Member News
Appointments
and Promotions
Retirements and Resignations
Academy Publications
Awards, Grants, Honors, and Leaves
Highlights:
Second Pulitzer Nomination for Ted Steinberg
Jeffrey Kimball and William Burr on Nixon
Appointments and Promotions
University of Akron
Constance Brittain Bouchard was promoted to Distinguished Professor (summer 2002).
Bowling Green State University
Rachel Buff was promoted to Associate Professor.
Apollos Nwauwa was promoted to Associate Professor.
Case Western Reserve University
Molly Berger was appointed Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, beginning January 1, 2002. She presented “What the Astors and the Vanderbilts Have in Common Besides Money: Public and Private Luxury in the Late Nineteenth Century” to the History Associates of Case Western Reserve University, April 10, 2002, and “Naming the Landscape: Rich Men and Their Buildings in Gilded Age New York” at the 29th symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) in Granada, Spain, June 25, 2002. She continues to serve on the Advisory Board for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and the National Museum of American History and as co-chair of WITH, Women in Technology History, a special interest group in the Society for the History of Technology.
Susan Schmidt Horning shifted from graduate student to faculty member. Horning successfully defended her dissertation in May, received her Ph.D. in August, and has joined the Department as part-time Lecturer for the 2002/2003 academic year. Her article “From Polka to Punk” appeared in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, edited by Hans-Joachim Braun, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002. Horning gave a paper, “Creativity in the Trading Zone: Sound Recording as Collaboration,” at the International Committee for the History of Technology 29th Symposium in Granada, Spain, in August, where she also performed with the jazz group, E-Mail Special. She has been invited to participate in the “Sound Matters: New Technology and Music” International Workshop at the Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands, in November, where she will discuss her paper, “Engineering the Performance: Recording Engineers, Tacit Knowledge and the Art of Controlling Sound.” Horning is serving her second year on the ICOHTEC Program Committee.
Gillian Weiss was appointed Assistant Professor to fill the vacancy left by Michael Altschul, retiring Professor of Medieval and Early Modern European history. She has recently completed a short article entitled “Humble Petitioners and Able Contractors: French Women as Intermediaries in the Redemption of Captives,” which will be included in a collection published by the École Française de Rome.
Miami University
Wietse de Boer will join the faculty at Miami University as Associate Professor, beginning in August 2003. Dr. de Boer’s field is Early Modern Europe. The research for his book, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001), was funded by the Villa I Tatti Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the book subsequently won the Howard R. Marraro Prize. This year he won two grants, the Rome Prize and the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, for his current project entitled The Education of the Senses: Theories and Practices of Perception in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. He received his Ph.D. from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and he has been a member of the faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis since 1994.
Osaak Olumwullah was promoted to associate professor.
Robert Thurston is the new director of graduate studies.
University of Toledo
William H. Longton, Department Chair, will retire from the university this June.
University of Akron
Constance Brittain Bouchard, “Every Valley Shall Be Exalted”: The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2003).
Bowling Green State University
Liette Gidlow, “Delegitimizing Democracy: ‘Civic Slackers,’ the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of U.S. Political History,” Journal of American History (Dec. 2002); “Remembering Willie Wirehand: Coming to Terms with Consumer Culture in the Twentieth-Century U.S.,” appeared in Reviews in American History.
Beth Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (Yale University Press, 2002); “Image of a Churchman-Resister: Bishop von Galen, the Euthanasia Project and the Sermons of Summer 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History (2001); “A Pure Conscience is Good Enough: Bishop von Galen and Resistance to Nazism,” appeared in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Macks, eds., In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2001).
Walter Grunden, “Voina i nauka v Yaponii [Science and War in Japan],” Naukovedenie 3 (2001),189-201.
Peter Way, “Soldiers of Misfortune: New England Regulars and the Fall of Oswego, 1755-56,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 3 (2001), 49-88.
Case Western Reserve University
John G. Grabowski delivered a paper, “A question of identity: Turkish Immigrants, Then and Now” at the seventh international cultural studies symposium at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey. He reprised that paper at a special presentation at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. That presentation was covered by the Turkish media, and he ended up in the “Hurriyet” newspaper, on the MSNBC Turkey website, and on Turkish television. That exposure has greatly accelerated his work on early (1900-1921) Turkish immigration to the United States. A colleague in Turkey, Sedat Isci, and Dr. Grabowski have received over 300 contacts from the descendants of early immigrants. Most of the immigrants returned to Turkey, so these contacts come from their children and grandchildren in Turkey. His article “Republican Perceptions: Time and the Gulcemal” has been published in the Turkish Foreign Relations Yearbook. He and his wife Diane (a graduate of the department) have completed the book Cleveland: Then and Now. It was published by Thunder Bay Press in January 2003. As of October 1 he will also be serving as Interim Director of the Library of the Western Reserve Historical Society. He has been filmed as an expert “talking head” on a national documentary concerning the rivers of America (he was interviewed about the Cuyahoga) and on a new documentary being produced for the bicentennial of the state of Ohio. Both films are produced by Florentine, Ken Burns’s production company.
