PAST PERFECT:

A Newsletter from UIC’s History Department

January 2004

News from the AHA:

• Professor Barbara Ransby was announced as the winner of the AHA’s prestigious Joan Kelly Award for her 2003 book Ella Baker and the Black Political Tradition.

• According to HNN, the panel drawing the largest crowd was the one dealing with the writing of biography.  Panelists were UIC History Department Professor Emeritus Robert Remini, Joseph Ellis, John Lukacs, and Annette Gordon Reed.  See HNN for more details, but Bob, who “had the crowd in stitches,” managed to include martinis and Jesuits in his presentation. an AHA first according to observers.  It has also been announced that Bob will be awarded an honorary degree by Southern Illinois University in May, his fifth such degree!

• A Saturday panel on issues of race, class, and suburban home-ownership was chaired by Professor Roger Biles of East Carolina University (Ph.D., 1981) and offered a paper by Professor Wendy Plotkin (Ph.D., 1999) of Arizona State University on "Cause of Eviction: Being Black" which treated a restrictive covenant case arising in Evanston.

• Professor Robert Johnston presented a paper on "John Brown and Martin Luther King, Jr., as Middle-Class Radicals." Professor James Sack presided over a session on "British 'Popular' Responses to War and Peace with France, 1793-1815."
  
  
• Grad student Amy Schneidhorst gave a paper titled "'We Did It Together': Chicago Women's Resistance to the Vietnam War."
  
  
• Professor Javier Villa-Flores gave a paper entitled "Performing the Inquisitor: Imposture and Identity Fashioning in Seventeenth-Century New Spain."

**********

Other News of the Department:

Professor Eric Arnesen’s collection, The Human Tradition in American Labor History, (which includes his essay on A. Philip Randolph) was published in November by Scholarly Resources. His “Specter of the Black Strikebreaker:

Race, Employment, and Labor Activism in the Industrial Era,” came out in the Winter 2003 issue of Labor History.  He had two pieces in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Books section: an essay on three books about raising children in the

20th Century (Dec. 21) and a review of a book on the Leo Frank lynching (Jan. 11).  In January he gave a talk on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement for City Year Chicago/Americorps Leadership Development Day at Roosevelt University.

Adjunct Professor Fred Beuttler organized a panel for the Social Science History Association, in November and gave several papers, including:  "Defending Democracy Catholic Style: Liberal Catholic Intellectuals and the Making of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, 1938-1960," for that panel; "Envisioning an Urban University: President David Henry and

the Chicago Campus of the University of Illinois," History of Education Society, Evanston, in October; "'To Be Helpful to Any Child': A Brief History of the Institute for Juvenile Research," Institute for Juvenile Research, UIC in September.  In October he gave an invited lecture on "UIC and Urban Planning in Chicago," to a CUPPA class. This term he is teaching  "The History and Philosophy of Medicine," for pre-meds in the

Honors College and also to fourth-year medical students in the College of Medicine.

Grad student Lauren Braun will present a paper at the July OAH regional conference in Atlanta entitled “To solve the race and labor question at one and the same time': Italian Agricultural Colonization as Progressive Reform

in the New South.”

Professor Peter D’Agostino’s article "Orthodoxy or Decorum? Missionary Discourse, Religious Representations, and Historical Knowledge," appeared in Church History 72 (Dec. 2003).

Professor Rick Fried’s chapter on the 1950s appears in Blackwell’s Companion to 20th-Century America (2004), edited by Stephen J. Whitfield.  The focus is historiographical, with special attention (would we kid?) to the Green

Bay Packers.

Arnold Hirsch (Ph.D, 1978), the Herman and Ethel Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies and University Research Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, had a review in the January 11 Chicago Tribune of James S.

Fuerst’s book on the early years of the Chicago Housing Authority.

Professor Emeritus Mel Holli is listed in the latest Marquis’s WHO’S WHO.  His (and Paul Green’s) book, Images of America: World War II Chicago, was recently published by Arcadia.  His article, "Finland's Ski Troops,"

appeared in the December issue of Skiing Heritage: Journal of the Skiing History Association.  He has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Swedish American Historical Society.

Professor Kirk Hoppe’s book, Lords of the Fly: Sleeping Sickness Control in British East Africa, 1900-1960, has just been published by Greenwood. Kirk has also received a Research/Lecturing Fulbright award for 2004 to the African Studies Center at Bayreuth University for his research project "The Multiple Imperialisms of Emin Pasha." His article, "Illegal Living and Planned Communities: Forced Depopulations and Resettlement in British Colonial Sleeping Sickness Control in Tanzania, 1920-1960," has appeared in Mark Dorian and Gillian Rose, eds., _Deterritorialisations'

Revisioning Landscapes and Politics_ (London, 2003).  And his essay "Simulated Safaris: African Wildlife in the US," will appear in the collection From Landscape to Technoscape: Contestations of Space in American Culture (Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt, eds.).  His entry on Nile Perch appears in the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (Routledge, 2003). Later this month he will give the invited Martin Luther King Annual Lecture at the University of Bonn.

In December, Professor Laura Hostetler gave a paper on “China in Eighteenth-Century France: A Mirror for the Monarch?” at a University of Pennsylvania conference on “Crossing the Borders of China: A Conference of

Cross-Cultural Interactions in Honor of Professor Victor H. Mair.

Grad student Cat Jacquet’s submission for the Violence Against Women Research Award (created and funded by the Center for Research on Women and Gender at UIC) received an Honorable Mention in December.

Professor David Jordan’s book, The King's Trial: Louis XVI vs. the French Revolution, will be reissued in February 2004 by the University of California Press in a 25th anniversary edition, with a new Preface.

Grad student Angela Kristen McWilliams will present a paper at the Women and Creativity conference at Marquette University at the end of March.

Professor Dominic Pacyga (Ph.D., 1981) of Columbia College will serve a second term as peer reviewer for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. He is serving his final year as Chair of the Illinois State Archives Advisory

Board. Next fall he will be on sabbatical next fall.

Grad student Theresa Pfister will present a paper at the Missouri Valley History Conference (in March) on “Why the Colored Woman Should Vote for Mrs. McCormick': African American Clubwomen and Ruth Hanna McCormick's 1930

Senatorial Campaign.”  (See the November bulletin for the rest of the UIC lineup at this conference.)

Professor Barbara Ransby rated inclusion in Katha Pollitt’s recent piece in The Nation, "Good news around the world for women in 2003." Her fourth item in a list of twenty says that Barbara’s Ella Baker biography “illuminated a

behind-the-scenes heroine of the civil rights struggle. As Ransby showed, there are other, more egalitarian ways to move forward than by playing follow the leader.”

Professor Jackie Wolf’s article, “Low Breastfeeding Rates and Public Health in the United States,” appeared in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.  She also contributed the entry “Wet-nursing” for the

Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society just published by Macmillan.

Professor Christopher Young (Ph.D., 2001) of MacMurray College contributed several entries to the  (forthcoming 2005) and in December chaired a panel entitled "Educating Women" at the Illinois History Symposium in Springfield.

Please send all news of interest to the UIC History community to rmfried@uic.edu