Good News Bulletin
March 2001

HARD NEWS. Per decision of the editorial board, the GNB will occasionally feature fast-breaking headline news before the usual alphabetical listings of activities.  We open with a summary of salient items in the latest AHA newsletter.  In this edition, we also bring to you a first, a piece of
speculative investigative journalism.  Inquiring historical minds want to know.

The recent AHA Perspectives carried several items pertinent to members of this Department:

*One of this year's three winners of the American  Historical Association Awards for Scholarly Distinction, presented at the January 2001 Annual Meeting, was Prof. Emeritus ROBERT V. REMINI. The citation begins:  "Combining meticulous research with engaging prose, Robert V. Remini has carved out a remarkable niche in American historical scholarship. Read by specialists and the general public alike, Remini's name is definitively linked with Andrew Jackson and his age." And so on, at some length.

*On the front page of Perspectives, the first paragraph reviewed the opening plenary session devoted to the convention's theme "Practices of Historical Narrative": "DEIRDRE McCLOSKEY (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) began by discussing her transition from an economic view of the past to a more humanistic study and presentation of the past."

*Toward the back of the book, the list of committees noted that PROF. SONYA MICHEL (History and Women's and Gender Studies) is a member of the Committee on International Historical Activities.

*BOOKS recently published:

Prof. ERIC ARNESEN, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Harvard University Press).

Prof. KATRIN SCHULTHEISS, Bodies and Souls: Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France, 1880-1922 (Harvard University Press).
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*COINCIDENCE?  The 2nd edition of Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, edited by Prof. LEON FINK, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin.  This joins its chronological predecessor in the same series, Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Michael Perman, editor (2nd ed., 1998), and Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia, James Cracraft, editor. The financial press has speculated whether this constitutes enough leverage for a takeover of the series.

And in other news…..

Prof. ERIC ARNESEN published an essay entitled "Race and Labour in a Southern U.S. Port: The Case of New Orleans, 1860-1930," in S. Davies, C. Davis, D. De Vries, L. Heerma Van Voss, L. Hesselink, and K. Weinhauer, eds., Comparative International History of Dock Labor, c. 1790s-1970s (Edinburgh: Ashgate, 2000); his "A Life Against the Grain," a review of David Levering Lewis’s W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Books on December 10, 2000). His other recent reviews include August Sartorius von Waltershausen, The Workers' Movement in the United States, 1879-1885, edited by David Montgomery and Marcel van der Linden, in Labor History (May 2000) and African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, edited by V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil, in the Journal of Southern History (August 2000).

Ph.D. Candidate EVA BECSE’s paper "Peyton Rous (1879-1970), Cancer Research as Contested Knowledge ," has been slated on the program of the 2001 meeting of the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology, to be held 6-7 April at The George Washington University.

RAYMOND M. BROD (Ph.D., 1999), cartographer at UIC, gave a paper on December 1 at the Illinois State Historical Society symposium in Springfield on John Melish’s 1818 Map of Illinois/Political Regions at the Dawn of Statehood.

On January 20, 2001, PAUL BUELOW presented a paper entitled, "George Washington and the Doctors: Medicine in Revolutionary America," as part of a lecture series at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, Western Springs, Illinois. At the UIC College of Medicine on January 23 he presented a talk on the early history of Chicago hospitals for the College's History of Medicine Interest Group.

Ph.D. candidate JUSTIN COFFEY will present his paper, "Academic Freedom at the University of Illinois under the Clabaugh Act," at the Missouri Valley Historical Conference on March 10.

An August 1999 Washington Post article by Prof. MARA DODGE (Ph.D., 1997) was quoted in a January 29, 2001 article in the same paper regarding President Bush’s choice to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.  She termed his prediction of 270,000 new juvenile superpredators on American streets by 2010 a myth.

Prof. LEON FINK will give the Missouri Valley History Conference Luncheon address (March 9): “How the Dead Organize the Living: A Mayan Imprint on American Labor History.”

Prof. RICK FRIED has been invited to lecture on “The Domestic Cold War” in July as part of a National History Day institute sponsored by the University of Maryland and co-hosted by the National Archives and the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Grad student CHERYL GANZ was interviewed on WTTW’s “Chicago Stories” for their show “Break in the Clouds: Chicago's 1933 World's Fair." She received a travel award from the Lemelson Center of the National Museum of American History in Washington for December-January.  Her “Science Advancing Mankind” is the cover essay in Technology and Culture’s October, 2000 issue.

On February 24, Prof. RICHARD R. JOHN delivered a public lecture for the Historical Society at Northwestern University on "Whence the Information Age? Writing the History of Communications in a Postmodern World." On February 27, he joined Duke University historian Alexander Keyssar in a roundtable discussion on the history of voting rights in the United States for WBEZ's
morning radio program, "Odyssey."

