Spring
Nominations
Nominees
for OAH Executive Council
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Outstanding Publication Award
Public History Award
Nominees for OAH Executive Council
President
Tom Taylor
—New Position—
Representative for Secondary SchoolsAt the April 2003 Academy meeting, the Academy will consider an amendment proposed by the Executive Council to include a representative for secondary school teachers on the Council. If the amendment is adopted, the Nominating Committee will recommend two nominees for that position to be voted on at the meeting.
Secretary Treasurer Mary Ann Heiss Newsletter Editor Anne Kugler Representative
from a CollegeDavid Hogan
Carol LasserRepresentative
from a UniversityDonald Ramos
One Nomination Pending
Thomas T. Taylor has been a member of the faculty at Wittenberg University since 1988, where he is a Professor of History and a past department chair and past faculty development administrator. He received his B.A. and M.A. from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1976, 1978), and his Ph.D. in American Intellectual History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1988). He teaches courses in early American, legal, film, and religious history, and is currently the presiding officer for Wittenberg faculty meetings. Recipient of the Wittenberg ODK Teaching Excellence Award (1991) and the Ohio Academy of History’s Outstanding Teaching Award (2001), he has served as the Academy’s Secretary-Treasurer since 2000. His most recent publication is on law in colonial America, and he currently is engaged in two restoration projects in Springfield, Ohio, the Westcott House (a 1908 Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style house), and the Gammon House (one of Ohio’s few standing African American owned underground railroad houses).
Mary Ann Heiss, a specialist in the history of U.S. foreign relations, began teaching at Kent State University in 1992 and currently holds the rank of Associate Professor. Her publications include Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954 (Columbia University Press, 1997), two co-edited books, and a number of journal articles and book chapters. She chaired the Academy’s Outstanding Publication Committee in 2000 and this year’s Program Committee.
Anne Kugler is a specialist in early modern English history with research interests in gender, culture, politics and religion in the early eighteenth century. Her monograph 'Errant Plagiary': The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper (1644–1720) just came out this year from Stanford University Press, and she has published on aging and marriage as well. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Anne taught for three years at Loyola College in Baltimore before returning to the Midwest to teach English, French, and women's history at John Carroll University.
David Hogan is Associate Professor at Heidelberg College, specializing in U.S. Social History. Hogan did his graduate work at SUNY Binghamton and Carnegie Mellon. He taught for two years at Rogers State College in Claremore, Oklahoma, before coming to Heidelberg thirteen years ago. Hogan studies various topics in modern United States history, ranging from education to food to crime. In 1997, he published Selling’em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food. Hogan lives in Marion.
Carol Lasser, Professor of History at Oberlin College, received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She teaches American history, particularly in the areas of antislavery, 19th century and women’s history. Co-editor of Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell and numerous other articles, reviews, and web publications, she is also co-editor of the JAH section on “Textbooks and Teaching.” She is involved in several Department of Education “Teaching American History” grants and is involved in outreach to high school teachers. Her current project investigates the history of African American opportunity in the city of Oberlin.
Donald Ramos is a Professor of History at Cleveland State University and served as department chair for eight years. His field of specialization is the social and cultural history of Brazil. He has published extensively here as well as in Brazil and Portugal and is currently working on a history of popular religion in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. He has been involved in social studies education for years and is committed to improving history education in the schools and the training of teachers. He also helped design the Social History and the City Program at CSU and has been the editor of its e-journal, Crooked River. He is currently a member of the OAH Standards Committee. A copy of his full c.v. is available at http://academic.csuohio.edu/dramos.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Andrew Scott Brake (University of Toledo), “Man in the Middle: The Reform and Influence of Henry Benjamin Whipple, The First Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota”
Henry Benjamin Whipple served as the First Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota from 1859 until his death in 1901. Not only did he oversee the yearly trials and successes of the diocese of Minnesota but he also became an active advocate for Indian policy reform. Whipple’s role in Indian policy reform, rather than generating the process of cultural genocide for the Dakota and Chippewa peoples of Minnesota as some have claimed, actually worked for their survival and the salvaging of what land claims they could from the advancing American population. This dissertation re-evaluates the life of Henry Benjamin Whipple using his sermons, his letters, and Dakota and Chippewa letters to illuminate the contribution of an obscure figure to the story of American religious and Indian history.
Brian Craig Etheridge (The Ohio State University), “Window and Wall: Berlin, the Third Reich, and the German Question in the United States, 1933-1999”
This dissertation examines representations of Germans during and after the Cold War. More specifically, it explores how during this period the American cultural landscape was populated by several mass media “sites of memory,” places where collective memories and understandings of Germans in the United States were revealed, constituted, and contested. It investigates how American and German actors, both public and private, attempted to create, promote, manipulate and suppress certain representations. It uses the notion of “interpretative communities” to organize and discuss the various responses to these images. Two main narratives are featured: a World War II narrative symbolized primarily by the Third Reich and the Holocaust, which portrayed the Germans as unreconstructed Nazis still bent on world conquest; and a Cold War narrative, represented primarily by the symbol of Berlin, which depicted the Germans as brave democrats dedicated to the defense of the West. This dissertation examines how these two different narratives competed for dominance and how they fared in light of different international and domestic contexts.
