News
Listen to the History Department's own Brian Balogh discuss the history of the State of the Union address with his Backstory co-host Ed Ayers on NPR's Here & Now. You can fiind the recording here.
The journal Europe Now has recently launched a Campus Spotlight feature on UVa, which includes a "first response reading list" with reference to "Shock and Outrage" and the Backstory podcast on Charlottesville. This feature was put together with the help of Corcoran Department of History faculty members Manuela Achilles and Kyrill Kunakhovich, as well as Janet Horne, who is associated with the department. Check out the stories here!
Congratulations to Karen Parshall, Commonwealth Professor of Mathematics and History, on receiving the 2018 Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize! This award is given by the AMS in recognition of "notable exposition and exceptional scholarship in the history of mathematics." The award was granted on January 11, 2018 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.
The partisan divide between Americans is one of the most significant in the last century, according to an October study by the Pew Research Center. But 50 years ago, divisions were arguably worse. The history department's Brian Balogh recently spoke with Here & Now's Robin Young about the divide in 1968.
Congratulations to department graduate student Mina Lee, who has been accepted to the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Nuclear History Institute. The institute will take place on March 4-10 in Soeul South Korea and is jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center and Kyungnam University. Read more here.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is denying a report from The Washington Post that the Trump administration is prohibiting health officials from using several words, including "fetus," "transgender" and "science-based." Brian Balogh spoke to Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson on the U.S. government's long history of guiding the use of certain words. Listen here.
As more men stand accused of sexual misconduct, many are watching for two words: "I'm sorry." But, according to historians, the public apology is not America's strong suit. From Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton to President Grover Cleveland to Justice Clarence Thomas, Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson explores that history with Brian Balogh and Joanne Freeman from BackStory. Listen to the story here.
Leif Fredrickson, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in May, has been awarded the 2017 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts for his dissertation, “The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Change, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment.” A panel of graduate deans with expertise in humanities and fine arts selected his dissertation from a field of 65 dissertations from institutions throughout the United States and Canada. Read more about the award here.
On Tuesday, 28 November, the students in Waitman Beorn’s class, “Curating the Past,” debuted their exhibition, “Contested Spaces: Examining the Past, Present, and the Forgotten at the University” in the atrium of Nau Hall. The six posters, each of which treats an aspect of the history of UVa, represent the collaborative efforts of six groups of four students. Beorn, who kicked off the event, was followed at the podium by Aswanth Samuel, one of the students in the class who had been elected by his peers to speak, and Mark Edmundson, Professor of English. After the unveiling of the posters, the students fielded questions from the sizeable audience. The posters and their creators are: “Introduction: Contested Spaces” by Olivia Tate, Hannah Hicks, Anna Barr, and Lauren Woodrell; “Changing Names, Changing Values” by Lauren Staton, Lily Snodgrass, Gwynnie Powers, and Teresa Nowalk; “Voids: Spaces of Absence, Loss, and Memory” by Rachel Smith, Olivia Bousquette, Ashwanth Samuel, and Jane Diamond; “Buried Over Time: Cemeteries at UVa” by Liz Feeser, Ellen Adams, Sarah Barbour, and Laila Husain; “Changing Over Time” by Ethan Hyman, Addie Patrick, Ashley Botkin, and Gregroty Lee; and “Who is in Control?” by Maeve Jones, Chad Kamen, Shannon Spence, and Jesse Ginn. The project was sponsored by the University of Virginia Library , the University of Virginia Bicentennial, and Gropen.
View the Project Website
Danielle Bernstein, of the History Distinguished Majors Program, has written an article on the US Housing and Urban Development Department. Read it here: HUD's Problems are Bigger than Ben Carson: The Agency's Problem Isn't Personnel--It's Policy.
Department graduate student Erik Erlandson has written an op-ed for the Washington Post about tax reform and how government bureaucracy serves as a bulwark against hasty deregulation. Read the aritcle here: In Praise of Red Tape.
Delaware University professor Robert Hampel has dedicated his new book Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education (Rowman & Littlefield) to the history department's Michael Holt. Prof. Holt served as Hampel's undergraduate thesis advisor while at Yale. More information about Dr. Hampel's book, including a blurb by the history department's Joseph Kett, is available below and at the publisher's webpage, here.
Robert Hampel’s new book, Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts to
Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), starts with Norman Rockwell’s correspondence school and
ends with Evelyn Wood’s speed reading classes. Along the way he looks at Classic Comics, Paint by
Numbers, shorthand, Cliff Notes, phonetic spelling, Teach for America, three year bachelors degrees,
law school at the YMCA, and other streamlined paths to education.
Tuesday's election was a big night for Democrats, with major victories in Virginia and New Jersey. But as an off-year election, what it says about the state of national politics may be difficult to read. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson talks with Brian Balogh and yale's Joanne Freeman about how the importance of off-year elections has changed. Listen here.
Recent alumnus Frank Cirillo has written an article in response to White House chief of staff John Kelly's statement that the Civil War happened because of a "failure to compromise." Read it here.
A full video of October 11th's "A Recent History of the Alt-Right" conversation with Jamelle Bouie (Slate Magazine), Dahlia Lithwick (Slate Magazine), and Nicole Hemmer (Washington Post and Miller Center) is now available here.
Prof. Balogh has written an Op-Ed for the Washington Post about the Health Care debate. Read it here, "Donald Trump wants Association Health Plans’ to replace Obamacare. But are associations good for the nation’s health?"
Is taking a knee—the intersection of sports, politics and race—a “new” thing? Jennifer Keitt, talks with Brian Balogh about the current war being waged as athletes “take a knee” and once again the colliding of sports, politics and race in America. Listen here.
Professor Brian Balogh spoke to NPR's Jeremy Hobson about the gun control debate from the early days of the American republic. Listen to the segment here.
On October 10, the History Department held a panel on non-academic and non-tenure track jobs. Guest speakers all received their PhDs in a humanities field, and work in a non-academic or non-tenure track position: Matthew Gibson, Executive Director, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; Ed Barnaby, Senior Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs, Arts & Sciences; Nicole Hemmer, Assistant Professor, Miller Center; Eric Brandt, Assistant Director and Editor-in-Chief, University of Virginia Press; James Graham Wilson, Historian, U.S. Department of State; Holly White, Digital Projects Communications Coordinator, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; and Brian Balogh, Professor of History, University of Virginia Corcoran Department of History; Professor at the Miller Center; "Twentieth-Century History Guy" at BackStory Radio.
View video of the panel here.
Congratulations to Professor Erik Linstrum, whose book, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard, 2016 )has won the American Historical Association's 2017 George Louis Beer Prize for the best book in European international history since 1895! Read more about the prize here.