one of our current M.A. students, Joanne Saunders.
Blain P. Babcock
Amanda S. Barron
Daniel C. Boner, II
David A. Boswell
Clint D. Brown
Joelene E. Brown
Timothy R. Brown
Adele J. Bullock
William W. Burch
Rosemary Caldwell
John F. Carson, Jr.
Marie C. Catchot
Jeffrey M. Chambliss
Duane M. Clark
Melissa D. Conlon
Matthew J. Cooper
Leah K. Costes
Richard G. Currey, Jr.
Dyan M. Dawson
Robbin R. Dennis
Beau R. M. Doolittle
James K. Evans
Robert W. Fell, III
Marcus V. Fletcher
Gary L. Francis, Jr.
Mary L. Gaillard
Christopher S. Genereux
Lora L. Gorrell
Heather R. Guidry
John W. Harbin
Ronald G. Harding
Rodney W. Harper
Peter A. Havas, Jr.
Robert T. Henry
Curry A. Herring
Tina A. Hill
Thomas W. Hinote
Larry F. Holt, Jr.
Christopher J. Houston
Walter L. Hudson
Meredith W. Johnston
Katrina A. Jones
Kevin P. Kenney
Ronald G. Kuerner, Jr.
Thomas E. Lami
Melanie A. Lane
Margie E. Law
Martha J. Layne
John E. Lightsey
Jessica Y. Little
Rachel C. Loreto
Michael E. Matthews
Gregory M. Mayfield
Andre V. McConico
Roland L. McMillan
Karen E. Moseley
Martha G. Murray
Meredith L. Nivens
Deanna F. Norwood
April J. Philips
Jennifer A. Pullum
Tera L. Reid
Tom T. Rockwell
William P. Rodgers, Jr.
Christine M. Sacramona
William J. Schatzman
Louis M. Screws, II
Hooiinn J. Seow
Robin H. Shepard
Christopher W. Shiver
Laura L. Simpson
Ashlea C. Singleton
Michael W. Sisson
Melissa D. Smith
Arnita V. Smith
James T. Stinson
Daniel G. Stubblefield
Thomas B. Sumrall, Jr.
Lawrence H. Thibault
Harry E. Townley, IV
Todd Veland
Alexander G. Vesa
Tara S. Waller
Linda H. Walton
Debra K. Webb
Douglas B. Weisberg
Jonathan D. Wiggins
Bobbie J. Wilson
Travis W. Wright
M.A.
Teresa B. Bowers
Amie D. Bryant
Robert L. Dean
Daniel S. Hale
Edward K. Harkins
Marjorie L. Hilton
Lawrence N. Hyland
Donna M. Lewis-Christian
John O'Donnell-Rosales
Aaron J. Kruger
Michael W. Mansfield
Kathryn R. McKinley
Michelle A. Meads
Louise H. Renard
Thomas M. Ryan
Jack R. Schodlbauer, Jr.
Carol S. Sibley
Sandra E. Whiting
James L. Willmann
Juan Fermín
de Aycinena: Central American Colonial Entrepreneur, 1729-1796 by 
Richmond
F. Brown (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997)
From the book jacket: "Juan Fermín de Aycinena was the wealthiest, most prominent, and most powerful individual in late colonial Central America. Chronicling Aycinena's extraordinary rise to power, Richmond F. Brown also sheds new light on the development of politics, economy, and society in Central America.
"A mid-eighteenth-century immigrant from Navarre (via New Spain), Aycinena moved to Santiago de Guatemala in 1754. Through a fortuitous marriage, he acquired instant wealth and important connections to the region's elite. Not content to rest on his wealth, he capitalized on his newfound resources to become Guatemala's leading exporter, importer, and lender during a time of great economic expansion.
"As Brown demonstrates, Aycinena played a role in practically all aspects of isthmian affairs, including commercial expansion, military activities, and the church establishment....Aycinena's success placed his family in a position to dominate Central American politics, commerce, and society for much of the nineteenth century."
Writing in the Business History Review, Richard J. Salvucci, economics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, praised Brown's book as "a detailed yet coherent account of the emergence of a major figure in Guatemala's creole establishment. Brown observes that the Aycinena story can tell us a great deal about the history of Central America. Yes, indeed, it can....Brown is the first researcher to gain access to a substantial number of private family papers in Guatemala City and he makes effective use of their rich detail. The study is organized around thematic treatments of Aycinena's life as well as his business and socio-political activities, alternating between narrative treatments of his life experiences and descriptions of his many business and social transactions."