Susan Kathleen Freeman (The Ohio State University), “Making Sense of Sex: Adolescent Girls and Sex Education in the United States, 1940-1960”
Contrary to the notion that traditional gender roles and conservative sexual norms predominated in the post-World II United States, this dissertation argues that public school sex education in the 1940s and 1950s challenged gender and sexual conformity. In the era preceding the second wave of feminism, teachers and students collaborated on efforts to develop personal preferences, eliminate the sexual double standard, and dismantle patriarchal relationship. This study points to an unrecognized continuity between the ideas and practices of the 1940s and the 1950s and those of consciousness-raising groups and other elements of the women’s movement of the late 1960 and 1970s. Along with other recent scholarship that has explored the roots of the sexual revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, this dissertation demonstrates how a mainstream institution - public education - fostered shifts in youth’s attitudes and belief systems, prefiguring more dramatic social change in the l960s.
Susan Schmidt Horningz(Case Western Reserve University), “Chasing Sound: The Culture of Technology of Recording Studios in America, 1877-1977”
This dissertation traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from 1877 to 1977. Technologically, it covers three important revolutions in recording methods, a transition from acoustical to electrical recording in 1925, from disk recording to magnetic tape in 1948, and the subsequent increase in technological complexity through multi-track recording. Culturally it traces that the evolution of musical styles in response to, and as a force in, the growth of recording technology. It details how the earliest efforts to capture the sound of the live performance led ultimately, as a result of reliance on technology in the creation as well as reception of sound, to the creation of recordings that had no live performance.
Jason C. Hribal (University of Toledo), “Animals are Part of the Working Class: Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance in the Atlantic World”
This dissertation is a history of animals in the early modern/modern Atlantic World. It examines the commons, the elite enclosure movements and the resistance to the impositions of private property and of labor in England, Ireland, Scotland, and colonial America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The dissertation describes the enclosure of those commons, and how that development created a working class among animals. Its theses are: first, animals were more free in societies which shared and worked the land in common. Second, they contested their expropriation and their exploitation. Third, with the destruction of the Commons and the birth of industry, animals became a part of the working class. And forth, there existed between the 1640s and 1790s a series of historically linked, Anglo-phone writers who directly challenged and sought to redefine the supposition that humans and non-humans are separate, distinct species and therefore deserved different treatment and rights.
James B. MacGregor (University of Cincinnati), “Salue Martir Spes Anglorum: English Devotion to Saint George in the Middle Ages”
Since the seventeenth century, English antiquarians, scholars and popular authors have sought to explain why Saint George became the patron of England. Unfortunately, the majority of these works have concerned themselves so thoroughly with documenting the development of the saint as the symbol of the nation that they have forgotten or ignored the fact that medieval people venerated Saint George as a martyr. In short, these works have ignored Saint George’s place within the context of medieval piety - the very context out of which the political and patriotic symbol of the nation emerged. This study examines the history of the cult of Saint George in England with special emphasis on the manner in which English men and women venerated and prayed to Saint George. The result of this new analysis is a picture of medieval piety that clearly identifies Saint George as a personal intercessor.
Clinton W. Terry (University of Cincinnati), “‘The Most Commercial of People’: Cincinnati, the Civil War, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1861-1865”
This study examines the impact of the Civil War on the rise of industrial capitalism in Cincinnati, Ohio. In an era of laissez faire capitalism, Cincinnati merchants developed economic institutions fitting their circumstances, the most important of which was the Chamber of Commerce and Merchant Exchange, which controlled much of the city’s trade. Although manufacturing had been important throughout the city’s short history, merchants, especially those who were involved in Southern trade, dominated the local economy. The Civil War undermined the mercantile basis of the local economy. The end of the Southern trade threw the city into a severe financial panic to which the mercantile community responded initially with their traditional notions of free trade, private capital, small government and peace. Within months, however, it became clear to the mercantile elite that prosperity would return only if they abandoned their traditional notions of political economy and alignment of their local self-interest with that of the federal government. The Chamber quickly wedded itself to the Republican economic program of protected trade, organized capital, free labor, and preservation of the union. In so doing The Chamber of Commerce helped to elevate manufacturing to dominance in the economic prosperity of the city.
