PAST PERFECT

News from UIC’s History Department

March 2004

Prizes (Three, and Counting):

Professor Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker had already won the AHA’s Kelly Prize in January.  Now she has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians.  The book is co-winner of the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history and is also the 2003 winner of the James Rawley Prize.

More Prizes:

Professor Emeritus Bill Hoisington’s book, The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936-43 in its Arabic translation (published in Rabat in 2002) has won the Prix du Maroc (2003) presented annually by the Association of Moroccan Historians.

Fleming Lecture:

Professor Michael Perman has been invited to deliver the 1907 Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, the 69th of this august series. The three lectures are given during a week in April at Louisiana State University and are then published by LSU Press. (Bob Remini gave the Fleming Lectures in 1984.)

Capitol News:

Professor Emeritus Robert V. Remini is the 2004 recipient of the Freedom Award of the United States Capitol Hill Historical Society for “outstanding contributions to preserving and communicating the history of our nation.”  The award will be presented in November at an undisclosed location on Capitol Hill. In May he will also receive an honorary degree from Southern Illinois University.

Recent Books:

Professor Renato Barahona: Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528-1735 (University of Toronto Press).

Professor James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard University Press),

Professor Peter D’Agostino (History and Catholic Studies), Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (University of North Carolina Press).

Professor Robert D. Johnson, editor, The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America (Routledge).

Professor Guity Nashat, co-editor, Women in Islam: From the Rise of Islam to 1800 (University of Illinois Press).

Professor  Margaret Strobel and grad student Cheryl R. Ganz, co-editor, Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920-40 (University of Illinois at Chicago).  There will be a book party at the Hull-House Museum: Friday, April 30, 4:30-6:30.

Inaugural Issue:

Volume 1, Number one of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Professor Leon Fink, editor.

The Siege of Boston:

UIC was well represented at the April 25-28 OAH Conference, said by some to be the most heavily attended ever.

• Professor BARBARA RANSBY (see above).

• Professor JOHN D'EMILIO, a member of this year's program committee, chaired and commented on the panel "Civil Rights" Beyond the Sixties, Beyond the South."

• Professor CYNTHIA BLAIR spoke on "Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity" for a "state of the field" panel on the History of Sexuality.

• Grad student CHERYL GANZ gave a paper on "The Hull-House Kilns: Between Worlds for Mexicans in Chicago in the Great Depression." UIC Professor MARGARET STROBEL presided of that session.

• Professor ERIC ARNESEN chaired and commented on a session on "Local Revolutions: Relocating Grassroots Struggle in Twentieth-Century Upper Midwest History."

• BARBARA DOBSCHUETZ (Ph.D., 2002) gave a paper on "The Moody Church and the Civil Rights Movement."

• Professor RICK FRIED gave a paper on "The Congressman from Madison Avenue: Bruce Barton in Politics."

• Professor BRIAN HOSMER (UIC and Newberry Library) commented on a session on "Southeastern Indian Masculinity and Femininity in the Twentieth Century."

• Professor ROBERT JOHNSTON presided and commented at a session on "Women's Grassroots and Electoral Activism in the 1950s."

• Professor JENNIFER BRIER gave a paper on "The San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Politics of Race."

• Professor Emeritus RICHARD JENSEN commented on a panel about "World War II, Oral History, and the Web. And in attendance were Profs. Dominic PACYGA (Ph.D., 1981) of Columbia College and Roger  BILES (Ph.D., 1981) of East Carolina University.

The Invasion of Omaha:

UIC sent a battalion to the Missouri Valley History Conference in March.  Unbiased observers said it was wall-to-wall UIC.

Most notably, grad student MATT POPOVICH won the conference’s Best Paper Award for graduate students for his paper “Daley Finally Declares War: How Chicago Juvenile Street Gangs Caught the Mayor’s Attention.”

