Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, July, 2009-present.
Area of Research: Native American history, Southern history, 19th and 20th century U.S. History
Education: Ph.D., History, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, May, 2005.
Dissertation: "Native American Identity in the Segregated South: The Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, 1872-1956."
Major Publications: Lowery is the author of Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, March 2010. Lowery is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Telling Our Own Stories: Writing Lumbee History In the Shadow of the BAR," American Indian Quarterly 33 (Fall 2009): 499-522; "Indians, Southerners, and Americans: Race, Tribe, and Nation During Jim Crow," James A. Hutchins Lecture at UNC- Chapel Hill, 26 February 2009, Native South 2 (2009): 1-22; "Practicing Sovereignty: Lumbee Identity, Tribal Factionalism, and Federal Recognition, 1932-1934." Foundations of First Peoples' Sovereignty: History, Culture and Education. Edited by Ulrike Wiethaus. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 57-95; "Finding Wisdom in Places: Lumbee Family History." Indigenous Diasporas: Unsettling Western Fixations. Edited by Graham Harvey and Charles D. Thompson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2005. 153-68; "People and Place: Croatan Indians in Jim Crow Georgia, 1890-1920." American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 21 (Spring 2005): 37-64; "Making Christianity Sing: The Origins and Experience of Lumbee Indian and African-American Church Music." Confounding the Color Line: Indian-Black Relations in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Edited by James Brooks. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 321-45; "Indians Got Rhythm, Too: Lumbee Indian and African-American Church Music." North Dakota Quarterly 67 (Summer/Fall 2000): 72-91; "The Cowboys Always Win: The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934." History in Dispute, Vol. III: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress. Edited by Robert J. Allison. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 142-6.
Filmography: Co-Producer, In the Light of Reverence - Video, 73 minutes (2001) National Broadcast: P.O.V., Public Broadcasting Service, August 14, 2001: Awarded Henry Hampton Award for Social Change Documentary; Best Documentary Feature, American Indian Film Festival; Eagle Award, Taos Talking Picture Film Festival; CINE Golden Eagle; Jury Award, MountainFilm
Producer/Director/Editor, Sounds of Faith - Video, 14 minutes (1997): Screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Smithsonian Institution, New York Native American Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival
Producer/Director/Editor, Real Indian - 16mm, 7 minutes (1996): Awarded Best Short Documentary, South by Southwest Film Festival; Best Indian-Produced Short Documentary, Red Earth Film Festival. Screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival
Awards: Lowery is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Center for Public Service Engaged Faculty Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill, for over two years to incorporate community engagement into scholarship;
Uelstchi Service-Learning Course Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, for over three years for Lumbee History course;
Junior Faculty Research Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, Spring 2010;
Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant, Center for Faculty Excellence, UNC-Chapel Hill, Digitization of Southern Historical Association Documents, Fall 2009;
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2008-2009;
Role Model of the Year, Native Americans at Harvard College, April, 2007;
Stanford University Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame Inductee, 2006;
Clark Fund Research Award, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2006;
Ford Foundation, Dissertation Fellowship, 2004-2005;
Archie K. Davis Fellowship, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina, January-May, 2004;
Johnson Center for Undergraduate Excellence Intellectual Life Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2002;
Southern Research Circle Summer Stipend, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, May 2001;
Rockefeller Foundation, Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, 2001-2002;
Royster Society Fellowship, The Graduate School, University of North Carolina, 2000-2005;
Multicultural Producer Scholarship, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1998-1999;
Native Initiative Fellowship, Sundance Institute, 1998;
Folklife Documentary Grant, North Carolina Arts Council, 1997;
Younger Scholar Summer Research Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1994;
Research Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1993.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, Harvard University. July, 2005-June, 2009;
Adjunct Faculty, Department of History, North Carolina State University. January-May 2005;
Adjunct Faculty, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. January-May 2002;
Lecturer, Department of American Indian Studies, San Francisco State University. January 1997-December 1998.
Lowery has a master's degree in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University and has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning "In the Light of Reverence" (2001), which showed on PBS in 2001 to over three million people. Her two previous films, "Real Indian" (1996) and "Sounds of Faith (1997)," both concern Lumbee identity and culture.

Personal Anecdote

LUMBEE INDIANS IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH has been living with me for over fifteen years, since I first wrote my undergraduate thesis on Henry Berry Lowrie, an important Recomstruction-era figure in Lumbee history. After that I took a big break from history to become a documentary film producer, but film only intensified my desires to use academic history as a storytelling medium that transcends the boundaries between the academy and the community. When I went back to get my PhD, I remained involved in documentary film, became a part-time theater producer, and began to think visually about historical storytelling, both in terms of narrative as well as argument. Oral tradition and artistic production, of course, has always been a tremendous part of Lumbee culture, so I could not ignore that, especially since I was writing about a relatively recent time period and many people who remember the people and events are still living. There were also plenty of compelling photographs, taken by both insiders and outsiders, that prompted fundamental questions about the documentary record. As I revised my dissertation into a book, I felt comfortable taking a few risks with voice and images to explicate questions of interest to academic historians but also to animate the narrative and give readers an insider look at the Lumbees.

I am extremely grateful to all my mentors, in filmmaking, in graduate school, at UNC Press, and at the First Peoples/New Directions publishing initiative for encouraging me on this path. But I have to give my greatest thanks to my family. Like my sister says, "the woman who taught me to read is a dangerous woman!" My mother, an English professor who taught everything from freshman composition to advanced grammar to world lit, taught me to read and remains my first and best writing teacher. My father, political radical in his own way (he would say "because I didn't know any better"), has always nurtured my iconoclastic tendencies while giving me a hefty dose of "respect your elders" training. Finally, my husband is a brilliant Lumbee musician and artist who lacks a formal education. He is not only a moral compass in my responsibilities to my community, but he gives me vital inspiration every day. He once said something which has become a kind of mantra for me in explaining Native attitudes towards history. A student interviewing him asked, "how did you learn Lumbee history?" He simply said, "I lived it."

The relevance of history to contemporary life is immediately obvious in the Lumbee case, since the categories of knowledge scholars have used to describe us have often been inadequate at best, and damaging at worst. For example, our 122-year struggle for federal recognition, and the political factionalism it has engendered, has been one of the layers of our identity but it is not the only facet of it. Some believe (and many scholars promote this idea) that Lumbee recognition is a struggle for identity, as if we don't know or don't understand our identities as an Indigenous People. This argument stems from a recognition of the several times our People have been subject to legislation which alters our tribal name. My book argues that this legislation, and the whole debate about the definition of "Indian," was motivated by the prerogatives of white supremacy and Indians' ambivalent relationship to it. But scholars (and more importantly, policy makers) have not looked to this explanation of the name changes, instead selectively revising our history to then justify our exclusion from the ranks of tribes who have government- to-government relationships with the United States. The Lumbee struggle is not for identity, but for sovereignty.

Another question about Lumbee history consistently involves our "origins." This is the question I get most often from the general public, and it also sums up the doubt expressed by anti-Indian interests in Congress and people who comment on websites and create Wikipedia entries on us. The argument goes that we're not real Indians and don't deserve federal recognition because we can't prove descent from a "historic" tribe, or that we don't look "Indian." While my book doesn't delve into this research extensively, it is plain that the Lumbees descend from a kin network of extended families, some of whom have had long-standing attachments to our current homeland in Robeson County, and some of whom migrated there in the 18th century. It is the relationship of people and place, and the development and maintenance of a coherent political and social organization, that makes us real Indians. Of course some of our ancestors are non-Indian; nearly every member of every tribe has non-Indian ancestors; it was a fact of colonization. And if you look at the so-called "historic" tribes (i.e. the ones you've heard of: Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Navajos, Sioux, etc.), each one of them has a time in which they were called something else than what they are called now. To pretend that there is some kind of universal definition of a "historic" tribe against which Lumbees should be measured is to deny that Indian people can legitimately change and that colonization itself happened. It's a notion that hurts all of us as Indigenous people, and one that we can refute--to powerful effect on international Indigenous affairs--if we are all on the same epistemological page.

Quotes

By Malinda Maynor Lowery

"This American nation is home to other Indigenous nations which were formed around different values, strategies, and under different circumstances than the American nation. If we are to understand or define the American people, we must also understand the Native peoples whose nations share the land. For Native history is linked in the most intimate ways with that of America-the land, the people, and the nation. They are linked by kinship, culture, and economy, but also by race, class, gender, and inequality. Whether the inequalities tied to citizenship in the American nation can be rectified depends largely on how we know ourselves and each other. Do we wrestle with categories of knowledge that are different from our own, and assign them equal standing with our own categories? Or do we decide that some categories are more real, truthful, or scientific than others?" -- Malinda Maynor Lowery in "Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation"

About Malinda Maynor Lowery

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, History and American Studies, Indiana University 2009-present.
Area of Research: Identity, race, and the intersection of Native American and Southern history
Education: Ph.D., History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007
Major Publications: Snyder is the author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Snyder is also the author of scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives," Journal of Southern History 73 (2007), 255-288; "The Lady of Cofitachequi: Gender and Political Power among Native Southerners" in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. Joan Johnson, Valinda Littlefield, and Marjorie Spruill. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Snyder is currently working on the book manuscript "The Indian Gentlemen of Choctaw Academy: Status and Sovereignty in Antebellum America." and an upcoming journal article "Andrew Jackson's Indian Son: Native Captives and White Captors."
Awards: Snyder is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Travel Research Grant, IU, 2010;
New Frontiers Exploration Traveling Fellowship, IU, 2010;
Barra/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2007-09;
Sequoyah Fellow, Royster Society of Fellows, The Graduate School, UNC , 2006-07;
Phillips Fellow, American Philosophical Society, 2006;
Wills Fellow, Tennessee Historical Society, 2006;
Filson Fellow, Filson Historical Society, 2004/05;
Summer Research Grant, Center for the Study of the American South, 2004.
Additional Info:
Snyder was the Barra/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Asst. Professor, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2007-2009.

Personal Anecdote

I grew up in Macon, Georgia, a fall-line city carved out of Creek Indian country that became a major cotton depot. My high school was downtown, near a cluster of historic sites: the Cannonball House, so-named because of damage sustained during the Civil War; the 1916 Beaux Arts train station, with its reliquary of extra water foundations and bathrooms and waiting rooms; the home of Sidney Lanier, a poet, novelist, and critic who famously eulogized the Old South; the Douglass Theater which, throughout the Jim Crow era, featured entertainers including local greats like Little Richard and Otis Redding. Every day we passed a memorial of some kind, markers that begged us to consider the legacies of slavery, the Civil War, segregation, or some combination thereof. Substantial physical reminders were all around us, and they forced an ongoing dialog with our history. I doubt that any Maconite would argue that the past is past.

Towering literally over all these historic sites were the Ocmulgee mounds, remnants of a thousand-year-old Native city that had borne silent witness to a much longer scope of Southern history. The tallest mound was built atop a natural plateau, and seemed nearly twice as high as its fifty feet when viewed from the floodplain. When I was about eight years old, I went to summer day-camp there, and I remember trekking around the sweltering, miasmic bottomlands at the base the mounds, wondering about the lives of the chiefs who had lived atop them, including how they had managed without air conditioning. Growing up, this place seemed disjointed from the rest of my historical knowledge: I could connect the dots from the colony's eighteenth-century settlers to the living history museum at the Georgia Agorama, but Ocmulgee seemed an awe-inspiring outlier, a challenge to what I thought I knew about the place I grew up.

That challenge has continued to inspire me. Throughout the course of my education, I discovered, of course, that Ocmulgee is not an outlier. It was an early and particularly grand example of the Native chiefdoms that dominated the region prior to European colonization. The Creek or Muscogee Indians, whose ancestors built the site, carried its name with them to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma; their tribal government meets at Okmulgee in a contemporary building shaped like a mound. Indian Removal expelled the Creeks and many other Native peoples from their homelands, and so, too, did it largely erase them from the region's historical memory. When the cotton curtain descended, it obscured the history of an older South, a messier, less biologically determined one. But, as I wrote in my first book, these two Souths were never really separate, and Native people, like their neighbors, struggled with questions of identity and belonging, and the meaning and significance of race, slavery, and freedom. I'm grateful to all of my teachers, especially my hometown, for showing me the complexity and diversity of American history, for exposing its contested meanings and its enduring relevance to us all.

Quotes

By Christina Snyder

"In a nation passionate about freedom, the standard historical narrative tells us that bondage was an American aberration. Restricted in time and space, slavery characterized the antebellum South, and its victims were African Americans. Captivity, not slavery, belonged to Indian tribes, and they targeted white women. But bondage cannot be so neatly confined. In 1725, near what is now Natchez, Mississippi, Tattooed Serpent's nameless Indian servant died not merely because he was loyal, but because he was a slave. In life, the head servant contributed labor and prestige to his master's household; in death, he confirmed the social order that privileged elites like Tattooed Serpent. Captivity and its most exploitive form-slavery-was indigenous to North America, it was widespread, and it took many forms. From Tattooed Serpent's slave to indentured servants in colonial Philadelphia to Apache women sold in the mission of San Antonio, the unfree were everywhere." -- Christina Snyder in "Slavery in Indian Country The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America"

About Christina Snyder

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia, 2007- present
Area of Research: American political, cultural, and intellectual history
Education: Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, History, 2005
Major Publications: Burns is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press 2009), an intellectual biography of the controversial novelist and philosopher. Based on exclusive access to Rand's personal papers, Goddess of the Market is the only book to draw upon Rand's unedited letters and journals. Burns is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "O Libertarian, Where is Thy Sting?" Journal of Policy History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007: 453-471; "Liberalism and The Conservative Imagination," in Liberalism for a New Century, Eds. Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (University of California Press, 2007); "In Retrospect: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," Reviews in American History, 32 (September 2004): 447-462; "Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement," Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (November 2004): 1-27. Reprinted in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in Twentieth Century America, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Awards: Burns is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, 2010-2013;
University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Fellowship, 2010-2011;
University of Virginia Bankard Fund for Political Economy, 2010-2011, 2009;
University of Virginia Summer Research Grant, 2009;
University of Virginia Excellence in Diversity Fellow, 2008-2009;
University of Virginia Professors as Writers Fellow, 2008-2009;
Campbell National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2007-2008;
National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2007;
James H. Kettner Graduate Prize for best dissertation, 2006, Berkeley History Department;
Library Prize for Undergraduate Research, UC Berkeley. Mentor of prizewinners, 2006 and 2003;
Research Fellow, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, 2006;
Grantee, F.A. Hayek Fund for Scholars, Institute for Humane Studies, 2006, 2007;
University of California, Berkeley, History Department Block Grant Fellowship, 2004, 2000;
University of California, Berkeley, Dean's Competitive Fellowship, 2002;
Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction for excellence in teaching, Harvard University, 2000;

Additional Info:
Burns has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, C-Span’s Book TV, NPR's Weekend America, and Here & Now. She has also contributed articles to Harvard Magazine, Foreign Policy, the Christian Science Monitor, and several academic journals.
Burns has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Columbia Business School, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Rice University, and the Cato Institute.
Jennifer Burns personal website www.jenniferburns.org

Personal Anecdote

In 2006 I was starting my first job as a lecturer at UC Berkeley when the technology office phoned up and asked if I would like to podcast my course "Introduction to United States History Since 1865." I didn't even have an iPod, but I said "yes" without thinking much about it, thus launching the most unexpected and rewarding aspect of my career as a historian. Six months later, my lectures were up on iTunes and had been downloaded nearly 300,000 times. My inbox was bursting with emails from enthusiastic history students around the world. Accustomed to the private sanctuary of my books and my study, I panicked. It felt as though I had lost some cherished measure of privacy, and I wanted the lectures taken down immediately.

