GOOD NEWS BULLETIN
January 2002
FLASH!! PRIZE!!! FLASH!!
Prof. ERIC ARNESEN, Chair
of the Department, was honored at this month's AHA Convention as the winner
of the 2001 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association and the
Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History for the year's best
book in Diaspora History.
PRIZES! MORE PRIZES!
On a related AHA Prize note: the History Division of the Oak Park River Forest
High School won the Beveridge Family History Teaching Award for the journal
of student writing, Interpretations, which they have published for 15 years.
Congratulations are due to UIC History Department alums and OPRFHS teachers
who work on the journal: MICHAEL AVERBACH (division chair), STAN FAUST and PHILIP
PRALE.
MORE AHA NEWS.
UIC was well represented on the program of the AHA Convention in San Francisco
earlier this month.
Prof. DEBORAH GRAY WHITE of Rutgers University (Ph.D., 1979) chaired a session
on African-American Women's Philosophy and Activism, 1890-1930.
Prof. GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER of Emporia State University (Ph.D., 1996) gave a
paper on "Conservatism's (First) Identity Crisis: From Old Right to New, 1948-1955."
Prof. ARNOLD HIRSCH of the University of New Orleans (Ph.D., 1978) chaired a
session on "Color Lines: Racial Frontiers in the Modern American Metropolis."
Prof. WENDY PLOTKIN (Ph.D., 1999also see below) commented at the same session.
Prof. MARGARET STROBEL (see below also) took part on a panel for a Brown-Bag
Session on "What Makes a Good Program Proposal."
Prof. PETER D'AGOSTINO (History and Catholic Studies) gave a paper, "When Woodrow
Wilson Held the Keys to Rome: Rethinking Catholicism in the United States from
a Global Perspective." He also presided at a session on "Constructing and Contesting
Racial and Ethnic Borders in American Religion, 1880-1930."
Prof. MICHAEL PERMAN chaired a session on "The Frontiers of American Reconstruction."
Prof. RICHARD JENSEN (emeritus) presided at a session on "Morals, Memory, and
Marketing: Selected Presidential Case Studies." At the same session, Prof. JOHN
MORELLO (Ph.D., 1998) of DeVry Institute of Technology presented "Hard Case,
Soft Sell: GOP Fundraising and the Election of Harding."
Prof. LEON FINK chaired a session on "The Death of the Textbook?"
Prof. GERALD DANZER (emeritus) was a panelist at the same session.
Prof. RICK FRIED gave a paper, "The Ugly American and the1960 Election."
At the Jan. 24-25 graduate student conference sponsored by UIC's Institute for
the Humanities, "Covering New Ground: Explorations in Humanities Research,"
History graduate students played a prominent role. CHERYL GANZ was a member
of the Conference Steering Committee.
On Jan. 24, in a panel moderated by Prof. Susan Levine, SARA ROSE spoke on "Facial
Vision and Blind Veterans: Post-World War II Narratives of Rehabilitation in
the United States and JOE LAPSLEY delivered "The Playboy Philosophy and its
Critics: Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Early 1960's."
On Jan. 25, ANNETTE CHAPMAN-ADISHO spoke on "Portrait of a Patriot: Jean Baptiste Volfius, Constitutional Bishop of the Cote-d'Or."
Prof. GREG ANDERSON was a guest on Milt Rosenberg's Extension 720 (WGN) on January 22, talking about ancient Greece.
Prof. ERIC ARNESEN's Brotherhoods of Color - see above - came out this month in paperback (Harvard). He also authored the Scholarly Controversy essay, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination" in International Labor and Working-Class History (Fall 2001) and "Assessing Whiteness Scholarship: A Reply to James Barrett, David Brody, Eric Foner, Barbara Fields, Victoria Hattam, and Adolph Reed" in the same issue. The essay was the subject of a symposium held at NYU in November as well as of a session at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cosponsored by the Historical Society, in December. His review of Thaddeus Russell's Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class appeared in the Chicago Tribune Book Section of Oct. 28. He was also a discussant at a book roundtable on Bruce Nelson's Divided We Stand at the Social Science History Association Convention in November and chaired and commented on a panel on "Liberalism and Labor" at the North American Labor History Conference in October.