Ph. D. candidate JIM KOLLENBROICH presented a paper entitled "Anti-Modern Modernism: The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the Homosexual Rights Movement in the Weimar Republic" at the 10th Annual Plesur Conference: “Different Paths?: The Development of Great Britain, Germany and the West” at the SUNY Buffalo on March 3, 2001.

Ph.D. candidate ANTHONY RAMA MARAVILLAS will give a paper, “The Partisan Reviewed:  Richard Nixon’s Lost Crises” at the Missouri Valley History Conference on March 8.  On the same panel is DAVID VEENSTRA (see January’s GNB).

HIROMI MIZUNO, who received her MA at UIC in 1995 in History, with a concentration in Women's Studies, will start as an Assistant Professor in Japanese History at the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities next fall.

Prof. GUITY NASHAT appeared on “Chicago Tonight” (WTTW) on February 8 for a panel discussion on the Palestinian-Israeli situation. 

GEORGE S. PABIS, Assistant Professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College, authored the essay "Subduing Nature through Engineering: Caleb G. Forshey and the Levees-only Policy, 1851-1881," in Craig E. Colton, ed., Transforming New Orleans and its Environs: Centuries of Change (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

Prof. MICHAEL PERMAN was heard on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday.

Prof. Emeritus ROBERT V. Remini’s forthcoming Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars will be the History Book Club’s main monthly selection when the book is published in July.

Prof. DAN SMITH presented a paper, "Seasoning, Disease Environment, and Conditions of Exposure: New York Union Army Regiments and Soldiers," at a conference on "Health and labor force participation over the life cycle: Evidence from the past," at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. on February 2, 2001.  On March 5 he gave a paper on  "Disease and Death in the Union Army during the American Civil War" as part of the Minnesota Population Center Seminar Series.

Ph.D. candidate MAREK SUSZKO will give a paper, “Making of a Socialist Nation: Provincial Poland, 1945-1946,” at the Sixth Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities at Columbia University on April 5-7.

Prof. JACKIE WOLF (Ph.D., 1998) has been Assistant Professor of the history of medicine in the Dept. of Social Medicine at the Ohio University College of Medicine and an adjunct Assistant Professor in OU’s Women Studies Program.  Ohio State University Press will publish her book Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries in fall 2001 as part of their Women and Health Cultural and Social Perspectives series. Her article "'Let Us Have More Mother-Fed Babies': Early Twentieth-Century Breastfeeding Campaigns in Chicago and Minneapolis," appeared in the Journal of Human Lactation in June 1999. Her "'Mercenary Hirelings' or 'A Great Blessing'?: Doctors' and Mothers' Conflicted Perceptions of Wet Nurses and the Ramifications for Infant Feeding in Chicago, 1871-1961," was published in the Fall 1999 Journal of Social History.  And her "The Social and Medical Construction of Lactation Pathology" appeared in Women and Health in Fall 2000.

      She has had numerous speaking engagements: before the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (Oct., 1999 in San Diego); at the (Sept., 2000) annual Planned Parenthood meeting in Athens, OH; at the annual (Nov., 2000) Annual Art of Breastfeeding Conference in Chapel Hill, NC.  She presented the paper "'Mighty Glad to Gasp in the Gas': The Historical Misuse of Anesthesia in Childbirth," at the conference “Writing the Past, Claiming the Future: Women and Gender in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology” in St. Louis (Oct., 2000). And she organized the panel "Perceiving Dangerous Environments: The Urban-Rural Divide and the Construction of Disease" for the annual American Society for Environmental History meeting in Tucson in April 1999 and presented the paper "Unnatural Environment, Unnatural Sustenance: Feeding Infants in the Late-Nineteenth Century City."

Ph.D. candidate KARL WOOD, in Germany on a DAAD research scholarship, presented a paper entitled “Heilsames Wasser in einer Heilen Welt: Ärzte, Professionalisierung und das Büürgertum im deutschen Kurort des 19. Jahrhundert” [“Healing waters in a world in order: doctors, professionalization and the bourgeoisie in the 19th century German health spa”] at the University of Tüübingen Colloquium for Modern Historical Research, in March, 2001. He has also been invited to participate in a conference on modern German history sponsored by the Stiftung Bundesprääsident Theodor Heuss Haus at the Schiller Historical Manuscript Archive in Marbach  in June, 2001.

Ph.D. Candidate CHRISTOPHER YOUNG has received a short-term fellowship from the Monticello Foundation's International Center for Jeffersonian Studies. He has also had a piece accepted for publication by the Maryland Historical Magazine.