Late-Breaking News:

Prof. ARNOLD HIRSCH (UIC Ph.D., 1978) of the University of New Orleans has the extraordinary distinction of having the bulk of the March 2003 issue of the JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY devoted to discussions and appreciations of his work by senior, distinguished urban historians. The focus, of course, is on his book The Making of the Second Ghetto, originally published in 1983, based on his dissertation. Arnie has an essay of his own in the issue: “Second Thoughts on the Second Ghetto.” It is hoped that none of this will distract him from his chief role, that of guide and restaurant critic for UIC visitors to the Big Easy.

Another unusual distinction was won by undergrad History major RENA PATEL. She has been selected by USA TODAY to the All-USA College Academic Team. Another UIC student from Biological Sciences was also named to the first team and third (in Engineering and BIOS) made the Third Team. Dean Stanley Fish notes that the only other school to place two students on the first team was Yale; the only other school to have three students honored was Harvard. The Department extends its proud congratulations to Rena.

Graduate Student Conference, UIC Institute for the Humanities: A bunch of History grad students were selected (by a steering committee that included SARA ROSE of History) to take part in the Feb. 27-28 Graduate Student Conference sponsored by the Humanities Institute. They and their topics are:

• JOHN REDA, “Illinois Slavery Reconsidered: The Significance of the Northwest Ordinance.”
• WILLIAM P. MALONE, “Roots of Revolutionary Religious Social Thought in Pre-1954 Guatemala.”
• AARON MAX BERKOWITZ, “‘Now He Understands the Game’: IWW Political Cartoons and Political Action, 1905-1922.”
• JEFF HELGESON, “‘Put on Your Best Bib and Tucker’: Respectability and Equality in the Chicago Urban League, 1944-1953.”

Missouri Valley History Conference: A contingent of UIC people captured control of this recent conference in Omaha. Prof. LEON FINK chaired a session on U.S. Socialism in the 20th Century. UIC grad students who presented papers were:

• JOSHUA SALZMAN: “The Tides of Liberalism: The 1889 Washington State Constitutional Convention Tidelands Debate.”
• SARAH ROSE: “Not the Way to Build a Better Man: Disabled World War II Veterans and the GI Bill at the University of Illinois.”
• JEFF HELGESON: “Put on Your Best Bibb and Tucker:” Respectability and Equality in the Chicago Urban League, 1944-1953.”
• MARK BULLOCK, “No Place for a ‘Lady’: The Narrative of Female Factory Workers in the Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago Press.”
• LAUREN BRAUN, “‘To Make Her Waste Places Blossom as the Rose’: Agriculture, Industry, and the Immigrationists’ Vision for the New South.”
  THOMAS PERRIN: “Progressives in the Board Room: The Influence of Settlement Life on Industrial Leadership.”

***********************************
OTHER NEWS OF THE DEPARTMENT:

Prof. ERIC ARNESEN edited a special issue of Cobblestone (Feb., 2003), a magazine for 4th and 5th graders, on the Underground Railroad and anti-slavery movement and contributed a piece on the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. In the Chicago Tribune Sunday Book section over the past four months he has published "Race in America, Past and Present" (a review of Stephan Talty’s Mulatto America on February 2, 2003); "A Civic Gender Gap" (a review of Maureen Flanagan’s Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 on November 17, 2002), "Agendas for Equality" (a review of the reissue of Rayford W. Logan’s classic What the Negro Wants on September 15, 2002); and he has published "Rethinking the Movement," a review of J. Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma in The Nation on December 16, 2002. He presented a paper at the Conference on Law and the Disappearance of Class in the Twentieth Century (Univ. of Pennsylvania) in November on “The Strike through the Courts: Race, Law, and Labor in Mid-Twentieth Century America.” He organized and spoke at “Labor in the Black Metropolis: Chicago’s Untold Stories,” sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library and the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies.

Grad student ROBERT ARNOLDT has been named Associate Director of the Center for Education and Reconciliation in Southeast Asia [CERSEA] sponsored by Barat College of DePaul University. The official opening of the Center takes place on April 7th in the College's Richer Gallery­accompanied by a photography show hung by the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. CERSEA is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to fostering multicultural understanding of the nations in East and Southeast Asia and the historical relationship of the United States with those nations, including further understanding of the Vietnam war. The Center promotes the process of reconciliation and the development of peaceful relations and harmony through a variety of programs emphasizing the role of education.