But then I paused and began to reflect on my goals and values as a historian. I had spent years of advanced study gathering knowledge - was this now to be shared only with specialists in my field? I had always believed historians should seek a broader audience, and now I was living that vision. As a Ph.D. student I had benefited from the intellectual vitality and openness of a public university, and my lectures were one small way to further the Berkeley legacy.

Instead of taking the lectures down, I decided to create a website for podcasters and began corresponding regularly with my listeners. Since then, the sense of speaking to a larger audience has shaped and strengthened all of my scholarship. Podcasting helped me craft my first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, so that it appealed to both academics and general readers. Engaging with the public has deepened my commitment to educational equity and convinced me that there need not be a firewall between professional and popular history. I have learned that even from the ivory tower, our profession can still foster and connect with the ongoing human search for meaning, story, and a shared past. Though I may be an accidental podcaster, I have become and hope to remain a deliberate historian.

Quotes

By Jennifer Burns

Writing my first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, was like being a detective at the heart of an intellectual mystery story. Though Rand's legend was well established among both her fans and enemies, there was little scholarly work about her life and career. I was the first historian to work in her personal papers, and thus it was essential to document her life with archival evidence. Then came the challenge of fitting Rand into the evolving ideological landscape of the American right, which historians were just beginning to chart. The final step was crafting an analytic narrative that would demystify Rand yet retain the tension and sense of discovery that animated my years of detective work. -- Jennifer Burns about "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right"

About Jennifer Burns

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Senior University Lecturer in History, and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University
Area of Research: American diplomatic history; American-East Asian relations; American religious history
Education: Ph.D., History, Cambridge University, 2001
Major Publications: Preston is the author of The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
He is currently writing a book on the religious influence on American war and diplomacy from the colonial era to the present, to be published by Knopf in 2012.
Preston is the co-editor with Fredrik Logevall of Nixon in the World: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1969-1977. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Preston is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Universal Nationalism: Christian America's Response to the Years of Upheaval." In The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010: 306-318; "The Politics of Realism and Religion: Christian Responses to Bush's New World Order." Diplomatic History 34:1 (January 2010): 95-118; "The Deeper Roots of Faith and Foreign Policy." International Journal 65 (Spring 2010): 451-462; "Reviving Religion in the History of American Foreign Relations." In God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy, ed. Jonathan Chaplin and Robert Joustra. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010: 25-44; "The Death of a Peculiar Special Relationship: Myron Taylor and the Religious Roots of America’s Cold War." In America's Special Relationships: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance, ed. John Dumbrell and Axel Schäfer. New York and London: Routledge, 2009: 202-216; "Bridging the Gap between the Sacred and the Secular in the History of American Foreign Relations," Diplomatic History, 30:5 (November 2006): 783-812; Operation Smallbridge: Chester Ronning, the Second Indochina War, and the Challenge to the United States in Asia," Pacific Historical Review 72:3 (August 2003): 353-390; "The Soft Hawks' Dilemma in Vietnam: Michael V. Forrestal at the National Security Council, 1962-64," International History Review 25:1 (March 2003): 63-95.
Awards: Preston is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
London School of Economics Fellow, Cold War Studies Centre, 2006-2009;
Post-Doctoral Fellow, International Security Studies, Yale University, 2001-2003;
Fox International Fellow, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, 1999-2000.
Additional Info:
Formerly Visiting Professor of History, Autumn 2007, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Institut universitaire de hautes études internationals et du développement), Geneva, Switzerland;
And Visiting Assistant Professor, International Relations, John M. Olin Fellow, International Security Studies, Yale University, 2005-2006.

Personal Anecdote

I was twenty-five years old in the spring of 1999, and just in the throes of my first intensive research trip to the United States. I was writing a dissertation on McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, and his role in the origins of America's war in Vietnam. This trip was to be an extended reconnaissance mission to scope out archives in Washington, New York, Boston/Cambridge, and Austin, and lay the groundwork for a full year of research in 1999-2000. I had also lined up several interviews with many of Bundy's former colleagues.

Unlike many students of the war, I had no personal connection to Vietnam. As a Canadian born after U.S. troops withdrew in the spring of 1973, the war was a chapter in history rather than an episode from my own life. My parents had attended a protest or two in Toronto, but they were not activists, and Vietnam had never really been a part of their lives. I became fascinated by Vietnam for purely intellectual reasons, especially after reading David Halberstam's classic The Best and the Brightest. So I was yet unacquainted with the raw emotional power the war still held over generations of Americans.

One of my interviewees was Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense and probably the best-known Vietnam policymaker. After decades of silence on the subject since leaving the Pentagon in 1968, McNamara had only recently begun granting interviews on Vietnam. In 1995, he published his memoir of the war, In Retrospect, which attracted a good deal of praise but also a firestorm of criticism.

McNamara not only possessed a formidable intellect, he had also earned a reputation as a fearsome interviewee who would storm out of the room if he felt the questions-or the questioner-were political, moralistic, or just plain stupid. Despite In Retrospect-or probably because of it-McNamara was still extraordinarily sensitive about Vietnam. Indeed, I was surprised he had agreed to my interview request in the first place. Needless to say, I was extremely nervous.

We met in his large, book-lined office in Washington. To break the ice, I began with what I thought was a softball. I pulled out a document I'd photocopied a few weeks before at the LBJ Library in Austin, a 1965 memo to LBJ outlining Bundy and McNamara's reasons for advocating military escalation. I asked him to take me back to 1965 and explain the pressures they faced. To follow up, I had a series of tougher questions about why he and Bundy had not only supported escalation despite evidence-already mounting in early 1965-that it likely wouldn't work, but also why they had so vigorously marginalized and discredited the prescient dissenters within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Brandishing the memo, I asked my question. McNamara looked at me blankly, and then down at the piece of paper in my hand. Narrowing his eyes, he fixed his gaze upon me again and blurted out, "Well, just read the damn thing! You're a smart guy, you can obviously read, so just read it for yourself!" I was stunned by the rawness of his anger. I didn't know how to respond, and his comments hovered over us in the awkward silence. But he hadn't asked me to leave, and so I meekly suggested that it was perhaps best if I moved on to the next question. "Yes, I think you should," he replied tersely, and we spoke for another half-hour. He relaxed a bit, as did I. But I never did ask my tough questions about the suppression on internal dissent (though they ended up forming the analytical core of my dissertation). I did, however, receive an invaluable lesson in Vietnam's enduring resonance.

Quotes

By Andrew Preston

Although both Kennedy and Johnson were strong presidents, neither was particularly passionate about Vietnam, and neither of them was ever certain about the best course of action. They were not enthusiastic about waging a difficult war in pursuit of murky aims, but they also did not want to risk the domestic and international consequences that seemed likely to follow disengagement. At this point Bundy and the NSC staff enter the story, and it is the president's uncertainty that makes them so important. Unlike their chief executive, they were rarely unsure. Their strong advice, their skill in promoting it, their bureaucratic dexterity, and their professional intimacy with the president enabled them to skew the internal debate over Vietnam in their favor. This book, then, is both a bureaucratic history of the changes in presidential decision making and a diplomatic history of the origins of the Vietnam War. It is a story with two inseparable themes: the acquisition and consolidation of power, and how that power was then used. -- Andrew Preston in "The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)

About Andrew Preston

Reviews of The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam

Reviews of Nixon in the World American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 Edited by Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Colorado, Denver, Fall, 2007-present
Area of Research: The social and environmental history of the Rocky Mountain West
Education: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States History, May, 2003; Dissertation: "The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization in Southern Colorado, 1870-1915"
Major Publications: Andrews is the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008, winner of the 2009 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History; 2009 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University; 2009 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; 2009 Colorado Book Award, History Category; 2009 Spence Award, Mining History Association; Honorable Mention, 2009 Hundley Prize, The Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association; Finalist, 2009 Clements Prize, Southwest History category, Clements Center at SMU; Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Firestone Library; 2009 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, Denver Public Library.
Andrews is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Contemplating Animal Histories: Politics and Pedagogy across Borders," Radical History Review 107 (Spring, 2010): 139-165; "Making Meat: Efficiency and Exploitation in Progressive Chicago." Organization of American Historians Magazine 24 (January, 2010): 37-40; Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews, "The Five Cs of History: Putting the Elements of Historical Thinking into Practice in Teacher Education." Pp. 151-167 in History Education 101: The Past, Present, and Future of Teacher Preparation, eds. Wilson J. Warren and D. Antonio Cantu. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing, 2008; "What Does It Mean to Think Historically?" Perspectives: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (January, 2007): 32-35l; "'Made by Toile'? Tourism, Landscape, and Labor in Colorado, 1858-1917." Journal of American History 92 (December, 2005): 837-863; "Turning the Tables on Assimilation: Oglala Lakotas and the Pine Ridge Day Schools, 1889-1920s." Western Historical Quarterly 33 (Winter, 2002): 407-430; "Tata Atanasio Trujillo's Unlikely Tale of Utes, Nuevo Mexicanos, and the Settling of Colorado's San Luis Valley." New Mexico Historical Review 75 (January, 2000): 4-41.
Andrews is currently working on An Animals' History of the United States. Under contract with Harvard University Press, and "An Environmental History of the Kawuneeche Valley, Rocky Mountain National Park." Book-length National Park Service contract report
Awards: Andrews is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
W. P. Whitsett Lecturer in Western History, California State University-Northridge, 2010;
Bancroft Prize, Columbia University, 2009;
George Perkins Marsh Award, American Society for Environmental History, 2009;
Vincent DeSantis Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2009;
Caroline Bancroft Prize, Denver Public Library Western History Department, 2009;
Colorado Book Award, History, 2009;
Clark Spence Award, Mining History Association, 2009;
Honorable Mention, Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2009;
Honorable Mention, Hundley Book Award, Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association, 2009;
Alice Hamilton Article Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2007;
Ray Allen Billington Article Prize, Western History Association, 2006;
Polished Apple Teaching Award, California State University-Northridge, 2005;
Rachel Carson Dissertation Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2004;
Arrell M. Gibson Article Prize, Western History Association, 2003;
John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Faculty Fellowship, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 2004-5, 2009-10;
CRISP Grant, UC-Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2009;
American Council for Learned Societies Contemplative Practice Fellowship, 2007-8;
Bill Lane Center for the North American West, Stanford University, Short-Term Fellow, 2007-8;
W. M. Keck Young Scholars Award, Huntington Library, 2005-6;
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on "The Redemptive West," Huntington Library, 2005;
Research Grants (2), Rockefeller Archive Center, 2000-2001 and 2002-3;
U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship, 1999-2002.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, California State University, Northridge, Fall, 2003-Spring, 2007.

Personal Anecdote

In less than a week, I was set to give my first-ever conference paper, before the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History. A very generous friend who was already out of graduate school and teaching had made room for me on a panel devoted to exploring the implications of Richard White's important 1994 essay, "'Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?'" The conference organizers had slated the session for a room that sat at least a hundred, not because anyone wanted to hear a Ph.D. candidate from Wisconsin blather on about coal-mine explosions, but instead because my fellow panelists were fast making names for themselves. More important still, Richard White had kindly agreed to comment on the papers.

White's "Are You an Environmentalist" had grabbed me the first time I read it (it has yet to let me go). I found myself deeply persuaded by White's central claim: that environmental historians can learn a lot by taking seriously work and those who perform it. The piece taught me the best kind of truth--a simple truth of seemingly boundless explanatory power: Labor, White reminds us, has always encompassed many of the core practices through which human beings have arrived at a knowledge of nature.

I don't know what they put in the Koolaid that I imbibed in seminar at Wisconsin, but like most graduate students there and elsewhere, my way of paying homage to the profound influence White's essay had had upon me (and, for that matter, the impact that his whole corpus of scholarship had made upon me since I first encountered The Middle Ground as an undergraduate) was to lash out with that peculiar brand of Oedipal rage that combines the worst aspects of adolescent impudence and twenty-something earnestness. In the months leading up to the ASEH, I must have read "Are You an Environmentalist" at least six times, each time slicing and dicing the essay with my critical knives sharpened to a razor's edge. My near-compulsive re-reading had filled me with unwarranted confidence. I told myself that I had found every weakness, every contradiction, every leap of logic, every hole in White's argument.

I could not wait to tell the assembled lights of my discipline about all the things White had gotten wrong. I envisioned myself delivering a devastating critique; I imagined the verbal combat that would ensue as White, one of the greatest historians of his generation in my estimation (a conviction that I hold even more strongly today) devoted his comment to parrying my attack.

Those who have seen Richard White engage in debate will understand why this thought was not entirely comforting. At the first historical conference I had ever attended, in fact, I had watched White pretty much eviscerate two junior scholars when they tried a stunt very similar to the one I was plotting. I attempted with little success to maintain my confidence. I told myself that I was smarter than the pair I had seen White tear up. Besides, my critique was as persuasive and elegant as theirs had been tendentious and awkward.

Doubt, thank goodness, remained. I sent my advisor, Bill Cronon, a draft of the diatribe I had assembled. Bill gave me very clear and direct advice: Don't be an idiot. File the paper away and write a new one that focused instead on presenting my own research findings.

Part of me evidently had a death wish and welcomed the heady risk of committing career suicide at such an early stage. That part of me felt censored by Bill and frustrated at the ways in which professionalism seemed to constrain intellectual exchange within the academy.