From the book jacket: "Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first comprehensive treatment of eighteenth-century German settlement of North America. Utilizing a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, Fogleman emphasizes the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans' emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America. He emphasizes that the movement of Germans to America was a pattern of immigration, not colonization.
"Hopeful
Journeys traces the German migrant groups from their origins to their
places of final settlement in the colonies. The immigrants' Old World customs,
beliefs, and connections did not entirely disappear as they adapted to
life in the colonies; instead, the Germans' past ways helped shape behavior
in the New World. German settled in rural, ethnic communities where family,
village, and religion helped them succeed in the multi-ethnic, capitalist
economy of British North America. This collective strategy carried into
the political arena, as the immigrants and their descendants sought to
solidify and protect their gains. Fogleman contends that, to a significant
degree, the immigrants and their children developed a new ethnic identity:
adapting to the strains of migration, settlement, and politicization, they
became Americanized without becoming less German."
James Horn, writing in History, stated that "this is a significant work and a valuable addition to the growing literature linking old and new world migrant experience in the colonial period. More broadly, German immigration serves as a reminder that the ethnic and cultural pluralism associated with nineteenth-century America had its roots much earlier in the mass migrations of hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Africans who came, free and coerced, in the century before the Revolution." Horn lauds Hopeful Journeys for its "sensitive and detailed portrayal of the regional backgrounds of immigrants in south-west Germany and Switzerland, the area from which the majority of eighteenth-century migrants came, in relation to the experience of immigration and settlement in America."
From the book jacket: "In this study of Birmingham's iron and steel workers, Henry McKiven unravels the complex dynamics of race relations and class struggle that shaped the city's social and economic order.
"According to McKiven, the white men who moved to Birmingham soon after its founding to take jobs as skilled iron workers shared a free labor ideology that emphasized opportunity and equality between white employees and management at the expense of less skilled black laborers. But, doubtful of their employers' commitment to white supremacy, they formed unions to defend their position within the racial order of the workplace. This order changed, however, when advances in manufacturing and technology created more semiskilled jobs and broadened opportunities for black workers.
"McKiven
shows how race and class divisions also shaped working-class life away
from the plant, as workers built neighborhoods and organized community
and political associations that reinforced bonds of skill, race, and ethnicity."
In advance praise of the book, Robert J. Norrell, Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence and Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, wrote that McKiven "shows exactly how skilled white workers consciously separated themselves from unskilled blacks in order to protect their own material interests." Robert Zieger of the University of Florida stated that "this impressive book illuminates the workplace conflicts, political battles, racial tensions, and community struggles that shaped working-class life in the New South."
Steve Goodson of the State University of West Georgia, writing in the Mississippi Quarterly, notes that "McKiven does an excellent job of correcting earlier historiography by revealing that, in Birmingham at least, racial and class issues were deeply, inseparably intertwined." In Southern Cultures, Tim Minchin, lecturer in American history at St. Andrews University, Scotland, praised Iron & Steel as "a welcome addition to the growing number of studies of southern workers that have been published in the last decade. It offers a readable, accessible account that illuminates the causes of racial segregation in one of the major industrial centers of the New South. McKiven's emphasis on the wider community also ensures that this book will appeal to many historians of the region."
From the book jacket: "As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing, than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid to its history. Now, in All the Modern Conveniences, Maureen Ogle presents a fascinating study that explores the development of household plumbing in nineteenth-century America.
"Until 1840, indoor plumbing could
be found only in mansions and first-class hotels. Then, in the decade before
midcentury, 
Americans
representing a wider range of economic circumstances began to install household
plumbing with increasing eagerness. Ogle draws on a wide assortment of
contemporary sources -- sanitation reports, builders' manuals, fixture
catalogues, patent applications, and popular science tracts -- to show
how the demand for plumbing was prompted more by an emerging middle-class
culture of convenience, reform, and domestic life than by fears about hygiene
and sanitation. She also examines advancements in water-supply and waste-management
technology, the architectural considerations these amenities entailed,
and the scientific approach to sanitation that began to emerge by century's
end."