The March 9 Chicago Tribune carried a lengthy, favorable review of Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois by Prof. ROGER BILES (UIC Ph.D., 1981) of East Carolina University.

Prof. JOHN D’EMILIO (History and Gender and Women’s Studies) reports that his collection of essays, The World Turned, has WON the Editor's Choice Award of the Lambda Literary Foundation. The award is "designed to recognize a book of major significance in gay and lesbian publishing." In April he will give the banquet address at the annual conference of the Peace Studies Society. His work was also reviewed in the recent New York Review of Books.

Prof. MARA DODGE of Westfield State College (UIC Ph.D., 1997) has published "Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind:: A Study of women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835-2000 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).

Grad student ROBERT E. HUNTER contributed a chapter titled “Who’s in Charge Here? Technology and the Presidency in Fail-Safe (1964) and Colossus (1970) to the forthcoming book Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Collins and John E. O’Connor (University Press of Kentucky).

Prof. ROBERT JOHNSTON was on “Odyssey” with Eric Arnesen on Jan. 21, talking about “The Rhetoric of Class Warfare.” He gave a talk to the Medical Humanities and Social Science Program of the U of I College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign on Feb 25 entitled “Current Anti-Vaccination Movements in Historical Perspective.”

ANTHONY RAMA MARAVILLAS (Ph.D., 2001), now teaching at Columbia College, gave a paper at the recent Missouri Valley History Conference titled “What Daddy Did in the War: The Philippine Scouts, Bataan, the Death March, and Beyond.”

Prof. GEORGE PABIS (Ph.D., 1996) of Georgia Perimeter College will have his article, "Delaying the Deluge: The Engineering Debate over Flood Control on the Lower Mississippi River, 1846-1861," reprinted in Antebellum Louisiana, Volume IV, part of an anthology for the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. This volume will be published by the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Prof. DOMINIC PACYGA of Columbia College (UIC Ph.D., 1981) is one of three speakers for the opening session, "Making Our World a Good Place to Grow Old," of the 2003 Joint Conference of the National Council on the Aging/American Society on Aging on March 13, 2003. Ten days later he is scheduled to visit Vietnam to explore opportunities between Columbia College/Chicago and various Vietnamese institutions. In February he appeared in Chicago Stories: The 1919 Race Riot on WTTW.

WENDY PLOTKIN (Ph.D., 1999) has accepted a tenure-track job at Arizona State University for next fall. For her first two years she will teach one course (in post-1945 U.S. History) per term while she develops showcase courses which integrate multimedia and Internet technology/ literacy into the curriculum. She will work with her colleagues to incorporate these elements into their courses and will introduce it into undergraduate methods courses.

On February 3, the National Endowment for the Humanities named Prof. Emeritus ROBERT REMINI as the first annual “HEROES OF HISTORY" LECTURER. He delivered his lecture on February 18 at the White House at a ceremony which is part of the NEH’s “We the People” initiative, which is aimed at strengthening teaching, study and understanding of American history and civics. The title of Bob’s lecture is “Ordinary Heroes: Founders of Our Republic.”

Prof. Emeritus LEO SCHELBERT published “Glimpses of an Ethnic Mentality: Six German Swiss Texts of Migration-Related Folksongs," in Land Without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German America, edited by Philip Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel (Madison, Wisconsin: Max Kade Institute for German American Studies, University of Wisconsin, 2002).

Prof. GREG SCHNEIDER of Emporia State University (Ph.D., 1996) received promotion to Associate Professor and tenure at Emporia State University. His edited book, Conservatism in America Since 1930: A Reader will be published in July 2003 by NYU Press. His essay, "Conservatives and the Reagan Presidency," was published in Richard Conley, ed., Reassessing the Reagan Presidency (University Press of America, 2003). He is serving this academic year as a member of the editorial committee of the University Press of Kansas.

Prof. KATRIN SCHULTHEISS reviwed Mary Louise Roberts’s Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France in the March 9 book review section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune.

Prof. PEG STROBEL has agreed to serve on the selection committee of the AHA’s Gutenberg-e competition. This year’s theme is Women’s History and Gender History. Gutenberg-e aims at promoting “the creation of a new kind of scholarly book, an electronic or ‘e-book,’” which can exploit the possibilities of the Internet. The deadline for the competition is Sept. 1, and recent Ph.D.s and independent scholars are invited to apply.

Prof. CAROL TSANG’s book, War and Faith: Ikko Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan, has been accepted for publication by the Harvard University Asia Center.

Please send your good news to rmfried@uic.edu