Sonja P. Wentling (Kent State University), “Ambivalence and Ambiguity: The Hoover Administration and American Zionism”
The special relationship between the United States and Israel has been a political reality for over fifty years and a longstanding grievance of Arab leaders against what they see as a biased and unbalanced policy in the Middle East. Yet prior to the state of Israel’s creation in 1948, when Great Britain was in charge of the Palestine mandate, Zionism and its political objective of a Jewish state found little resonance among either the U. S. Government or American Jews. This triangular relationship among the U. S. Government, Zionism, and American Jews was plagued by ambivalence and ambiguity. That ambivalence and ambiguity were a consequence of the United State’s desire to effect a rapprochement and to secure naval disarmament with England. While an abundance of literature has been produced on the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt comparatively little has been written on the Hoover administration and its record on Zionism and American Jews. This dissertation attempts to disentangle the complex web of domestic and international factors that shaped the relationship between the Hoover Administration and American Zionism that led to reluctant U.S. government support of the fledgling Jewish venture in Palestine.
Abby Gail Goodnite and Ivan M. Tribe (University of Rio Grande), Rio Grande: From Baptists and Bevo to the Bell Tower, 1876-2001 (Ashland, Kentucky: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2002). A history of the college, its community and the individuals who contributed to it.
Beth Griech-Polelle (Bowling Green State University), Bishop Von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Clemens August Graf Von Galen was Bishop of Munster from 1933 until 1946, and has been portrayed as a resister of Nazism. This study interrogates that reputation, and offers a revisionist interpretation that sees him as moving between resistance and complicity.
Stephen L. Harp (University of Akron), Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Straddling the usually separate fields of business history and cultural history, this study of the large French tire company uses the history of Michelin to explore such diverse topics as the Belle Epoque, World War I, pronatalism, modernity, Taylorism and tourism.
Mitchell B. Lerner (Ohio State University, Newark), The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002). Using recently declassified documents from the Johnson Administration, this study presents the story of the Cold War crisis surrounding the 1968 capture by North Korea of the USS Pueblo.
Jerome Mushkat (ed.) (University of Akron), A Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War: The Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). An edited collection of the letters home to his wife, from 1861 to 1865, of a former Ohio legislator and “citizen-soldier” who was strongly anti-slavery.
Tammy M. Proctor (Wittenberg University), On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002). A social history of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides movements in Britain particularly in the interwar decades, this study considers the meanings of these massive youth organizations for the participants as well as for British national and imperial culture.
Isolde Thyret (Kent State University), Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). A study of the images and authority of royal women in medieval Russia, this book draws on religious iconography and other cultural forms to explore the role of the wives of Tsars and women’s claims to royal power.
Freedom Bound for the Lambert Lands
The Project commemorated the lives of thirty ex-slaves, who, freed by their master, migrated to Gallia County, Ohio, in the 1840s and established a communal settlement known as the Lambert Lands. The centerpiece of the project was a monument that summarized the story of the settlers and listed the names of the original Lambert Lands settlers. The project was organized by the Lambert Lands Preservation Society, a committee of the Gallia County Historical/Genealogical Society, located in Gallipolis, Ohio.
Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook
This project brought together historical documents and artifacts from more than three hundred libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies across the state into one website. The included items date from pre-history to 1903 and included letters, diaries, photographs, clothing, furniture, pre-historic artifacts, and government records. The project was the work of the Ohio Historical Society in partnership with several state-wide library and historical organizations.
Reading Our Past: Readers Theater / East Liverpool Pottery Convention 2002: Celebrating Harker Pottery
This project documented the lives of upper Ohio Valley residents, particularly those involved with the pottery industry, through the collection of oral histories. Selections of these oral histories were made available to public audiences through the presentation of a readers theater and the production of a video based on a selection of the oral histories. The project resulted from the collaboration of Kent State University, East Liverpool, the East Liverpool Historical Society, and Phoenix Studios.
River Voices: A Documentary Film on the 1937 Ohio River Flood
This project focused on Portsmouth, Ohio, during the 1937 flood. The film placed the city in the context of the Ohio Valley and the widespread devastation of the 1937 flood. Using still imagery, motion picture film (including newly discovered color footage), and oral history interviews, the film tells the story of how the flood effected the lives of ordinary Portsmouth residents. The project was produced by Shawnee State University.
Rio Grande: From Baptists and Bevo to the Bell
Tower, 1876-2001This book is the first authoritative history of the University of Rio Grande in over sixty years. The goal of authors Abby Gail Goodnite and Ivan M. Tribe was to produce a volume that appealed to alumni, general readers, and a scholarly audience. The authors place Rio Grande in the context of the town, region, state, and nation. The book is based on extensive research in primary sources and is illustrated with photographs. The work was produced by the University of Rio Grande and published by the Jesse Stuart Foundation.
Walking Tour of the Uptown Oxford Historic District
This booklet guides the walking reader through one the three historic districts in Oxford, Ohio. Entries are focused on pre-World War II buildings, describing how structures were used or who lived there. Architectural style is also noted. The work is based on research in a variety of primary sources. It is noteworthy for the use period photographs of numerous buildings. The tour booklet resulted from a partnership between the Oxford Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Smith Library of Regional History.