But overwhelming the compulsions seeking to push me to the edge were cooler, more cautious impulses. And so I pulled back to deliver an altogether safer paper. Bill had averted my juvenile plan. In the process, he spared Richard White the trouble of deciding whether to give me the dressing-down that I deserved, or to look graciously away from my impertinence.

If one of my own students were to concoct a similar stunt, I would undoubtedly provide the same advice. For all this, though, I can't help feeling a little uncomfortable with the hard lessons this incident imparted-that our profession is inextricably hierarchical in nature, that some historians are simply smarter and more highly-skilled than others, that what I can do and how I can do it depends at least to some extent on how well I know and keep to my place.

With apologies to Borges, I had always imagined academe as a sort of paradise. This was an unusually outrageous delusion on my part; as an academic brat, tales of departmental infighting, administrative folly, and student futility were nightly topics of conversation at the family dinner table. Choosing to hold my fire against Richard White turned out to be a critical first step in my discovery that the historical discipline can offer no real place of grace, no true escape, from the world as it is--not a happy discovery, I know, but perhaps a necessary one.

Quotes

By Thomas G. Andrews

Almost a century later, evocations of Ludlow still hew to the same story lines established as the fighting unfolded. The view of the Colorado coalfield war that has become the consensus is that workers were striking simply to achieve basic freedoms. Even though the miners suffered a crushing defeat, the blood sacrifices of Ludlow's martyrs prompted Rockefeller and his fellow capitalists to mend their ways and set American business on the path toward today's more enlightened labor relations. A Works Project Administration guidebook summarized this interpretation. Ludlow, New Deal authors argued, "aroused public opinion and brought about improvement of working conditions and civil liberties in the coal camps." Like most tales of the bad old days, such stories chart a narrative of progress. From this starting point, it becomes simply a matter of emphasis and tone to elicit either complacence or alarm or lest we go back to the dark ages when big business reigned supreme and government forces served as the mailed fist of concentrated capital. -- Thomas Andrews in "Killing for Coal America's Deadliest Labor War"

About Thomas G. Andrews

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
Area of Research: Modern American History, American foreign policy
Education: Doctor of Philosophy, History, Harvard University, 2008
Major Publications: Sargent is the author of A Superpower Transformed: Globalization and the Crisis of American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (Oxford University Press: Forthcoming). Sargent is an editor of Shock of the Global: The 1970s In Perspective, co-edited with Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Sargent is also the author of scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"The United States and Globalization," in Shock of the Global: The International History of the 1970s, edited by Ferguson et. al. (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2010).
Awards: Sargent is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs , Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2006-07;
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies , Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in National Security Studies, 2005-06;
Harvard University, Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (Awarded 3 times, 2003-04, 2004-05).
Additional Info:
Taught at Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2007-2008, Henry Chauncey Jr. '57 Postdoctoral Fellowship

Personal Anecdote

Earlier this year, I found myself in San Francisco General Hospital after an athletic accident shattered my left acetabulum. An immobile week in hospital gave me plenty of time to mull my first surgical experience and to reflect on the choices that had brought me here: choices that -- by the happenstance that looks in retrospect like fate -- had carried me to a fast and risky stretch of sidewalk in Berkeley.

If truth be told, my doctors intimidated me. Here they were, a group of experts whose competencies complemented each other perfectly: from the nurses and radiologists to the anesthesiologist and the orthopedic surgeon who specialized in pelvic fractures. As my fears about surgery mellowed in the glow of their expertise, I wondered what I -- a putative knowledge professional myself -- had accomplished by comparison? Did my credentials -- a PhD in international history -- accredit me as an expert on a par with these men and women? Did I, by comparison with them, know anything that really mattered?

As I pondered, I came to the conclusion that historians may be somewhat anomalous among the ranks of the gowned and capped. In my own work at least, I am more a generalist than specialist, and I imagine that the same could be said about many of us. By comparison with the surgeon or the scientist, the historian knows a little about a lot of things; knowledge in breadth, not in depth, is our stock in trade. But this, I concluded, can serve a valuable purpose.

What I have tried to do in my own work, I suppose, is to think about how the pieces of the past might constitute larger frameworks of causation and meaning. In my book manuscript, for example, I ask how the acceleration of globalization contributed to both an apparent crisis of American power in the 1970s and to its surprising revival thereafter. This question has drawn me into a variety of specialist topics, ranging from monetary economics to human rights law. I could not claim real expertise in any of them -- not by the standards of the economist or the lawyer. What I have tried to do as a historian is to learn enough to be able to relate the particular to the general, to see the fragments as part of a larger whole.

This, I think, may be the real genius of our profession. The past, especially the recent past, is too vast to permit scholars to acquire a scientific understanding of it. What we do instead is to become adept at navigating its patterns, at distilling understanding from complexity. This may make historians somewhat anomalous in a knowledge economy in which specialization remains the order of the day. (For proof of this, spend a week in the hospital.)

Yet it may be that the historian's willingness to synthesize complexity and to think broadly distinguishes us in useful ways from our colleagues in medicine and the sciences. After all, conversation in the public square is too often denuded of context, complexity, and all sense of possible consequences. The historian's sensibility may have value even outside of the academy, as a corrective to the pervasive short-termism that marks our times and our politics. I certainly hope so, although I'll be sticking with the medical specialists for my health care!

Quotes

By Daniel J. Sargent

About Daniel J. Sargent

"An illuminating book that provides a new way to look at the international history of the 1970s. It redirects our attention away from the familiar narrative and instead places the decade in a new perspective that allows us to evaluate longer-term trends, including the evolution of global society, the dynamics of the international economy, the breakup of colonial empires, the impact of popular culture, and the declining realm for autonomous national choices. This superb work will be greeted with enthusiasm." -- Melvyn P. Leffler, author of "For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War"

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and the History of Christianity Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, 2010-2011
Area of Research: History of capitalism, the twentieth-century cultural and religious history of the United States, and transnational history
Education: Ph.D. 2006, (M.A., M. Phil.) U.S. History, Yale University
Dissertation: "The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," under the direction of Glenda E. Gilmore.
Major Publications: Moreton is the author of Book: To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, May 2009). Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, April, 2010.
Moreton is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?" Journal of Southern History 75th anniversary issue, v. 75, no. 3 (August, 2009); "Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture as Youth Culture," in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); "The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," Enterprise & Society 8:4 (December, 2007); "The Soul of Neoliberalism," Social Text v. 25, no. 3 92 (Fall 2007), pp. 103-123; co-authored with Pamela Voekel: "Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the Americas," History Compass, Summer 2007; "It Came from Bentonville: The Agrarian Origins of Wal-Mart Culture" in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New Press, 2005).
Moreton is currently working on the tentively titled manuscript "Spiritual Development: Neoliberalism and Transnational Religion".
Awards: Moreton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Emerging Scholar's Prize Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, April, 2009;
Junior Faculty Fellowship Willson Center for the Humanities, University of Georgia, for fall semester 2009;
Visiting Scholar Fellowship American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006-2007;
Charlotte F. Newcombe Fellowship Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2005-2006;
Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of American Religion Louisville Institute, 2004-2005;
Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2004;
Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2003;
Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship Award Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003;
Dissertation Research Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003;
Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Summer Travel Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003;
Mellon Research Seminar Fellowship in Women's and Gender History Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, 2002.

Personal Anecdote

My first act of research for To Serve God and Wal-Mart was shoveling fossilized chicken droppings out of a defunct coop on a goat farm in Northwest Arkansas. The farm's owners, friends of my favorite agrarian Jim Scott, evidently took my willingness to pick up a shovel as a character reference, and lost no time making me feel at home in Wal-Mart's backyard. Since we have no Freedom of Information Act for the state-supported institutions we somewhat inaccurately call private corporations, the research could only go so far by relying on formal archives. It was only through the generosity of my hosts in the Ozarks-the original Wal-Mart Country--that I was able to learn to explore how "Wal-Martism" might fill the conceptual hole in the middle of "post-Fordism." If the Detroit auto industry had set the pattern for the first half of the twentieth century-in spatial organization, labor arrangements, finance, family formation, ideology, immigration, art-then surely its successor was a likely site for understanding major developments of the post-war years.

When Wal-Mart beat out Exxon-Mobil to become the world's largest company in 2002, what we knew that the first service company to make it to the top of the Fortune 400 was what astute business journalists like Bob Ortega had been telling us since the early 1990s: Wal-Mart had remade retail by achieving such market dominance that it could dictate its terms to the suppliers rather than the other way around. At the fringes of this narrative were the voices of historic preservationists and organized labor, finally roused by the Arkansas company's disruptive penetration of Vermont, Chicago, and Southern California. The reigning questions about the new top multinational were often variations on "Wow--how did Wal-Mart do it?" or "Is Wal-Mart good for America?"

While my 2002 dissertation prospectus referenced this literature, though, it also included chapter proposals that ultimately allowed me to explore a question I found much more interesting, the one that Thomas Frank revived from the original Populist mobilization: "What's the matter with Kansas?" -understood now as "Why have Americans on the losing end of the deregulated, off-shored service economy enabled it politically for more than a generation?" To Serve God and Wal-Mart is therefore not so much a book about Wal-Mart as an account of the anointing of free enterprise, the unlikely legitimation of neoliberal economics through evangelical religion. It tells this story through the twinned biographies of the world's largest company and the ideological apparatus it nurtured. It argues that this specific experience of mass service work transformed economic common sense and infused it with evangelical values at precisely the moment that federal redistribution catapulted the Sun Belt to its position of decisive influence within the nation. That moment of waxing power for the old agricultural periphery coincided with American-led economic integration, so that the ethos of Christian free enterprise-the odd pairing of Jerry Falwell and Milton Friedman, so to speak-gave late twentieth-century globalization some of its most distinctive characteristics. Ultimately I join writers like Janet Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Lisa Duggan, Tanya Erzen, and Linda Kintz in arguing that the Left's frustration with the "culture wars" misreads the necessary connection between conservative sexual mores and the post-1973 economy that Wal-Mart ultimately dominated.

That I got to learn about this complex relationship while living in the Ozarks, knee-deep in chicken droppings, was my good fortune.

Quotes

By Bethany Moreton

"For the emerging Wal-Mart constituency, faith in God and faith in the market grew in tandem, aided by a generous government and an organized, corporate-funded grassroots movement for Christian free enterprise. Ultimately, they helped shape American-led globalization itself. The postindustrial society grew from a specific regional history an the heritage of Populism. It was built in the aisles and break rooms of Southern discount stores, in small-group Bible study and vast Sunday-morning worship services. It spread through the marketing classes and mission trips of Christian colleges, through student business clubs and service projects. Although free-market economic theories captured the hearts and minds of elite policymakers in the later twentieth century, the animatig spirit of Christian free enterprise shaped the outcome. The Wal-Mart Moms understood better than their critics: Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it." -- Bethany Moreton in "To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

About Bethany Moreton

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor of History, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation Chair in American Studies, Université de Montréal.
Area of Research: U.S. and comparative nationalism, Political ideologies, The French Atlantic World, c. 1790-1820, Slavery and Society, c. 1770-1860
Education: Ph.D., History, Johns Hopkins University (2003); B.A., Columbia University (1994).
Major Publications: Furstenberg is the author of In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, Penguin Press, 2006, Audio book edition, Tantor audio, 2006,Paperback edition, Penguin Books, 2007, a Finalist for the Washington Book Prize, and a "Starred Review," Publisher's Weekly. Furstenberg is an editor with Carolyn Fick, La construction de la nation haïtienne après la Révolution. Under contract with CIDIHCA Press, 2010, and the upcoming George Washington and the American Nation: A Brief History with Documents. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Under Contract with Bedford/ St. Martin's Press, for publication in 2011.
Furstenberg is currently working on When the United States Spoke French: French Émigrés, Land, and Empire in the Age of Revolutions. Under contract with Penguin Press, for publication in 2012/2013.
Furstenberg is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George Washington's Library, Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Abolitionist Networks," William and Mary Quarterly, forthcoming, October 2010; "The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History, c. 1754-1815," The American Historical Review, 113:2 (June, 2008), 647-677, Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Award, Western Historical Association, for the best article on Western history; "Beyond Slavery and Freedom: Autonomy, Agency, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse." The Journal of American History 89:4 (March, 2003), 1295-1330, Winner of the ABC-CLIO: America: History and Life Award, for scholarship in American history advancing new perspectives on accepted interpretations or previously unconsidered topics.
Awards: Furstenberg is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Principal Investigator, "When the United States spoke French: Trans-Atlantic commerce, finance, and land speculation in the age of revolutions," Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grants Program, 2010-2013;
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, The New York Public Library (Gilder Lehrman Fellow) 2009-2010;
Co-Investigator, "French Atlantic Studies" (with a group of scholars from Université de Montréal and McGill University), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2006-2009;
Gilder Lehrman Fellowship, The New-York Historical Society, 2008;
Principal Investigator, "French Atlantic World and the Creation of the American Republic, 1789-1803," Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grants Program, 2005-2008;
Principal Investigator, "Les émigrés français aux États-Unis et la transformation politique, économique, et diplomatique de la jeune république américaine, 1789-1803," Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, Québec, Établissement de nouveau professeurs-chercheurs, 2005-2008;
Program in Early American Economy and Society postdoctoral fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia, 2005;
Principal Investigator, "Entangling Alliances: Philadelphia's International Revolutionary Networks and the Creation of Early American Political Culture," Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and l'Université de Montréal, Petite subvention/ Start-up Research Grant, 2004-2005;
Delmas Fellowship, The New-York Historical Society, 2001;
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2001;
Johns Hopkins Dean's Fellowship, 2001;
Fellowship for graduate study, The Johns Hopkins University, 1998-2002;
Richard Hofstadter Fellowship, Columbia University, 1997-1998;
Jacob Javits Fellowship, United States Department of Education, 1997-2001.

Additional Info:
Furstenberg formerly was a Visiting Professor, Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot, and Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, King's College, Cambridge University.
Furstenberg hasalso contributed to the New York Times, and Baltimore Sun, and has given commentary on CBC Radio, Radio Canada Première Chaîne, and LCI/ TVA Television.

Personal Anecdote

My grandfather on my mother's side, Félix-Paul Codaccioni, was an historian. He taught in high schools in France for many years and then, when he completed his monumental thèse d'état, a two-volume work on the working class of Lille, an industrial city in the north of France where he had settled with his family, he began teaching at the University. For my grandfather, as for many Corsicans starting with his own father, education was road out of the grinding poverty of the rural peasantry; educational achievement was probably the single most important value for him.