David Hammack published “Nonprofit Organizations in American History: Research Opportunities and Sources,” The American Behavioral Scientist (Vol. 45, No. 11, July 2002, pp. 1638-1674); this paper was initially presented to a Conference on Data Resources and Research Opportunities in Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector, Social Science Research Council, Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 2001. He also published “Philanthropy und öffentliche Einrichtungen in amerikanishchen Grosstädten 1800-2000,” in “Zwischen Markt und Staat: Stifter und Stiftungun im transatlantischen Vergleich,” edited by Thomas Adam and James Retallack, in Comparativ: Leipziger Beitrage zur Universalgeshichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung (Leipziger Universitätsverlag) 11:5/6, 2001, pp. 160-190. He has been appointed to the Committee on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector of the Social Science Research Council and also gave a paper at the meeting of the International Society for Third Sector Research in Cape Town, South Africa, in July.
Elisabeth Köll’s article “Factories in the Countryside: The Industrial Workforce and Social Division in Nantong County, 1895-1937” was published in the volume Town and Country in China: Identity and Perception, edited by David Faure and Tao Tao Liu (pp. 107-25, Macmillan, 2002). She was a nominee for the 2002 Carl F. Wittke Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and has been appointed director of the Asian studies program as of July 1. Elisabeth has also been elected vice-president and president-elect of the Historical Society for 20th Century China, an organization affiliated with the Association of Asian Studies and the American Historical Association. With the help of a W. P. Jones Faculty Development Grant she was able to continue her research on the social history of the Chinese railway in Shandong province and Shanghai this summer. In August she presented the paper “Negotiating Family and Corporate Interests during War and Occupation: The Transformation of the Dasheng Enterprise from the 1920s to the 1950s” at the International Chinese Business History Conference, organized by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Kenneth Ledford published “Codification and Normativity: Catalan ‘Exception’ and European ‘Norm’.” Law and History Review 20 (2002): 385-92 and served as a panel commentator for “Citizenship in Comparative Perspective,” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History, San Diego, November 7-10, 2002. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Law and History Review, continuing a role he has filled since 1996 and also will be serving in 2003 another year as a member of the Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History. He is the Undergraduate Advisor for the Department of History as well as an instructor in the new SAGES Program, 2002-05.
Renée Sentille’s book, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity, is due out in April 2003 from Cambridge University Press. This past summer she was asked by the Journal of Women’s History to comment on the future of American women’s history; that essay will appear in the spring issue. She served as the commentator on a panel on Native American history at the American Studies Association conference in November 2002. As Director of American Studies, she is busy on the paperwork to put through changes to the curriculum. She also received a Glennan to create a course called Advanced Topics in American Women’s History, with the first topic focusing on Women and Medicine, and will be offering that class in the spring of 2004.
University of Dayton
Erving E. Beauregard published the following articles: “In Defense of President Harding’s Supreme Court Appointees,” The Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.3; “Matthew Simpson: Bishop and Patriot,” Journal of the Alleghenies, Vol. 38; “Thomas E. Cramblet and Wilbur H. Cramblet: Bulwarks of Bethany College,” Upper Ohio Valley Historical Review, Vol. 25.
Miami University
P. Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan, Routledge, 2002.
Osaak A. Olumwullah, Dis-ease in the Colonial State: Medicine, Society, and Social Change Among the AbaNyole of Western Kenya, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002.
University of Toledo
Larry D. Wilcox, “‘Shadows of a Distant Nightmare’: Visualizing the Unimaginable in Early Documentary Films,” in John Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future 2000: The Holocaust in the Age of Genocide (2000). Wilcox also served as guest editor and wrote the introductions for the two 2002 focus issues of the journal Film and History titled The Holocaust on Film.
Awards, Grants, Honors and Leaves
University of Akron
Constance Brittain Bouchard was awarded a year-long Membership (2002-2003) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Case Western Reserve University
Kenneth Ledford received the Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award from the Undergraduate Student Government, CWRU, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, 2002, as well as a Senior Faculty Fellowship from the College of Arts & Sciences, CWRU, spring 2002.