Grad student EDWARD BEHREND-MARTINEZ has a chapter, "An Early Modern Spanish 'Divorce Court' and the Rhetoric of Matrimony," in a forthcoming book (2002) Feminists at Work, Ann J. Cruz, ed (Juan de la Cuesta Press).
Prof. BRUCE CALDER published
"The Role of the Catholic Church and Other Religious Institutions in the Guatemalan
Peace Process, 1980-1996" in The Journal of Church and State (Autumn
2001).
TADEUSZ DEBSKI (Ph.D., 1998) had his book, A Battlefield of Ideas: Nazi Concentration
Camps and Their Polish Prisoners, published by East European Monographs
(Boulder) in 2001.
Prof. RICK FRIED was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch regarding
the baroque patriotism at this year's Super Bowl. He allowed that, since the
Packers were eliminated by this newspaper's home team, he didn't much care,
and was thus not too insightful.
Prof. MEL HOLLI's The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt
and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling comes out in February under the
Palgrave/St. Martin's imprint. His "Emil Hurja and the Winter War's Impact on
American Isolationism" appears in the Winter issue of New World Finn.
His1993 book, The American Mayor, was cited in an end-of-term appraisal
of the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani by reporter Sam Roberts in the December 31
New York Times.
Grad student ANA MARIA KAPELUSZ-POPPI's article "The Primer Congreso de Higiene
Rural and the Project for Socialist Medicine in Mexico: Morelia, 1935" was published
by The Americas in its October 2001 issue.
Prof. RICHARD R. JOHN has been elected to the Advisory Council of the Society for Historians for the Early American Republic. In November he gave a paper on the political economy of the 19th-century US telegraph industry before the American Society for Legal History. He has been quoted in the Boston Globe and the New York Times on topics ranging from grade inflation at Harvard to historical parallels for the recent anthrax scare. On 6 September he appeared on "Odyssey" with Gretchen Hilfrich (slavery and the U. S. Constitution) and Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg (re Robert REMINI's book on Andrew Jackson's Indian wars). On 9 January he discussed plans to privatize the U. S. Postal Service on Seattle's NPR affiliate.
Prof. RICHARD LEVY has signed a contract with ABC-Clio to serve as general editor of a two-volume Encyclopedia of Antisemitism, Anti-Jewish Prejudice and Persecution. The contract, he notes, is sensationally lucrative until broken down into an hourly wage, whereupon the amount looks far less than impressive.
The OAH is flying graduate student RAYMOND LOHNE to Washington to serve as photographer at its annual Convention.
Prof. JOHN MORELLO (Ph.D., 1998), DeVry Institute, has been signed by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers to provide material for an upcoming edition of The Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology.
Prof. GUITY NASHAT has been invited to participate on two panels: on fundamentalism and women in the Islamic world, at the World Economic Forum (New York, Jan.30-Feb 3, 2002); and on women in the Middle East at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (March 26).
WENDY PLOTKIN (Ph.D., 1999), currently Visiting Assistant Research Professor at the UIC Library, is the author of "'Hemmed In': Racial Restrictive Covenants and Deed Restrictions in Chicago in the World War II Era," JOURNAL OF THE ILLINOIS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (Spring, 2001). Her "Electronic Texts in the Historical Profession: Perspectives from Across the Scholarly Spectrum" appears in Orville Vernon Burton, ed., Computing in the Social Sciences (University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Grad student ERIC SMITH has accepted a full-time job beginning January 2 as a researcher and organizer with Teamsters Local 705 (whose headquarters are over on Ashland Avenue).
Prof. PEG STROBEL, Interim Director of Hull-House Museum reports that the Museum's third annual conference, "Hull-House Magazine and the Chicago Cultural Front, 1930-1945," will take place April 12-13. For details check their website.
CHRIS YOUNG (Ph.D., 2001)
reviewed George Washington Reconsidered (edited by Don Higginbotham)
for the Maryland Historical Magazine.