I grew up in the United States and only saw my grandfather every other year, when the family went to Corsica on vacation. (As a teacher, he was able to spend the summers in his ancestral home in a small village in the mountains there). No doubt misinterpreting my awkward shyness as intellectual profundity, he imagined I was interested in school and so he would, on occasion, try to mentor me. I have vivid memories of the two of us in the middle of the afternoon on the house's balcony, me sitting on an uncomfortable chair facing my grandfather, my eyes stinging from the blinding white sun, sweating and miserable, as he droned on and on about Hegel's dialectic-thèse, antithèse, synthèse… thèse, antithèse, synthèse-while I listened despondently to the other kids playing in the village, blissfully unaware of nineteenth-century German philosophy.

I wish I could say it was he who inspired me to become an historian, but I think the truth is probably more complicated. Other, more powerful and direct influences intervened in college and graduate school to shape my professional choices and intellectual interests. What is strangely true, however, is that I seem to have lived the life that he imagined for himself.

My grandfather always dreamed of moving to Canada. I have no idea why. Certainly he wasn't enamored of the cold. I think it must have been the scale that caught his imagination: of the forests and mountains and lakes and rivers, and the great Saint Laurent in particular, all of it so different from the smallness and cramped life of postwar Europe in general and of arid Corsica in particular. My grandmother wouldn't hear of moving to Canada, however, and so they never got further than the north of France.

I, on the other hand, not only became a university professor of history, but went on to get a job teaching in French in Québec: exactly the life my grandfather would have chosen had if he had been able to follow through on his dreams. It is a curious fate for me; my education was in English in big-named American universities, and like most Americans I never gave Canada the slightest though-until I got a job and moved there. Historians as much as anyone else lack perspicacity when the benefits of distance and hindsight are absent, so I won't even try to speculate about how it is that, without any conscious intent whatsoever, I fulfilled my grandfather's dream.

Quotes

By François Furstenberg

If George had intended the delay in abolition to spare Martha various "disagreeable consequences," his hopes were not borne out. In fact, George's will entailed consequences more burdensome and terrifying for Martha than anything he had anticipated.
Martha ultimately took it upon herself to free her husband's slaves early: some two years before her own death. But it was not humanitarian reasons that drove this early emancipation, the existing evidence suggests she disapproved of freeing slaves, nor was it from the expense or difficulty involved in supporting² the slaves. It was out of fear. It was found necessary, reported Martha¹s grandson, to free the slaves for prudential reasons. Hidden in this circumlocution was the fact that George;s deathbed emancipation had put Martha¹s life in jeopardy. As she and the slaves all recognized, the longer she lived, the longer their bondage extended. "In the state in which they were left by the General," wrote Adams, "she did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, may of the [the slaves] would be told that it was [in] their interest to get rid of her." She therefore was advised to set them free at the close of the year.
Martha Washington, first First Lady, wife of the father of the nation, lived her last days among hundreds of enslaved people she called family, people she believed would try to kill her. -- François Furstenberg in "In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation"

About François Furstenberg

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara and Co-Director of Indigenous Studies Minor
Area of Research: U.S. History, Borderlands, Native American History
Education: Ph.D. in History, University of Helsinki, 2001
Major Publications: Hämäläinen is the author of The Comanche Empire, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Paperback in 2009. Awarded the Recognition of Excellence, Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University. Winner of Bancroft Prize, Merle Curti Award, Caughey Western History Association Prize, Norris and Carol Hundley Award, William P. Clements Prize, Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit, and Kate Broocks Bates Award. ForeWord Magazine's History Book of the Year. An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Book-of-the-Month Club 2, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. El imperio comanche. Translation of The Comanche Empire by Ricardo García. Peninsula Press, forthcoming 2010. He is currently working on The Shapes of Power: Frontiers, Borderlands, Middle Grounds, and Empires of North America, 1600-1900. Under contract with Yale University Press.
Hämäläinen is the editor of When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turnings Points, ed. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press,2006, and currently working on Major Problems in North American Borderlands History, ed. with Benjamin H. Johnson. Under contract with Houghton Mifflin Company.
Hämäläinen is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Into the Mainstream: The Rise of a New Texas Indian History," in Beyond Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations, ed. Walter Buenger and Arnoldo DeLeon. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, forthcoming; "The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands," William and Mary Quarterly 67 (April 2010), 173-208. Reprinted in Major Problems in North American Borderlands History, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, forthcoming; "Pathogens, Peoples, and the Paths of History," in When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turnings Points, 1-16, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2006; "The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures," Journal of American History 90 (Dec. 2003), 833- 862. Winner of Arrell Morgan Gibson Award. Reprinted in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, 361-92, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell. New York: Routledge, 2006; and The American Indian: Past and Present, 6th ed., 53-77, ed. Roger L. Nichols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008; "The First Phase of Destruction: Killing the Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840," Great Plains Quarterly 21 (Spring 2001), 101-114; "Beyond the Ideology of Victimization: New Trends in the Study of Native American-Euroamerican Relations," Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 26 (Oct. 2001), 45-49; "Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays," with John R. Wunder, American Historical Review 104 (Oct. 1999), 1229-1234; The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System," Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 485-513. Winner of Bert M. Fireman Prize. Reprinted in Major Problems in American Indian History, 238-257, ed. Albert Hurtado and Peter Iverson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001; "Hevosen leviäminen ja sen vaikutukset Pohjois-Amerikan tasangoilla sekä Länsi-Afrikan savanneilla" [The Spread and Influence of the Horse on the North American Great Plains and the Western African Savanna], with Pekka Masonen, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 21 (1996), 31-41.
Awards: Hämäläinen is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2010-2012 (declined);
Institut d'Etudes Avancées in Nantes, 2010-2011;
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 2009-2010;
Turku Institute for Advanced Study, University of Turku, 2009-12 (declined);
Recognition of Excellence, Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University, 2009;
Bancroft Prize in American History, the Trustees of Columbia University, 2009;
Merle Curti Award for the best book on social and/or intellectual history, the Organization of American Historians, 2009;
Caughey Western History Association Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West, the Western History Association, 2009;
Norris and Carol Hundley Award for the most distinguished book on any historical subject, the American Historical Association Pacific Branch, 2009;
The William P. Clements Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America, the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, 2008;
Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center for Great Plains Studies, 2009;
Award of Merit for the best fiction or non-fiction book on Texas, the Philosophical Society of Texas, 2009;
Kate Broocks Bates Award for the best book on Texas history prior to 1900, the Texas State Historical Association, 2008;
History Book of the Year, ForeWord Magazine, 2009;
Silver Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards in History, 2009;
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award in U.S. History and Biography/Autobiography, Association of American Publishers, 2009;
Finalist for Carr P. Collins Award for the best book of non-fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters, 2009;
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, 2009;
Arrell Morgan Gibson Award for the best essay on Native American history, the Western History Association, 2004;
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2003-2005;
Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year (all disciplines), the University of Helsinki, 2002;
William P. Clements Center in Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2001-2002;
Bert M. Fireman Prize for the best student essay published in the Western Historical Quarterly, the Western History Association, 1999;
Fulbright Fellowship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1995-1996.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University, 2002-2004.

Personal Anecdote

This happened many times in 2006 and 2007:

It is 2 AM, and I'm suddenly wide awake. I've had less than an hour of sleep, but the adrenaline jolt has eliminated any chance of getting more. I know the cause of my unwelcome alertness: panic. The writing is too slow, the tenure deadline is too soon, my kids are growing up too fast, and my insomnia is worse than ever. I suppress the urge to howl in frustration, and instead get dressed and leave the house. I walk the half-mile to the office, convinced that the night is ruined-as is the following day, which will find me exhausted and unable to think or write. I cling to the idea that if I get down just one half-decent sentence tonight, surely it must be better than nothing.

I ended up staying in the office for twenty hours, writing more than I had managed in weeks. I couldn't count on this pattern, but it happened often enough for me to finish the book and become a professional historian. I found writing my first book-a book that I knew would be controversial-a dreadful and debilitating task, and I don't think I would have made it without those moments when expectations and self-criticism were temporarily suspended. Most of the thinking and conceptualizing happened while I was busy with other things. They still do. I sleep better these nights, but getting anything worthwhile on paper still requires mind tricks; insights only come when I'm preoccupied with things-running, hanging out with the kids, cleaning the house-that seemingly have nothing to do with the job.

This, of course, is commonplace. Anyone who has tried to write on a sustained basis knows the workings of the subconscious. And they know that for mind tricks to work, they must catch one by surprise; they must be-or at least feel-thoroughly accidental. One can't force them, or even be aware of them. One can only appreciate them in hindsight.

Like almost all my friends in academia, I wrote my first book slightly scared and enormously annoyed, thinking that there was little in the way of method to my madness. I'm glad that I didn't realize at the time that I did have a method, all along.

Quotes

By Pekka Hämäläinen

To understand the particular nature of Comanche imperialism, it is necessary to understand how Comanche ascendancy intertwined with other imperial expansions-New Spain's tenacious if erratic northward thrust from central Mexico, New France's endeavor to absorb the interior grasslands into its commercial realm, and the United States' quest for a transcontinental empire. Comanches, to simplify a complex multistage process, developed aggressive power policies in reaction to Euro-American invasions that had threatened their safety and autonomy from the moment they had entered the southern plains. Indeed, the fact that Comanche territory, Comanchería, was encircled throughout its existence by Euro-American settler colonies makes the Comanches an unlikely candidate for achieving regional primacy. But as the Comanches grew in numbers and power, that geopolitical layout became the very foundation of their dominance. Their overwhelming military force, so evident in their terror-inspiring mounted guerrilla attacks, would have allowed them to destroy many New Mexico and Texas settlements and drive most of the colonists out of their borders. Yet they never adopted such a policy of expulsion, preferring instead to have their borders lined with formally autonomous but economically subservient and dependent outposts that served as economic access points into the vast resources of the Spanish empire.
The Comanches, then, were an imperial power with a difference: their aim was not to conquer and colonize, but to coexist, control, and exploit. Whereas more traditional imperial powers ruled by making things rigid and predictable, Comanches ruled by keeping them fluid and malleable. This informal, almost ambiguous nature of Comanches' politics not only makes their empire difficult to define; it sometimes makes it difficult to see. New Mexico and Texas existed side by side with Comanchería throughout the colonial era, and though often suffering under Comanche pressure, the twin colonies endured, allowing Spain to claim sweeping imperial command over the Southwest. Yet when examined closely, Spain's uncompromised imperial presence in the Southwest becomes a fiction that existed only in Spanish minds and on European maps, for Comanches controlled a large portion of those material things that could be controlled in New Mexico and Texas. The idea of land as a form of private, revenue-producing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property. This basic observation has enormous repercussions on how we should see the relationship between the Comanches and colonists. When Comanches subjected Texas and New Mexico to systematic raiding of horses, mules, and captives, draining wide sectors of those productive resources, they in effect turned the colonies into imperial possessions. That Spanish Texas and New Mexico remained unconquered by Comanches is not a historical fact; it is a matter of perspective. -- Pekka Hamalainen in "The Comanche Empire" pp. 4-5.

About Pekka Hämäläinen

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor and Verlin and Howard Kruse '52 Founders Professor and the Director of Programming, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at the Bush School of Texas A&M University.
Area of Research: Engel teaches courses in American foreign policy and the evolution of international strategy, with primary research interests including diplomacy's domestic and localized effects, technology and foreign policy, and economic warfare.
Education: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D. in American History, 2001
Major Publications: Engel is the author of Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). American Historical Association's 2008 Paul Birdsall Prize, awarded biannually to the outstanding work published in European Military and Strategic History. Engel is the editor of Rethinking Leadership and "Whole of Government" National Security Reform, with Joseph R. Cerami, (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2010)." Authored the chapter: "Change is Hard... But Even Small Steps Matter," 187-208;
Diplomatic History, Guest Editor of Special Edition, "The End of the Cold War: New Evidence and Interpretations from the First Bush Administration," 34(1), January 2010;
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, Jeffrey A. Engel, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Excerpted in Foreignpolicy.com, November 9, 2009, authored the chapter: "1989: An Introduction to an International History," 1-35;
The China Diary of George H.W Bush: The Making of a Global President (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Excerpted in Newsweek, December 24, 2007;
Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, Jeffrey A. Engel, ed. (Palo Alto and Washington, DC: Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), authored with Katherine Carté Engel the chapter: "On Writing the Local within Diplomatic History: Trends, Historiography, Purpose," 1-32.
Engel is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "'A Better World...but Don't Get Carried Away': The Foreign Policy of George H.W. Bush Twenty Years On," Diplomatic History, 34(1), January 2010, 25-46;
"Leadership and National Security Reform," A Strategic Studies Institute Colloquium Brief, Joseph R. Cerami, Jeffrey A. Engel, and Lindsey Pavelka," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, December 2009;
"The Democratic Language of American Imperialism: Race, Order, and Theodore Roosevelt's Personifications of Foreign Policy Evil," Diplomacy and Statecraft 19(4), December 2008, 671-689;
"Over There…To Stay this Time: The Forward Deployment of American Basing Strategy in the Cold War and Beyond," in Luis Rodrigues and Sergiy Glebov (eds.), Political and Social Impact of Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Challenges (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), 17-28;
"A Shrinking World: Transport, Communication, and Towards a Global Culture," in Gordon Martel, ed., Companion to International History, 1900-2001 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 52-64; "The American Tendency to Personify Foreign Threats, from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush: A Note on American Diplomatic Rhetoric," Political Internacional 25(2), 2002, 197-230;
"'Every Cent from America's Working Man': Fiscal Conservatism and the Politics of International Aid after World War II," The New England Journal of History 58(1), 2001, 20-60.
Engel is currently writing Seeking Monsters to Destroy: Language and War from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Awards: Engel is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Texas A&M University System Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award, 2010;
Verlin and Howard Kruse '52 Founders Professor, 2009-Present;
Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant, Texas A&M University, 2008;
2008 Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History for Cold War at 30,000 Feet, American Historical Association;
Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Summer Institute Participant, 2008;
Bush Faculty Excellence Award (Annually Awarded to Outstanding Faculty Member), 2007;
Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse '49 Faculty Fellow, Awarded to Outstanding GBS Assistant Professor, 2006-2009;
Visiting Fellow, International Security Studies, Yale University, 2007;
Silver Star Award, Awarded by Graduating Students to Outstanding Bush School Professor, 2006;
John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Studies, Yale University, 2001-2003;
Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University, 2000-2001;
Guggenheim Research Fellow (renewed), National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2000;
Guggenheim Research Fellow, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1999-2000;
W. Stull Holt Memorial Fellowship of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2000;
United States Military Academy, West Point, Summer Teaching Fellow in Military History, 1999;
Research Fellow, Harry S Truman Presidential Library Institute, 1999;
Dissertation Research Fellow, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, 1999;
Visiting Research Fellow, Eisenhower World Affairs Council (Eisenhower Library), 1999;
University of Wisconsin-Madison Vilas Fellow, 1997;
Blattberg Writing Award, University of Wisconsin Department of History, 1997;
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanistic Studies, 1995-1996.
Additional Info:
Formerly a lecturer in history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania (2003-2004), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College (2004), and an Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University (2001-2003).
Engel is the Co-Director, Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Summer Institute, 2010, "Decision-making and the Uses of History";
Engel serves on the Editorial Board for Diplomatic History and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and has published in numerous journals including Diplomatic History, The International Journal, and Enterprise & Society.