Professor Jacqueline Wilkie of Luther College writes in the Journal of Social History that "All the Modern Conveniences serves as a model case study in the link between private and public life in the evolution of industrial society. It represents a valiant attempt to move discussion of the history of technology beyond both technological determinism and what Ogle calls the 'wild goose chase' of technological impact. Its intriguing use of manuscripts from ordinary, middle-class householders indicates that it may be possible to get inside their heads to figure out why they did what they did."
From the book jacket: "Politics
after Hitler is the first book to demonstrate the importance of American,
British, and French 
interference
in the development of party politics in Germany after 1945. Based on through
and wide-ranging research in official and party archives in Britain, France,
Germany, and the United States, the book demonstrates how parties came
under intense pressure from the three Western Allied occupiers.
"The occupiers had arrived in Germany in the wake of combat in 1945 without firm plans for reviving German politics, and had to improvise and hastily construct a licensing system for new parties which was then used to limit and steer party politics in desirable directions. Above all else, they responded whenever German politicians evoked one of four fears: the fear of reactionaries; the fear of communist revolution; the fear of nationalism; and the fear of political fragmentation that had led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic a generation earlier. The book concludes that the Allied occupation was a success in helping move German politics toward the stability they have enjoyed to the present day."
In the Journal of Modern History, Professor Thomas A. Schwartz of Vanderbilt University wrote that "this book helps us understand the relative impact of the Western powers on the Federal Republic's political development, and why the system they established proved so durable." In Foreign Affairs, Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University wrote that Rogers "makes an important contribution to the history of the Allies' occupation of western Germany by concentrating not on programs aimed at reforming German political culture but on efforts to revive and reorient party politics. He argues that Britain, the United States, and France played a major role in reshaping the party system. While he finds little evidence that they were relatively indulgent toward the right after the Cold War began, he shows that they were concerned with preventing both reaction and revolution, a revival of nationalism including that of Kurt Schumacher's Social Democratic Party (SPD), and splinter parties, and that the system of licenses and authorizations resulted in a limited number of moderate parties. This fine monograph tells a complex success story clearly and intelligently."
From the book jacket: "Draffus Lamar Hightower, 1899-1993, spent most of his life in Barbour County, Alabama. For many years he was the owner of a Chevrolet dealership, but he had another occupation as well. From his youth, he was fascinated with photography, and for fifty years he experimented with the craft both technically and artistically.
"Hightower, while participating fully in the twentieth century, was also acutely aware of the passing of the heritage of the last one. From the early 1920s to the late '60s, he made thousands of negatives of people, events, landscapes, objects, and buildings in Barbour County, all of which were being swept along by the coming of new times. By the 1960s, he had created a nearly unbelievable record of the life of the county during a period of profound change, of a vanishing world, if you will. His photographs rival the work of Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and other great photographers of our time. Indeed, he studied the style and technique of these and other great contemporaries in books and on the pages of Life and Popular Photography. He shot what interested him, or sometimes what friends and family asked him to record -- everything from birthday parties to the demolition of historic buildings, so that future generations would not forget the world of their forebears. It was a world he loved....
"Eventually, Thomason restored
and printed the 175 photographs you will find in this book. His sensitive
and thorough approach to this remarkable collection is evident in the essays
which precede the photos. They detail not only the technical material,
but also Hightower's life and times, and the human and economic changes
in Barbour County during this period."
In The Southern Quarterly, Robert E. Snyder writes that "in the absence of any written records, Thomason utilized oral interviews to reconstruct Hightower's life and mind, and filled in and fleshed out information on photographs through people who came in to identify them. The 175 negatives, which Michael Thomason restored and printed, are as much a testimony to Hightower's sense of history and conception of photography as to the author's expertise in reclaiming the legacy behind the lens and relating it to what stood in front of the camera." Mark C. McDonald, director of the Historic Savannah Foundation in Georgia, wrote in the Mobile Register that "it is no accident that book preserves this sense of reverence. Dr. Thomason is director of the USA Archives and as such brought considerable expertise to the Hightower task in his understanding of Alabama history, of the history and aesthetics of photography, and of its technical aspects....Hightower's images, combined with Dr. Thomason's commentary, make it an indispensable addition to any library on the South and its people."