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University of South Alabama Department of History News

Department Newsletter Fall 2024

Newsletter Archives

History Department well represented at South Alabama Regional History Day

In February 2025, the Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS) hosted the South Alabama Regional History Day with over 300 participants competing to take their project to the state competition in Montgomery and, ultimately, to Washington, DC for the national competition. History Day is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and in Alabama, by the Alabama Humanities Alliance. Drs. David Messenger, Michele Strong and Rebecca Williams all served as judges, as did adjunct faculty member Bill Barton and graduate students Jon Gutknecht and Liam Jones. Below is a photo of Drs. Williams and Messenger with Tyler Macon of Davidson High School, who won in the senior category for individual documentary film. 

Williams, Messenger, Macon

History Department Internships Program Renewed 

June 2024 A team at the University of South Alabama led by the Department of History and Chair Dr. David Messenger, the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Honors College, received a renewal for its Delta Fellows program from the Jean O’Connor-Snyder Internship Program at the David Mathews Center for Civic Life in Montevallo, AL. This program involves a class on local African American history and oral history in spring 2025, and then an eight week internship in summer 2025 for four students working in their community on the history of the city of Mobile, primarily in the former Down the Bay neighborhood.  This is the fifth time the Department of History had been a holder of this grant. 

Urban Wins Another Grant

June 2024 Dr. Kelly Urban has been awarded a Faculty Development Council Grant of $5000 from the  University of South Alabama's Office of Research and Economic Development. She will use this grant to work on researching her second books on tropical medicine in Cuba from 1930 to the present. This is her seventh grant from the University for her research, and her second from the Faculty Council. 

Congratulations, Dr. Urban!

Messenger Wins External Grant

May 2024 Professor and Chair Dr. David Messenger won a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society that funds research in Alicante, Spain on his book project involving civil defense and the construction of bomb shelters in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Urban Publishes First Book

March 2023 Congratulations to University of South Alabama Department of History assistant professor Dr. Kelly Urban, whose first book, Radical Prescription: Citizenship and the Politics of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Cuba, has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. Click here for more information: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469673080/radical-prescription/

Meola Publishes First Book

MArch 2023 Congratulations to University of South Alabama Department of History associate professor Dr. David Meola, whose first book, We Will Never Yield: Jews, the German Press and the Fight for Inclusion in the 1840s, has been published by Indiana University Press. Click here for more information:  https://iupress.org/9780253065223/we-will-never-yield/

Cage Publishes New Book

September 2022 Congratulations to University of South Alabama Department of History professor Dr. Claire Cage, whose second book, The Science of Proof: Forensic Medicine in Modern France, has been published by Cambridge University Press.
Click here for more information: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/science-of-proof/769EFA62E2C8A00D2342299AB9BCA66A

Recent History Department Faculty Publications