Personal Anecdote

I did not set out to write my first book. At least, I did not set out to write the book that finally appeared a decade after I began graduate school. The overarching topic never changed. It remained from beginning to end a study of Anglo-American diplomatic competition for control of the vital aerospace marketplace after World War II.

The topic never changed. But the book itself changed wholly, completely, and unexpectedly. I like to think for the better.

It began, as did I in many ways, as a good example of Wisconsin new-left revisionism. Not only was a I trained by disciples of this powerful strain of diplomatic history, as an undergraduate by Walt LaFeber and in graduate school by Tom McCormick, but revisionism's ingrained bias towards economic considerations and concerted policymaking by elite interests fit well my own red-diaper upbringing. Seminars and books that concluded, to crudely paint with a broad brush, that moneyed interests helped dictate Washington's international priorities simply made intuitive sense following years of similar intergenerational invectives from the host of New York Jewish socialists who gathered around the family dinner table (even after we moved to Nebraska).

My dissertation proposal fit this model. Having arrived in Madison-and really, where else would a would-be leftist historian go for grad school?-determined to study what I termed the local impact of diplomacy, that is the measurable human, social, and economic costs and benefits of foreign policy upon communities, I quickly chose Anglo-American aviation diplomacy as my broad topic. Planes during the Cold War were built largely in single sites, thus ensuring that one could quickly discern the effects of plane sales, or their dearth, on the well-being of cities from Seattle to Farnborough. It had to be a topic politically-sexy enough to have garnered the attention of Prime Ministers and Presidents, thus ensuring that diplomacy and sales interacted and produced an extant documentary record. Finally, it had to be an Anglo-American study as well, because good diplomatic work of the era was invariably comparative and transnational, and having studied in England as and undergrad I was determined to get back as quick as possible.

I thus wrote what I thought to be a rather eloquent dissertation proposal befitting the best of what I understood to be the Wisconsin tradition. This would be a story of economic competition for markets, I posited. It would show British and American diplomats battling throughout the world to secure sales for their domestic producers, thereby ensuring prosperity at home and influence abroad. Policymakers would invariably ensure that trade followed the flag, I expected to show. And if their Special Relationship took a beating for the sake of national sales, well this was exactly the type of economic primacy trumping allied solidarity I expected to find once I hit the archives.

The dissertation proposal proved a beautifully constructed piece of tripe. I was not in England 48 hours, immersed in the documents for the second day of an expected year-long cruise through the archives, when I realized I had the story entirely wrong. This was not a tale of export promotion, the records revealed. It was instead one of export-constraint. The story of Anglo-American aviation diplomacy was not a tale of diplomats fighting to open markets for their own producers. It was instead a saga of policymakers vainly struggling to hold back the tide of eager salespeople, whose lust for exports paid little concern for the potential loss of strategically valuable aviation technologies to communist foes. It was a also, I ultimately discovered, a tale of divergent and contradictory British and American strategies for waging and winning the Cold War, one in which strategic concerns trumped economic considerations; though I first had to accept how wrong I'd originally been before I could see this story emerge.

In short, I had it wrong. I won't say the experience of watching my expectations dashed and then reborn destroyed my revisionist leanings in one fell swoop, because in truth these had already begun to both decline in zeal in favor of a (hopefully) more complex worldview colored by different and even contradictory theories of analysis. At the least, it taught a valuable lesson: history is not always what we expect, but more often what we discover. First, however, one has to be willing to look. And to change one's mind, no matter how the final product is received around the dinner table.

Quotes

By Jeffrey A. Engel

The world changed in 1989.
At the start of the year, the globe's strategic map looked much like it had since the end of World War II. Communist leaders in China and the Soviet Union held power. Their American counterparts, skeptical of the sincerity of recent calls for change throughout the Communist world, prepared for a reinvigorated Cold War of unknown duration and ferocity. Europe prepared for another year divided along fault lines imposed by conquering armies nearly a half-century before.
A year later, communism would be dead in Eastern Europe and dying in the Soviet Union itself. China would be once more in the grip of hard-liners wary of reform, and once more on the precipice of isolation. Washington would be looking to capitalize on its Cold War victory. Europe would soon by rejoined. The future-our twenty-first century present-would be at hand. And no one had seen it coming. -- Jeffrey Engel in "The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989" (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 1.

This is a story about power. Power enough to shape nations and the world. It is an examination of the bitter battles fought by British and American officials over the proper maintenance of the international system following the horrors of World War II, and ultimately of their contest to see which nation would lead the Western crusade against global Communism during the ensuing Cold War. The contest would determine which nation was best equipped to lead the world in its long search for stability, peace, and prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. The competitors were not always in conflict. Rarely have two allies worked more closely than the United States and the United Kingdom, bonded by a common language, political tradition, and the burdens of combating common enemies. Yet with a fervor rarely appreciated owing to their frequent and public displays of intimacy, behind closed doors they fought bitterly-not only for their different visions of their "Special Relationship," in which the two nations famously operated as a tighter partnership than either capital enjoyed with any other nation, but more dramatically for their different visions of the future." -- Jeffrey Engel in "Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy" (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 1.

About Jeffrey A. Engel

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, Co-Chair, Program in Asian and Asian American Studies, Baruch College, City University of New York.
Area of Research: Twentieth-century U.S. history, particularly urban history, politics and policy, race, immigration, and Asian American history.
Education: 2002 Ph.D. U.S. History, Northwestern University.
Major Publications: Brooks is the author of Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Brooks is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "The War on Grant Avenue: Business Competition and Ethnic Rivalry in San Francisco's Chinatown, 1937-1942," Journal of Urban History, forthcoming (March 2011); "Sing Sheng vs. Southwood: Housing, Race, and the Cold War in 1950s California," Pacific Historical Review 73:3 (August 2004). [Reprinted in The Best American History Essays 2006, edited by Joyce Appleby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)]; "In the Twilight Zone Between Black and White: Japanese American Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945," Journal of American History 86:4 (March 2000).
She is currently doing research for her second book, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Political Culture in Cold War America (under contract with the University of Chicago Press). This book will examine the contours of Chinese American political activism after World War Two and the way it intersected with U.S. foreign policy, larger Asian American struggles for access to equal citizenship, the growth of Great Society programs, and the postwar black civil rights movement.
Awards: Brooks is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Brooks is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Honorable Mention, 2010 Frederick Jackson Turner Award (for an author's first book on some significant phase of American history), Organization of American Historians, 2010;
Eugene M. Lang Junior Faculty Research Program Fellowship, Baruch College, 2009-2010;
Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Grant, Baruch College, 2009;
Baruch College, Weissman School Dean's Office Summer Research Grant, 2008;
Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Grant, Baruch College, 2008;
Individual Development Award, State University of New York Joint Labor-Management Committee; 2006;
Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award (for best article in the previous volume of the Pacific Historical Review), Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, 2005;
Faculty Research Assistance Program B Grant, University at Albany, 2004-2005;
Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Barnard College (declined), 2003;
Northwestern University Graduate School Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2001-2002;
Social Science Research Council International Migration Dissertation Fellowship, 2000-2001;
Harry S Truman Library Foundation Research Grant, 2000;
Haynes Foundation Southern California History Research Grant, 2000;
Northwestern University Graduate School Research Grant, 2000;
Teaching Assistant Fellow, Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, 1999-2000.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, Faculty Affiliate, Department of Public Administration and Policy, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York.

Personal Anecdote

Although born in Los Angeles, I grew up in Auburn, a small town about forty-five minutes outside of Sacramento. At the time, Auburn's boosters played up its status as an old Gold Rush hub to lure tourists; as I grew older, however, I realized that the town also possessed what in those days was a largely unexplored Asian American past. I caught an occasional glimpse in the Shanghai Bar in Old Town, the tumbledown shacks that longtime residents still referred to as the "Chinese section," or a stack of the town's old high school yearbooks, where I discovered that until 1942, one-third of the student body of the now almost all-white school had been Japanese American.

Yet it took me many years to explore this past any further. Our high school textbooks didn't discuss Asian American history, nor did Yale offer any courses in the subject when I was a student there. During my undergrad years I tried to remedy what I felt was my general provinciality and weak educational background by taking courses on every area of the world except the US. In the process, I became particularly fascinated with modern China, studying everything from Chinese history to Chinese literature to the Chinese language itself. Desperate to actually visit China, I signed up with a program to teach English there after college, only to find myself placed at the last minute in a xenophobic town in Hubei Province. As the only white person and the only obvious foreigner in the city, I faced not only constant stares but actual harassment on a daily basis. People routinely came up to me and clapped in my face to see how I would react, children threw firecrackers and debris at me with the encouragement of adults, and even students from other departments in my college taunted me on campus. It was one of the most difficult experiences of my life, but at the same time, one of the most important. While I could never escape for a moment my status as an outsider, I had the opportunity to watch China in the midst of a wrenching industrial revolution.

My time in Hubei and a subsequent stint in Hong Kong made me think about issues such as race, class, environmental degradation, and economic development in ways I had never considered before. They also inspired to me to apply to graduate school to study U.S. history while further exploring the Chinese past.

The question I hear most often from students, friends, and family members is, "Why do you study that?" They're not referring to urban history or 20th century America, but to Asian American history. It's a question I've always struggled to answer satisfactorily, mostly because its racial subtext makes me self-conscious. I know, too, that historians often decide to study their own communities when they focus on fields such as gay and lesbian history, women's history, African American history, or similar subjects. I can't claim to be doing the same in my work, but I do think that my background is the reason I study Asian American history. And I believe that the importance of this field to the larger American story means that while I am not Asian American, Asian American history is my history too.

Quotes

By Charlotte Brooks

"California's postwar racial transformation did not result mainly from growing white acceptance of Asian American citizenship. Nor did it take place simply because of the repeal of prewar anti-Asian laws, although Asian Americans welcomed and benefited from such changes. Rather, it occurred largely because the meaning of Asian American 'foreignness' itself shifted with changing American interests in Asia. As the cold war deepened, a growing number of white Californians saw Asian American housing integration as a necessary price to pay for victory in the struggle. And as thousands of Asian Americans began moving to neighborhoods where blacks could not follow, the racial geography of urban and suburban California in the late 1950s because the most obvious barometer of the state's racial transformation." -- Charlott Brooks in "Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California"

Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California

About Charlotte Brooks

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government.
Area of Research: Modern transatlantic history, with an emphasis on 20th century political cultures in the US and Europe, the United States in the World
Education: Ph.D. History, Columbia University, 2007
Major Publications: Temkin is the author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Yale University Press, 2009), an international history of one of the major legal and political episodes of the twentieth century, selected for the long list of the 2009 Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University.
Temkin is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Internationalism and the Limits of Political Tolerance: Malcolm X in Europe, 1964-1965" (article manuscript in preparation); "Cold War Culture and the Lingering Myth of Sacco and Vanzetti", in Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, eds., The Cold War in Pieces: Explorations of a Model for Postwar American History (forthcoming, OUP); "Culture vs. Kultur: The First World War, American Intellectuals, and the Clash of Civilizations" (article under revision); "'Avec un certain malaise': The Paxtonian Trauma in France, 1973-74," Journal of Contemporary History (April 2003). His current research interests include the death penalty in transatlantic perspective, Malcolm X's career and politics in global context, and internationalism and border control in the twentieth century."
Awards: Temkin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Finalist, Cundill International Prize and Lecture in History, for The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (2009);
Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship, the New School University and the New-York Historical Society, 2007-2008 (declined);
Finalist, Bancroft Dissertation Award, 2008-2009;
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall, Paris, 2006-2007;
Visiting Fellow, Centre d'Études Nord-Américains, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Spring 2007; Visiting Fellow, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 2004-2005;
History Department Teaching Fellow, Columbia University, 2001-2003;
Gerson Cohen Memorial Fellow in History, Columbia University, 2003l;
Visiting Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, Summer 2002;
Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies Fellow, Columbia University, 2000-2007.
Additional Info:
Affiliated with both the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Temkin previously taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at Columbia University.
With Alex Keyssar, convenes the Harvard Seminar on History and Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.
Temkin has written articles for The Nation, Haaretz, and the Journal of Contemporary History, and was a founder of The Israel Forum of New York, which organized public discussions of Middle East politics and history, particularly the role of the United States.

Personal Anecdote

When I read or hear other people's accounts of how they wrote their dissertation or their first book-the sojourns in dusty but marvelous out-of-the-way archives, the fateful chance meetings with ousted despots in abandoned mineshafts, the luggage mistakenly switched with that of the shady foreign operative-I can't help but think of the recurring Seinfeld joke about "Rochelle, Rochelle", the film-turned-Broadway musical about "a young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk." In reality, at least in my experience, there's very little glamour or romance involved in getting a PhD in history. Yes, there is often a lot of travel involved, and anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time in airports and hotels is bound to have more than her share of misadventures. I am no exception. But the process of the PhD is in some ways nasty, brutish, and long-sometimes strange, yes, but not necessarily in a good way, and in any case rarely erotic. Still, I like to think I'm not a masochist, so it's reasonable to ask why I wound up walking that road. It wasn't at all obvious, and I can't claim to be following a calling I felt since I was a child. History was one of my worst subjects, my inability to memorize names and dates surpassed perhaps only by my inability to comprehend the most simple geometric axioms. I still recall the big day of the matriculation exam in history-as dictated by the high school curriculum in the frenetic Middle Eastern country where I spent most of my boyhood, we were tested on our knowledge of Second Temple-era Judea, and I bravely chose to answer the question about the differences in religious practices and beliefs between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. I wrote my response with some pride, pleased that I was actually able to remember all the priestly minutiae. It was only later that day that I realized in horror-though not with total surprise-that I had been absolutely correct about all the religious practices and beliefs, but had attributed those of the Pharisees to the Sadducees, and vice versa. I hoped against hope that the exam would be graded by an understanding soul who could appreciate that I had included all the relevant information, just the other way around, but no such luck was forthcoming.