Miriam Levin spent the spring semester as an Associate of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, and as Visiting Professor at the University Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, France. She was also invited Maria Goeppert Mayer Professor at the University of Gottingen, where she lectured on “Women and the Vocation of Science” and participated in a seminar on women studies programs in the United States and Europe. In March she co-organized an NSF sponsored workshop at MIT on “Reconsidering Technology in the Aftermath of September 11th.” A selection of essays from the workshop will be published later this year in the journal History and Technology. Her article “Museums and the Democratic Order” appeared in the winter 2002 issue of the Wilson Quarterly.
Carroll Pursell was on sabbatical during the fall semester of 2001, making some headway on his history of the rise and fall of the Appropriate Technology Movement. He has also been editing drafts of the essays contributed to his forthcoming book, The Blackwell Companion to American Technology. In the spring he gave a talk at the University of Texas (Austin) as part of a new program in Sustainability and took part in a workshop on African-Americans and technology at M.I.T. Meanwhile, he continues as Chair of the Department.
Jonathan Sadowsky gave invited papers this year at the Richardson Seminar in the History of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, the conference “The Politics of Racial Health” at Rutgers University, and the annual conference of the Society for the History of the Behavioral Sciences.
Angela Woollacott was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in November and December 2001, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, May to August 2002. She will complete her three-year term as Program Chair for the North American Conference on British Studies, with the NACBS/SCBS Conference to be held in Baltimore November 8-10, 2002.
Miami University
P. Renée Baernstein is on leave for 2002-2003 for research in Italy.
Curt Ellison is acting director of the McGuffey Museum.
Peggy Shaffer, Mary Cayton and Curt Ellison won both the Research Challenge Program Grant (for the Miami University Heritage Tourism Project) and an NEH curricular grant (“Diversity, Identity and Public Culture. Rethinking the American Studies Curriculum”).
Allan M. Winkler has received grants from the university’s Hampton Fund for Faculty International Initiatives and the Dolibois Faculty Development Fund to take students in his senior capstone course, “Vietnam: War and Society,” on a study tour of Vietnam in Spring 2003.
Second Pulitzer Nomination
for Ted Steinberg
By Gregory Bodwell
Oxford University Press has entered Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, by Ted Steinberg, in the 2003 competition for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Steinberg, Professor of History, Case Western University, received a nomination for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction for Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster.
According to William Cronon, pioneer in environmental history, Steinberg’s new book “changes the way we think not just about our past, but our future as well.” Cronon lauds the work as “a bold new critical synthesis of American environmental history, the most ambitious that any scholar has attempted since the founding of the field more than a century ago.” Publishers Weekly observes that the book “makes a strong case” for its two major themes. “The first is that the ecological balance is precarious and can be undermined, even completely destroyed, by unintended changes that flow from the smallest of events. The second is that the capitalist impulse to treat everything within its horizon as a commodity, and the corollary compulsion to assign a dollar value to every commodity, is fundamentally at odds with the existence of the diverse and healthy ecosystems that existed prior to the country’s settlement.” The work also emphasizes nature’s reciprocal impact on American history, providing over one hundred such examples. Steinberg is also the author of Slide Mountain, or the Folly of Owning Nature, and Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England. This year, Steinberg also published “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History” in the American Historical Review (June 2002). The essay was the subject of a moderated on-line discussion hosted by the AHR in September 2002.
Jeffrey Kimball and William Burr on Nixon
An article published by Miami University historian Jeffrey Kimball and William Burr, a National Security Archive senior analyst, on a 1969 worldwide secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon has received national and international attention. Their article appears in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. A longer, fully documented version appears in the journal Cold War History, published in the United Kingdom. The results of their historical sleuthing have been picked up by such media outlets as the New York Times,Washingon Post, Associated Press, CNN, ABC, NBC, and Agence France Presse.
President Nixon ordered the secret nuclear alert in October 1969, calling his wartime tactic a “madmanstrategy” aimed at “jarring” the Soviets into pressuring North Vietnam to make concessions. Nixon wanted the global military measures to be detectable, but not alarming to the Soviets. If Soviet leaders noticed the measures, they may have seen it as a bluff or they did not want to acknowledge it. Moscow made no change in its Vietnam policy.
Piecing together documentary evidence from recently declassified files of Nixon’s National Security Council, the authors were able to prove that the nuclear alert was connected to Nixon’s Vietnam policy. Known to White House insiders as the “Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test,” the purpose of the nuclear alert was kept secret even from the generals implementing the military exercise, according to memos revealed by Kimball and Burr. Kimball is a specialist in the Nixon presidency and is author of the award-winning Nixon’s Vietnam War (1998).
For more information and sample documents, go to the National Security Archive site. For the article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, click here.