In all the time that's passed since then I'm still not sure I've mastered the elusive art of memorization, and I've certainly forgotten most of what I knew about Judea in 70AD. It wasn't until over a decade later that I decided on an academic career (long story), and even after I embarked on the road to becoming a professional historian I was sorely tempted on a few occasions to opt for alternate paths: during one lull in graduate school I considered returning to my previous life as a journalist, and during another-this one more sustained, a probable side effect of the distractions of living in New York and then Paris-I seriously contemplated diving headlong into the world of music. What kept me going in the discipline is, I think, something that I first grasped in college, listening to a talk by wizened scholar of medieval France, and to which I have returned in such moments of doubt: that history should not, cannot, be treated as a "subject", something separate from other domains of life, to be learned in isolation. Eric Hobsbawm was on to something (though maybe not for the right reasons) when he demanded that history not be treated as "merely one damned thing after another." What I try to convey to students as they begin to delve into the past is that history, contrary to what they may have thought or heard, is not a body of knowledge to be absorbed, but "a way of thinking", as Marc Bloch put it, about the world they live in. That may sound banal to those of us professionalized in the discipline, but I wish I realized that twenty years ago. I think that's where I (and my teachers, for that matter) went wrong in high school. Armed with that insight, I might have enjoyed history much more even then, been somewhat more adept with names and dates (though probably still not with those geometric axioms) and maybe even remembered-correctly!-what it was exactly that those pesky Pharisees and Sadducees did differently from each other.

Quotes

By Moshik Temkin

"Sacco and Vanzetti left a number of odd legacies. A lot of people in the United States, Europe, and Latin America still recognize their names. I've seen or heard them mentioned in The Sopranos and Sports Illustrated, in novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Phillip Roth, in random conversations. The largest pencil-producing factory in Russia was named after them, and generations of Russian children associated the names Sacco and Vanzetti with the pencils and crayons they used. There was a film in Italy, a tango in Argentina, a song by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone, a punk band in Germany, a brand of cigarettes in Uruguay. There are streets named after them in Italy and France. They often come up when people give examples of past injustices, or more facetiously, when people want to denote famous duos, as in Abbott and Costello, Jagger and Richards, Siegfried and Roy, Sacco and Vanzetti.

I think all this reflects an uncertainty in how they are remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti do not have a clear place in our civic life or historical record. Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that we still don't know-and never will know-whether they "did it."

But in many ways, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair is still with us. Certainly the issues that animated it are very much alive. Americans today still do battle over the issue of immigration, and intolerance toward foreigners is still widespread, sometimes virulent, especially when times are hard. Europeans, Latin Americans, and other non-Americans are still concerned over, and in some cases outright hostile to, America's presence in the world, and the way Americans handle international politics. And then as now, Americans are still divided over what was called, in Sacco and Vanzetti's day, "foreign interference" in American affairs.

Whether it is the death penalty, or the health care system, or how to deal with terrorism suspects, or even who should be elected U.S. president, non-Americans have and will continue to have opinions, because the United States is so powerful and what it does domestically reverberates externally. Many Americans bristle at this but many others welcome this. It depends on whether they see the United States as an entity separated in principle from the rest of the world, or as a genuine part of the world-a world in which Americans have a stake in the lives of non-Americans, and vice versa.

This issue divided Americans when Sacco and Vanzetti were what one magazine called "the two most famous prisoners in the world," and it still divides Americans today. This, I believe, is the context in which the Sacco-Vanzetti affair took place. My book is not an attempt to end the discussion about Sacco and Vanzetti, or to provide a definitive account. My aim was to start a new conversation, one that would not be about guilt or innocence but rather about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair-its significance and place in history." -- -- Moshik Temkin in an interview with "Rorotoko" about his book "The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial"

About Moshik Temkin

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History, Tulsa University.
Area of Research: Modern American history, U.S. foreign relations history, American empire, America and the world, American covert operations, war and society, American criminal justice system and its internationalization, US War on Drugs, International police training programs.
Education: Doctor of Philosophy, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Completed May 2006
Dissertation: The Myth of the Addicted Army - Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs
Major Publications: Kuzmarov is the author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), and is currently writing Modernizing Repression: Police Training and the Violence of Empire (Amhrest, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, under contract).
Kuzmarov is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, and reviews including among others: "Modernizing Repression: Police Training, Political Violence and 'Nation-Building' in the American Century" Diplomatic History (April 2009); "The Myth of the 'Addicted Army': Drug Use in Vietnam in Historical Perspective" War and Society (October 2007); "From Counter-Insurgency to Narco-Insurgency: Vietnam and the International War on Drugs" Journal of Policy History (Summer 2008); "American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11-1-10, March 15, 2010.
Awards: Kuzmarov is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Sachar Dissertation Award, Graduate Studies Association Brandeis University, 2004-2005;
Crown Fellowship, Brandeis University American History Department, 2002-2006.
Additional Info:
Formerly Visiting Assistant Professor of History Bucknell University (2006-2009)
Kuzmarov's lecture "The Myth of the Addicted Army" at University of Arkansas-Fayetville, sponsored by the local branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws was broadcast on CSPAN in February 2010.

Personal Anecdote

I first became interested in history hearing stories from my grandfather, Oscar Weinstein, who passed away last year at the age of 99 and had an incredible memory. Intellectually, my perspective was first shaped by a course that I took at Dawson College in Montreal on the so-called anti-psychiatrists - R.D. Laing and Erich Fromm - whose idea that mental illness was a social construct and a product of the pathologies and intolerance of society I found to be compelling. At McGill University, I took a course on crime and punishment which introduced me to radical theories of criminology and examined the social roots and construction of deviance in Western society. Then I read Noam Chomsky, whose work on state crime and terrorism was (and remains) highly illuminating, and Alfred W. McCoy's on the CIA's support for the global narcotics trade, which my own research on the topic confirmed to be right on the mark.

My first book The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs draws on sociological theories about "moral panics" and the construction of deviance in examining the origins and growth of the modern drug war. I try and demonstrate how policy-makers and the media greatly exaggerated the scope and ravages of drug abuse in the army, creating a climate of hysteria over drugs which supplanted public concern about the war itself and resulted in the growth of repressive prohibition measures. The myth of the drug-addicted soldier took hold so widely in my view because it provided a convenient political scapegoat, which helped to deflect attention away from the carnage in Indochina, and to absolve of responsibility those responsible for perpetrating and expanding the war. The second half of the book analyzes the consequences of the War on Drugs, including its link to the growth of the carcerial state in the US and major human rights abuses internationally while at the same time failing to curb supply rates.

Building off this work, I am currently completing a book on American international police training programs entitled Modernizing Repression. Adopting a comparative analysis, I chronicle how police programs have served as an important mechanism for expanding American power from the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century through the 21st century occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and resulted in significant human rights violations. This book combines my interests in criminal justice, US foreign policy and covert operations and draws on many of the formative intellectual influences in my professional career and life.

Quotes

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

"The enduring quality of the myth of the addicted army in many respects demonstrates America's long-standing inability to come to terms with the moral consequences of the Vietnam War. By reimagining their soldiers as victims and the U.S. military defeat as a "tragedy," Americans were able to deflect responsibility for the massive destruction and loss of life inflicted on the people of Southeast Asia and thus to avoid serious reconsideration of the ideological principles that rationalized the American intervention. The silencing and demonizing of dissenting voices, including antiwar GIs typecast as psychopathic junkies, aided in this process." -- Jeremy Kuzmarov in "The Myth of the Addicted Army"

About Jeremy Kuzmarov

Top Young Historians' profiles edited by Bonnie K. Goodman

1st profile in our relaunch commencing "Top Young Historians: The Next 100"

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Yale University; courtesy appointments in the Department of History and Yale Divinity School
Area of Research: U.S. religious history, methods and theories in the study of religion, the history of sexuality
Education: Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thesis: "Making the Modern in Religious America, 1870-1935", 2005
Major Publications: Lofton is the author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011).
Lofton is currently working on The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Fundamentalisms and Modernisms in American Culture.
Together with Laurie Maffly-Kipp, she has edited An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings from Antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Lofton is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including -- with Richard Callahan and Chad Seales -- "Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States" in the March 2010 issue of Journal of the American Academy of Religion; "Queering Fundamentalism: John Balcom Shaw and the Sexuality of a Protestant Orthodoxy" in the September 2008 issue of The Journal of the History of Sexuality; "Public Confessions: Oprah Winfrey's American Religious History" in the March 2008 issue of Women & Performance; "Practicing Oprah; Or, The Prescriptive Compulsion of a Spiritual Capitalism" in the August 2006 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture; “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism” in the June 2006 issue of Church History; “The Preacher Paradigm: Biographical Promotions and the Modern-Made Evangelist” in the Winter 2006 issue of Religion and American Culture.
Awards: Lofton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including among others:
She was been named a 2010-2011 Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University;
2008-2009 Fellow of Religion and Religious History at the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University;
2008-2010 Young Scholar in American Religion at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.
In addition, she has won a College Arts & Humanities Institute Fellowship at Indiana University;
2006-2007 LGBT Religious History Award from the LGBT Religious Archives Network;
2005-2006 Stillman Drake Award for Faculty Development at Reed College; 2005 Students' Undergraduate Teaching and Staff Award, University of North Carolina; 2005 Tanner Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, University of North Carolina.
Additional Info:
Formerly Associate Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, 2008 - 2009; Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Indiana University, 2006 - 2008, and Visiting Professor of Religion and Humanities, Reed College, 2005 - 2006

Personal Anecdote

I found myself in his basement after several overeager e-mails and one short walk from campus. "There are the boxes," he said, apologizing for the appealing squalor. "Use whatever you can find." He smiled, waved a little, and left me alone. This is the loneliness which launched 1,000 monographs, the isolation of papers disordered and waiting. Just for what they were waiting I knew, then: I would have said (as I walked to his house, as I poured through large, long histories, as I sat in undergraduate lectures on the Stamp Act and Mesopotamian agriculture) that the papers waited for our story-telling, for our discovery. On that grey day, I would have said simply: I am doing the work of finding out what has not been found, but needs to be heard.

Several gorging hours later, I had more then I could have hoped to have: not only meeting minutes, but also typescripts of speeches. For a student of African American religions, such transcriptions of ministerial expression are treasure nonpareil. In 1961, I heard a pastor bellow back at the South East Chicago Commission: "Those people over there have got to realize once and for all that Woodlawn is not their private colony." In 1965, I found the same man-president of The Woodlawn Organization, reverend in a growing Pentecostal parish-arguing, "This proposal is based on the long-standing American assertion that self-determining communities, with sufficient resources, can bring their members into the mainstream of American life." Later, in the middle of the summer of '66, he cajoled, "I don't think we ought to get mad. We ought to get smart." Finally, I heard this same man-the subject of my study, the target of my discovery-steam forward with his success, "The greatest danger to an organization is complacency. Let us stick together. If you stick together, you got to win. I'm sticking to Woodlawn." In his notes accompanying this speech, the annotator remarked, "on several occasions, there was loud applause and/or amens."

I think I lived on the pure positivist pleasure of that afternoon for exactly three days. For three days, I felt like the queen of all archiving, mistress of data, and doyenne of detection. I had found what I believed was a critical missing voice in the historiography. I had found him arguing, avidly, against King and his imported political strategies to combat de facto segregation. In one clearinghouse afternoon, I had pulled voices, power, and political consequences from disordered files. There was such a gorgeous cleanliness to my self-satisfaction.

Then, of course, the bubble burst. Running behind in my reading for a class, I flew through an assigned chapter from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past, one which diagnosed Columbus Day and its peculiar formation. One sentence stopped me, cold: "The naming of the 'fact' is itself a narrative power disguised as innocence." Every historian realizes, at some point or another, that what they do is something may be more interpretive, more imaginative, and more manipulative than chatter of "objectivity" suggests. But when Trouillot named my glee an innocence-and my "discovery" an imperial format-I think I began, finally, to commit to history. Not as a romance with data, or a story to unfold, or a voice to ventriloquize, but as a practice of powerful criticism, one in which we unrelentingly seek the mess, especially when anything presents too easily, too neatly, too logically, to be true.

Quotes

By Kathryn Lofton

About Kathryn Lofton

Top Young Historians' profiles edited by Bonnie K. Goodman

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, 2008-Present
Area of Research: Territorial revision and treatment of minorities during WWII; History of European renewal; History of media in East-Central and Southeastern Europe
Education: Ph.D. in History and Humanities, Stanford University, June 2004
Major Publications: Case is the author of Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII [forthcoming spring 2009, Stanford University Press] and the editor with Norman M. Naimark if Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
She is also working on the manuscript Between the Lines: Contested Boundaries and the Fate of the Jews and other Minorities in Eastern Europe during WWII.
Case is also the author of numerous book chapters and reviews including among others: "Being European: East and West," in European Identity, Jeffrey Checkel and Peter Katzenstein, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 111-131; "Territorial Revision and the Holocaust: The Case of Hungary and Slovakia during WWII" in Lessons and Legacies: From Generation to Generation, edited by Doris L. Bergen (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008), pp. 222-244; "Between States: A Research Agenda," in European Studies Forum (Autumn 2008) 38:2, pp. 113-119; "Navigating Identities: The Jews of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and the Hungarian Administration 1940-1944," in Osteuropa vom Weltkrieg zur Wende, Wolfgang Mueller und Michael Portmann, eds. (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akedemie der Wissenschaften, 2007), pp. 39-53; "The Holocaust and the Transylvanian Question in the 20th Century" in The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 17-40.
Awards: Case is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
President's Council of Cornell Women Affinito-Stewart Faculty Grant for research in Southeastern Europe, 2007;
Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (12/07-6/08), 2007;
Research fellowship from the East European Studies Program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars (Fall 2007);
Junior Faculty Research Grant from the Institute of European Studies, Cornell University, for research in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Bulgaria, 2006;
Cornell University Dean's Grant for research trip to the Hoover Archives, Stanford University, 2006;
Cornell University Library Faculty Grant for Digital Collections in the amount of $36,025 to digitize part of CUL's unique collection on the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s for the Integrated History website I created together with James Bjork (won spr. 2005, digitization to be completed by fall 2006, 2005;
Recipient of the Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Prize for Outstanding Dissertation Writing awarded by the Department of History at Stanford University, 2004;
Recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for dissertation research and write-up, 2003-2004 academic year, 2003;
Recipient of Fulbright-Hays fellowship for dissertation research and write-up, 2003-2004 academic year (declined), 2003;
Recipient of the J. and O. Winter Fund for Holocaust-related research at the USHMM during the winter of 2003, 2002;
Recipient of a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum fellowship for research at the USHMM (2-5/03) on the Jews of Kolozsvár/Cluj during WWII, 2002;
National Security Education Program graduate fellowship for study and research in Cluj, Romania and Budapest, Hungary, 2000;
Center for Russian and East European Studies fellowship for study and research (of Romanian language and inter-war Transylvanian history) at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, 1999;
Fulbright Fellowship for study and research (on the subject of the Slovene- and German-language press in areas of the Habsburg Empire inhabited by Slovenes from 1848-51) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1997;
Frederick and Elsa Sell Scholarship for junior-year study in Szeged, Hungary, 1995;
National Security Education Program scholarship for summer study in Kraków, Poland, 1995.
Additional Info:
Founded Integrated History website, together with James Bjork (King's College, London) includes over 80 digitized sources on the history of East-Central Europe for educators, students and scholars. Integrated History

Personal Anecdote

Much of history writing, as I understand it, consists of drawing connections between seemingly unrelated events or phenomena. In that tradition, I will try to explain how growing up in South Dakota prepared me for academia and the study of East-Central European history. As is the case with many East-Central European states and sub-state regions (Slovenia, Slovakia, Slavonia, etc.) not many people are able to differentiate between North and South Dakota. Indeed, I have found that, even shortly after hearing that I am from South Dakota, a new acquaintance will invariably ask me what it was like growing up in North Dakota. To confirm my suspicion that the conflation of the two in the minds of non-Dakotans is complete and indiscriminate, for a time I claimed to be from North Dakota. This control experiment-coupled with the testimonies of North Dakotans I knew-cemented the hypothesis I had drawn from previous encounters: namely that "Dakota" is an undifferentiated, static and monolithic near-void in the global collective consciousness (and perhaps even in reality).

Similarly, it is hardly uncommon for someone (say, a former president of the United States) to confuse Slovenia with Slovakia during a conversation with the prime minister of the former. Despite the resentment that such conflations invariably arouse, there are advantages to being undifferentiated. I met my now-husband thanks to the manner in which the various small Slavic nationalities are commonly conflated. Some years ago I was in my home town of Mitchell, South Dakota (home of the Corn Palace, a Kremlin-like structure the likes of which North Dakota does not-indeed cannot-possess, by virtue of it being the "world's only") when a local professor friend said he'd like me to meet a Slovak student of his, and wasn't it fortunate that I speak Slovak (which I didn't) so that I could communicate with this young man. It turned out, however, that the young man in question was about as Slovak as I am North Dakotan. In fact he was of an entirely different externally undifferentiated Slavic nationality. It turned out we had a lot in common, and shortly became even less differentiated than we had previously been.

Quotes

By Holly Case

The Transylvanian Question-the struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania-seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These two allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly among themselves over Transylvania's future, and Europe's leaders, Germany and Italy, were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of the European idea-how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what "Europe" means and what it does. For tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new and perhaps chastening perspective. In short, when we look closely at what people in small states think and how they behave, the history of twentieth-century Europe looks suddenly very different. -- Holly Case in "Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII"

About Holly Case

Note: This is the 100th Top Young Historian HNN has profiled!

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History and George C. Wiswell Jr. Research Fellow, Colby College
Area of Research: Jacksonian Democracy and the politics of "vengeance" in early national America; international law in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary public life; Thomas Paine and anti-imperialism in the eighteenth century
Education: Ph.D, History, Brandeis University, 2004.
Major Publications: Opal is the author of the Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England, University of Pennsylvania, March 2008, and the editor of Common Sense and Other Writings by Thomas Paine, Norton Critical Edition, forthcoming (under contract).
Opal is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "The Labors of Liberality: Christian Benevolence and National Prejudice in the American Founding," Journal of American History, 94 (March 2008), lead article; "Exciting Emulation: Academies and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1780s-1820s," Journal of American History, 91 (September 2004), lead article, winner of Binkley-Stephenson Award; "The Making of the Victorian Campus: Teacher and Student at Amherst College, 1850-1880," History of Education Quarterly, 42 (2002). Featured and reviewed in November 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education; "The Politics of 'Industry': Federalism in Concord and Exeter, New Hampshire, 1790-1805," Journal of the Early Republic, 20 (Winter 2000).
Opal is currently working on, "Freeborn Outlaws: Personal and National Sovereignties in Revolutionary North America, 1750-1830," Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson and the Ordeal of the Early United States.
Awards: Opal is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Colby College, Class of 2006 Charles Bassett Teaching Award, 2006; Organization of American Historians, Binkley-Stephenson Award for Best Scholarly Article, 2005;
Colby College, George C. Wiswell, Jr. Research Fellowship in American History, 2004 to present;
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, 2002-03;
New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Regional Fellowship, Summer 2002;
American Antiquarian Society, Legacy Fellowship, Summer 2002;
Spencer Foundation/Brandeis University, Research Grant for Interdisciplinary Seminar on Education, 2002;
Brandeis University, Rose and Irwin Crown Fellowship in American History, 1998-2002;
Cornell University, Department of History, George S. Lustig Prize, Outstanding Senior, 1998.

Personal Anecdote

Historians should read cozy anecdotes with skepticism, but...well, when I was twelve, my family went to see Les Miserables at the Shubert Theater in Boston. I was swept away by the dramatic tale of hunger and poverty, redemption and rebellion. During the car ride home, I kept pestering my parents and my brother with all manner of questions. Why did so many people suffer? Were things really so bad in nineteenth-century France? Why hadn't the Revolution of 1789 made life better? A few years later, the quick collapse of the Soviet Empire-and the brutal repression of the democratic protests in China-made these historical questions seem all the more real and vital and living.

So, I went to college knowing I would major in history and thinking I would study revolutions. Because of the great professors I met at Cornell and then Brandeis, I came to focus on the American Revolution and its aftermath. Where did this revolution come from? What did it accomplish? How does it continue to shape, define, and diminish democracy in America? As a teacher and scholar, I try to use many different strands of analysis so that I can ask big questions and study enduring themes. My first book was a study of ambition in the post-Revolutionary age, especially among the rural households of New England; my new project is about vengeance and its ascent in American foreign policy and nationalism. (My wife, Holly, jokes that I'm writing a series about the seven deadly sins of the early United States. First ambition, now vengeance...) I'm also working on an edited collection of Tom Paine's work, which has allowed me to learn again about a thinker and radical I thought I knew.

In any case, corny as it sounds, I try to retain a childish enthusiasm for the study of the past. This is fairly easy to do, because I am more and more convinced that studying history is an ethical as well as intellectual journey. By revealing to us the whole sweep of the human drama, across huge swaths of space and time, and by enabling us to comprehend people unlike ourselves, history jars us out of a narrow, shallow self-regard. It can make us more humble and decent, more compassionate and curious. So I consider myself very lucky to be able to learn and teach and write history for a living.

Quotes

By Jason M. Opal

The eventual emergence of ambition into a national creed was of course a long and fitful process, full of continuities and adaptations, through which the prevailing values of a primarily rural and household-based society gave way to those of a largely urban and individualized one. That much is clear. But the slow and uneven pace of cultural evolution can conceal rather sudden shifts in the cultural climate, after which certain ideas, conceits, and institutions gain traction while others give ground. The ensuing changes do not simply reveal and reflect the social and economic trajectories we now see; they also help to make those trends happen, and to frame how people remember and respond to them. To recognize this is not to impose simplicity on a kaleidoscopic world, nor to replace "material" explanations with purely ideological ones. It is, instead, to appreciate the interplay of ideas and circumstances, of aspirations and situations, within particular stages of recoverable history.

One of these cultural shifts began in the United States during the late 1780s, after the narrow victory of the Federal Constitution over more localized hopes for the new states. With the creation of the "extended republic" came a widespread effort to uproot households and communities from their provincial identities and to align them with national judgments of self and success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth. While trying to turn a specific kind of ambition into an organizing principle of national life, this effort also took aim at alternate, more familiar, and typically more viable forms of aspiration for those living in a rural social order of laboring households and interdependent neighbors. More and less than a set of adaptations to market expansion and integration, "the installation of ambition" was a discernible project, a drawn-out campaign that entailed innovations in both the imaginative and discursive realm (how people thought and ideas operated) and the institutional and social terrain (how people were conditioned and resources deployed). It also occasioned a moral controversy that mostly ensued, not between social groups or political factions, but within communities, families, and individuals. This book offers a social history of that personal and cultural struggle-a story of restless sons and ambivalent fathers, resilient women and defeated men, bright-eyed reformers and hard-bitten neighbors.

The restless sons were the focal points of the changes and conflicts at hand, because they, more than their sisters, stood to inherit both the local properties that brought independence and the national society that promised (and demanded) something more. For this reason, young men predominate in the pages that follow. But how to study them? Who to investigate and who to leave out? Any attempt to generalize about the young men of the young republic will tend to exaggerate the appeal and momentum of the project to promote ambition. It will also miss the inner struggles that ambitious striving brought (and still brings). A resort to biography, on the other hand, would lose the collective sway and texture of the larger effort in the details of a single life. By way of both narrative design and methodological compromise, then, I have crafted this history of ambition around six young men who found that passion to be compelling, inspiring, or necessary in their lives, and who therefore sought to transcend a social world and personal identity built on independence. -- Jason M. Opal in "Beyond the Farm National Ambitions in Rural New England"

About Jason M. Opal

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor of History, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, August 2008-Present
Area of Research: U.S. Gender and Women's History, U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History, Contemporary Social Theory, Race, Class, and Ethnicity in America.
Education: Ph.D., Department of American Civilization, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Major Publications: Zaretsky is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 (The University of North Carolina Press, April 2007).
Zaretsky is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Private Suffering and Public Strife: Delia Alvarez's War with the Nixon Administration's POW Publicity Campaign, 1968-1973," in Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, James T. Campbell, Matthew Guterl, and Robert Lee, eds. (University of North Carolina Press, September 2007); "In the Name of Austerity: Gender, The Middle Class Family, and the OPEC Oil Embargo of 1973-74," in The World The Sixties Made: Culture and Politics in Recent America, Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds. (Temple University Press, 2003);
She is currently working on two new books. The first, tentatively entitled Struggle Baby, is a collection of oral history interviews with the children of activists from the 1960s and 1970s. The second, tentatively entitled Meltdown, is a social and cultural history of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.
Awards: Zaretsky is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Participant, Reconfigurations of American Studies Summer Institute, Dartmouth College, June 22, 2006;
George S. and Gladys W. Queen Award for Excellence in History Teaching 2003-2004;
Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award at Brown University, 2002-2003;
Nomination for Gabriel Prize, Outstanding Dissertation in American Studies, 2002-2003;
Brown University Faculty Scholars Award, 2001;
Brown University Graduate School Fellowship Stipend, 2000;
Gerald R. Ford Library Travel Grant, 1999-2000;
Bernstein Dissertation Fellowship from Brown University, 1999-2000;
J. Walter Thompson Research Fellowship at Duke University, 1999;
June Proctorship for the Department of American Civilization, 1998;
Mellon Seminar on History and Literature Fellowship, 1997;
Graduate Council Research Fellowship, 1996-1997;
June Proctorship for the Department of American Civilization, 1996;
Graduate Council Fellowship, 1995-1996;
Adlai E. Stevenson College Honors, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1992;
Honors in American Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1992;
Adlai E. Stevenson College Junior Fellowship, 1991;
University of California Regents Scholarship, 1990-1992.
Additional Info:
Assistant Professor of History, Southern Illinois University Carbondale September 2002-August 2008.
Member, Editorial Board, Thought and Action [the NEA Higher Education Journal].
Sheridan Seminar on Instructional Assessment, the Sheridan Center for the Advancement of College Teaching, 1996-98, Teaching Certificate Recipient

Personal Anecdote

As a teenager, I showed no signs of one day becoming a historian. My parents had been left wing political activists and intellectuals, but I did not appear to be poised to follow in their footsteps. My time was spent watching John Hughes movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, and somberly listening to The Police and Prince on a very bulky Sony Walkman I lugged around with me everywhere. A mediocre student who graduated from high school with a B average, I struggled with my schoolwork. At the time, I lived alone in a small apartment with my mother, who battled chronic health problems. The particular challenges of my home life, combined with the everyday preoccupations of adolescent girlhood, made it hard for me to focus on my studies.

After graduating from high school in 1988, I left my native San Francisco and went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz. San Francisco and Santa Cruz were only separated by seventy miles of Pacific coastline, but I felt as though I had entered another universe. I would sit in the library with my books in front of me, staring out the window at a canopy of Redwood trees. My dormitory room was steps away from a panoramic view of Monterey Bay. I encountered roaming deer as I walked to and from classes. Freed from the confines of a challenging home life and transplanted into what felt like an enchanted forest, I started to see myself anew--as someone who actually cared about reading, writing, and critical thinking. I blossomed academically as my instructors told me that my interpretations of books mattered and praised my writing. Leaving home for college was the turning point for me: a moment when I simultaneously broke free from my family and experienced the healing power of nature. The combination unlocked an excitement about ideas that had been buried but has been with me ever since.

Now, twenty years later, I am a scholar of contemporary American history whose work focuses on U.S. political culture, gender, and the family. The decades during which I came of age-the 1970s and 1980s- have become more than the stuff of personal memory for me. They are now also objects of scholarly inquiry. As such, they have allowed me to see my own personal past in a different light. Yes, I was a girl who was preoccupied with clothes and make up, intent on rebelling against my politically left, intellectual parents. But all along, I was also bearing witness to history. I remember listening with keen interest as my mom and dad expressed their dismay when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. And I remember in the years that followed, walking through the city streets and seeing young gay men who were dying. My work as a scholar has enabled me to see that even the most intimate dimensions of my childhood-the dissolution of my parents' marriage and my experience living with a single mom-were rooted in larger transformations in gender roles and family life in the closing decades of the twentieth century. My study of history has enabled me to cultivate more compassion and respect for all the people-big and small--who populated my childhood and who had to navigate a changing world. History, at its best, has the power to do that.

Quotes

By Natasha Zaretsky

Following in a long tradition of keen European observers of the United States, British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson has noted a peculiar oscillation that has characterized American nationalism since the Vietnam War. In a world of frenetic media accounts that collapse distinctions between belief, opinion, and fact, and political campaigns that have become more and more vitriolic, public perceptions of the nation's world position since Vietnam have swung back and forth like a pendulum, moving from "alarmism to complacency," from delusions of invulnerability to fears of an imminent deadly threat, and from fantasies of "impotence to omnipotence and back again." Propelling the pendulum is not only the fear of foreign danger, but the question that was asked throughout the 1970s: did the United States possess the will required to protect its national interests? "After Vietnam," Hodgson writes, "it was not the resources that were in question, but the will to use them, and the purposes for which they would be used." From 1968 to 1980, the family gave shape to those debates about the nation that surfaced in the wake of military defeat. Emerging at once as a locus of national injury and a repository of national will, the family was assigned the paradoxical role of both victim and perpetrator in a nationalist discourse that swung back and forth between opposite ends of the pendulum. In one moment, the nation was omnipotent and fortress-like, in the next, vulnerable and endangered. This earlier history has cast a long shadow over the present, and as of this writing, the pendulum has not stopped moving. As we continue to watch it swing back and forth, the family will always be there. -- Natasha Zaretsky in "No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980"

About Natasha Zaretsky

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia, 2005-Present
Area of Research: 20th-century U.S. sociopolitical, history of technology, history of agriculture and rural life, and history of capitalism.
Education: Ph.D. in History and Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.
Major Publications: Shane Hamilton is the author of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton University Press, 2008). He has published articles and reviews in journals including Agricultural History, Business History Review, Enterprise & Society, Reviews in American History, and Technology and Culture. His article, "Cold Capitalism: The Political Ecology of Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice," which appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Agricultural History, won the 2003 Edward E. Everetts Award from the Agricultural History Society. He is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled "Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the American Century." Part of the research for this project will appear in spring 2009 as "Supermarket USA Confronts State Socialism: Airlifting the Technopolitics of Industrial Food Distribution into Cold War Yugoslavia," in Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (MIT Press). Awards: Hamilton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including, among others:
National Science Foundation Scholar's Award, "Supermarket USA: Food, Technology, and Power in the American Century" Award No. 0646662, 2007;
National Endowment for the Humanities, University of Georgia Nominee for Summer Stipend, 2007;
Gilbert C. Fite Award for Best Dissertation in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Society, 2006;
Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History, Business History Conference, 2006;
University of Georgia Alumni Research Foundation, Junior Faculty Research Grant in the Arts and Humanities, 2006;
Miller Center of Public Affairs, Charlottesville, VA, Fellow in History, Public Policy, and American Politics, 2004-2005;
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, Predoctoral Fellowship, 2003-2004;
Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, MA, Graduate Fellowship, 2003-2004;
National Science Foundation, Dissertation Improvement Grant SES-0322268, 2003-2004;
Edward E. Everetts Award for Best Graduate Essay, Agricultural History Society, 2003;
Siegel Prize for Best Essay on Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003;
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sawyer Fellowship for "Modern Times/Rural Places," 2001-2002;
National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention, 2000.
Additional Info:
Hamilton has been featured on Georgia Public Broadcasting's "Georgia Weekly," SIRIUS Radio Network's "Freewheelin'," and WABC-AM's "John Batchelor Show." He will also appear in a documentary film by Nicholas Robespierre, Running Heavy, when that film finally makes its way into art-house cinemas. He also writes op-ed pieces for, among other outlets, the History News Network.

Personal Anecdote

While pursuing a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 2000s I formed a band, The Atomic Harvesters, which we declared to be "Boston's Sexiest Lounge-Country Band." Merging the instrumentation of 1950s-60s urban jazz with the raw simplicity of rural country music from the same period, the Atomic Harvesters drew on diverse musical inspirations, ranging from Hank Williams, Sr. to Billie Holiday to the Modern Jazz Quartet and Merle Haggard. The intellectual inspiration for the band name and concept, however, drew directly on a passage in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State.

On page 272, Scott refers to Davis Meltzer's artistic rendering of the "farm of the future" in the February 1970 issue of National Geographic magazine. In the image, two men operate a semi-autonomous farm of enormous scale from a glass-topped dome equipped with a supercomputer. Beef cattle are arrayed in what seems to be a "cattle condo," architecturally not unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Guggenheim Museum, except that cattle munching on antibiotic-laced feedstuffs fill the places of tourists and art critics. The farmer seated at the supercomputer operates an atomic-powered harvester, processing a grain field of near-infinite size into the foodstuffs of a consumer-driven economy. Meltzer's image channels modernist Charles Scheeler's paintings, in which individual workers are dwarfed by the machines that surround them in techno-pastoralist landscapes. Meltzer's imagery borders on the surreal, yet evokes a very realistic world in which the Jeffersonian vision of independent farmers working the land with simple tools has been subsumed by the technocracy of late-twentieth-century capitalism.

Meltzer's image provided the inspiration for my band's name, as well as the title of one of our instrumentals, "Cattle Condo." James Scott's critique of high modernist agriculture, meanwhile, laid a cornerstone for my ongoing intellectual interest in the technology, political economy, social realities, and political culture of rural Americans living in a world of industrial agriculture, hypercapitalist consumerism, and profound antistatism-a world that I described in my first book, Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy.

Meltzer's 1970 imagining of the "farm of the future" and Jim Scott's critique of high modernism focused on the vast material, political, and ideological gulfs separating urbanites from rural residents in the modern era. I sought in Trucking Country, by contrast, to show how the wrenching transformations of rural life in the mid- twentieth century were deeply intertwined with broader transformations in U.S. politics, economic realities, cultural beliefs, and social experiences. By thus contextualizing the historical experiences of rural Americans- even those country-music-lovin' neopopulist truckers who self-identified as members of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority"-I demonstrated how rural workers helped to construct, from the 1930s through the 1970s, the economic realities and ideologies of neoliberalism that permeated the entire nation by the 1980s. These rural independent truckers, working in a world of industrial agribusiness, suburban supermarkets, and high modernist agricultural policymakers, found themselves with few choices other than to accept a "Wal-Mart economy"-decades before Wal-Mart became one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations.

I no longer have time to play much guitar, and the members of the Atomic Harvesters have spread to the four corners of the world. My fascination with the "farm of the future" and the rural people of the past, however, continues to drive my research-particularly as I work on my second book, "Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the American Century." There are far more country music songs about trucks than there are about supermarkets, so I unfortunately will not be integrating my musical interests and my historical research as tightly as I did in my first book. Unless, of course, I revive the Atomic Harvesters and write a couple of lounge-country tunes about U.S. supermarkets being airlifted into Yugoslavia, Italy, and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. If anyone knows of a rhyme for "Yugoslavia," I'm all ears.

Quotes

By Shane Hamilton

Every truck stop in the nation sells belt buckles that proudly declare: "Independent Truckers Move America." In the following pages I reveal the motto's deeper meaning, showing how agribusiness relied upon independent truckers to shift American capitalism into overdrive, introducing lean and mean business strategies and cultivating a culture of economic conservatism welcomed by both rural producers and suburban consumers. On country stretches of asphalt, in rural food factories, and in supermarket warehouses and shopping aisles, agribusinesses sowed the seeds of the anti-statist market populism that defined late-twentieth-century capitalism. Though it may seem surprising to link the country culture of trucking to the collapse of economic liberalism in America's post-WWII consumer economy, we might do well to pay heed to the words of country musician Del Reeves. As he twanged in his 1968 jukebox hit, "looking at the world through a windshield" helps put "everything in a little bit different light." -- Shane Hamilton in "Trucking Country"

About Shane Hamilton

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stanford University, 2004-Present
Area of Research: Late Modern European History, with particular interest in nineteenth and twentieth-century France and the history of French colonialism and imperialism. Modern French political and cultural history; Colonialism and Imperialism; religious missionaries; French republicanism; French national identity; Indochina, Madagascar, Tahiti and the Marquesas.
Education: Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley, 2002
Major Publications: Daughton is the author of An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback, 2008); Winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association; Winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, French Colonial Historical Society; A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2007. In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World, co-edited with Owen White (a collection of thirteen articles, currently under review with Oxford University Press). Daughton is currently working on Imperial Hardships: The Politics of Suffering in the Rise and Fall of the French Empire (book length project in progress), and Humanity So Far Away: International Organizations, European Empires, and Modern Humanitarianism (book project in progress) Daughton is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "When Argentina Was 'French': Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires," Journal of Modern History 80 (December 2008): 831-864; "Documenting Colonial Violence: The International Campaign Against Forced Labor during the Interwar Years," Revue de l'Histoire de la Shoah, No. 189 (October, 2008); "Recasting Pigneau de Béhaine: French Missionaries and the Politics of Colonial History," in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds.), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); "A Colonial Affair?: Dreyfus and the French Empire," Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 31: 3 (Fall 2005): 469-84; "Kings of the Mountains: Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina," Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 25: 3/4 (2001): 185-217; Reprinted in Eric Jennings (ed.), French Colonial Indochina (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), and "Sketches of the Poilu's World: Trench Cartoons from the Great War," in Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays (eds.), World War I and the Cultures of Modernity (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). Awards: Daughton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
George Louis Beer Prize (for best book on any aspect of European international history), American Historical Association, 2007;
Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize (for best book of the year), French Colonial Historical Society, 2007;
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, 2006-2007 (Declined);
Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University, 2002-2004;
Pew Charitable Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center on Religion and Democracy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2002-2003 (Declined);
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 2001-2002;
Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2000-2001;
Fellowship and Travel Stipend, Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego, 2000-2001;
Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fellowship, 2000-2001 (Declined);
John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Prize, American Catholic Historical Association, 2000;
J. William Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, France, 1998-1999;
Dean's Fellow in the Humanities, Stanford University, 2008-2010;
John Philip Coghlan Fellow, Stanford University, 2006-2008;
William and Flora Hewlett Endowment Fund Fellowship, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, 2005;
Course Development Grant, Program in Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2005;
Townsend Humanities Center Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley, 2000-2001 (Declined);
Humanities Research Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 2000-2001;
Graduate Division Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley, 1999-2000;
Henry Morse Stephens Memorial Travel Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1999-2000;
Sidney Hellman Ehrman Travel Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1999-2000;
Allan Sharlin Memorial Fellowship, Institute for International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1998-1999 Social Science Research Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1997;
Research Grant, Center for German and European Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1997;
Mellon Summer Research Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1997;
Sather Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley, 1995-1996;
France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, annual conference funding for "Terror and the Making of Modern Europe: Transatlantic Perspectives on the History of Violence / Rencontres Transatlantiques sur l'Histoire de la Violence," in collaboration with Sciences-Po (Paris), April 17-19, 2008 ($60,000);
Center for European Studies, funding for "Terror and the Making of Modern Europe: Transatlantic Perspectives on the History of Violence," in collaboration with Sciences-Po (Paris), April 17-19, 2008 ($5,000);
Research Unit of the Division of Languages, Cultures, and Literature, for the French Culture Workshop, Stanford University, Annual Funding for 2005-06, 2006-07 ($10,000);
Mellon Workshop Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, for the French Culture Workshop, Annual Funding for 2003-04, 2004-05; 2006-08 ($8500 p.a.).
Additional Info:
Daughton has conducted archival research in France, Italy, and Tahiti, and he was a visiting fellow in the Faculty of History at the National University of Vietnam, Hanoi.
Co-Director, Stanford French Culture Workshop, Stanford Humanities Center, 2003-Present;
Book Review Advisory Panel, H-France, 2006-present.
Co-organizer, with Jean-François Sirinelli, Sciences-Po (Paris), of the conference, "Terror and the Making of Modern Europe: Transatlantic Perspectives on the History of Violence," Stanford University, April 2008.

Personal Anecdote

The best thing about being an historian, in my opinion, is working in archives. The research for my book, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914, took me to almost twenty archives on four continents. They ranged from the high-ceilinged reading room of the Archives Nationales in Paris to a small table next to a photocopy machine in a cramped office of the Papeete, Tahiti archdiocese.

Non-historians often ask me what exactly I do at the archives. For me, it is a little like digging through the old papers left in someone's long abandoned desk. An average box or bundle of documents - at least the ones I look at most - is often a hodgepodge of letters, handwritten notes, receipts, a calling card from some forgotten visitor, official reports, and faded photographs. Spending hours sifting through dead people's refuse is not for everyone. But at no point in researching or writing do I feel more connected to my subject than in the archives.

There is something undeniably voyeuristic about archival work: reading letters never meant to be read by outsiders, seeing pictures not taken for posterity's sake, perusing someone else's secrets and exposing their plans. These remnants present great puzzles to be unraveled. Who were these people whose lives we now look into? How did they see their world, and how did they organize their vision of it? Trying to answer such questions inevitably requires looking for more and more sources, opening wider the cast of human characters, complicating the plot, drawing you in like a good mystery. The probing historian can discover things about historical figures - their motives, insecurities and contradictions - that they themselves may have denied or hidden from friends and loved ones.

Archives are also much more than repositories of documents. They are often themselves places where memories of the past come alive - sometimes in astonishing ways. One archivist, for example, at a religious archive in Paris assured me that, had the Catholic missionaries of the South Pacific failed to spread Christianity in the nineteenth century, the cannibal Polynesians would have eaten one another into extinction.

On another occasion, a French woman working in the departmental archives in Tahiti told me that she did not know why so many people wrote critically of colonialism when it was obvious that the Tahitians were happy to have gained the great cultural traditions of the French. While this struck me as a misguided assessment, I was equally surprised to have an octogenarian Vietnamese historian at the national archives in Hanoi wax nostalgic about the 1930s when he and his friends spoke French and devoured the latest books and music from Paris.

I have been in archives where I saw a rat scurry across the floor. I have unearthed worms gnawing through documents. I have seen people weep, sleep, and get angry in archives. I have even seen an archivist pass out from too much drinking at lunchtime. But I have never been bored in an archive. It is a place where Faulkner's often quoted observation - "The past is never dead. It's not even past." - takes on real meaning.

Quotes

By James Patrick Daughton

By examining the array of factors that shaped the civilizing mission, this book argues that what is often called French "colonial ideology" - the ideas behind, motivations for, and implementation of programs designed to reform and develop colonial societies - was in fact much less an extension of revolutionary republican values than a set of individual projects defined by degrees of dissent, debate, competition, and collaboration between people both at home and abroad. Differences of opinion over strategies of colonizing... forced administrators, missionaries, colonists, local inhabitants, and others to present, critique, and defend plans for expansion and control.... The "civilizing" policies ultimately adopted were neither strictly republican nor Catholic. Instead, they were shaped by the anxieties and aspirations of a variety of French men and women faced with the challenge of living with one another and ruling large indigenous populations. -- James Patrick Daughton in "An Empire Divided"

About James Patrick Daughton