Other UIC participants:

• KATIE BATZA, “Before AIDS: The Relationship Between the Chicago Gay and Medical Communities, 1974-1982."

• DAN HARPER, “Why Populism Mattered: The Denver Smelter Strike of 1899.”

• CAT JACQUET, “Women Against Myth: Second Wave Feminism and the Anti-Rape Movement.”

• EMILY LaBARBERA-TWAROG, “‘Bona Fide Housewives: Consumption, Labor Radicalism, and the 1935 Meat Boycott.”

• JOSEPH LIPARI, “‘This System is Out to Kill Us and We Know It’: Race, Class and the Politicization of Police Brutality in Chicago, 1965-1975.”

• SAM MITRANI, “Policing the Industrial City: The Development of the Chicago Police, 1855-1863.”

• THERESA PHISTER, “Why Colored Women Should Vote for Mrs. McCormick: African American Clubwomen and Ruth Hanna McCormick’s 1930 Illinois Senatorial Campaign.”

• CHRIS WONDERLICH, “Who’s Calling the Tune?  The Racial Merger of the Chicago Musicians’ Unions, 1963-1966.”

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Honors:

The Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies and the members of the team producing The Labor Trail: Chicago’s History of Working Class Life and Struggle recently won the Illinois Humanities Council’s Towner Award for 2003.  The Center won an IHC grant to support production of The Labor Trail, a full-color, professionally designed map which will illustrate episodes of the city’s labor past, indicate several walking tours, and encourage public attention to the state’s labor heritage.  The Project Director is Professor LEON FINK.  Administrative Director is grad student JEFF HELGESON.  Project Assistants include grad students AARON BERKOWITZ, JOHN FLORES, DAN HARPER, and EMILY LaBARBERA-TWAROG.

Phi Beta Kappa:

Three UIC History majors were elected to the esteemed national honorary society Phi Beta Kappa in April:  EMILY GROSS, MICHAEL SUNU, and MARIA VILLAFUERTE.

Other News of the Department:

Professor Michael Alexander represented the Humanities on a panel for the 2004 Promotion and Tenure Workshop, sponsored by the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs in February.

Professor Renato Barahona will chair and comment on the panel "Violence and/or Resistance in Early Modern Spain," at the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Los Angeles, in April.

Grad student Katie Batza has been chosen as the recipient of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Issues Graduate Scholarship for the year 2004-2005. This award goes to a graduate student whose work adds to the understanding of the LGBT community and heightens activism and awareness around LGBT issues.

Professor Roger Biles, East Carolina University (Ph.D., 1981) had an entry in African American National Biography (Oxford, 2004) and is an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (Macmillan, 2004).  He is also the “history expert” working with 25 social studies teachers in his region to improve the teaching of US history in high schools under a three-year, million-dollar Teaching American History (“Byrd”) grant from the US Department of Education.

Grad student Lauren Braun has won two fellowships for her coming summer’s research: an Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society and an Ellison Durant (“Cotton Ed”) Smith award from the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.

Justin Coffey (Ph.D., 2003), who is currently adjuncting at UIC and DePaul, had his article “Spiro T. Agnew and Middle Ground Politics” published in the Winter 2003 issue of Maryland Historical Magazine.

NORMAN EDER (Ph.D., 1980) reports from Oregon that his consulting partnership is doing well and that he is in his 22nd year of part-time teaching at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he offers a year long upper division class titled, "Why History Matters."

Professor Steven Fanning presented a paper, "Reconsideration of the Gothic Judgeship," at the Late Antiquity Symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 27.

Professor Rick Fried lectured On Feb. 6 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on “Before the Patriot Act:  Historical Attitudes Toward Civil Liberties, 1920 to Now.”  He spoke on “McCarthy 50 Years Later” at Roosevelt University on March 11.  And after the hanging chads were disposed of, he was this year’s recipient of the Shirley A. Bill Teaching Award.

Grad student Jeff Helgeston presented his paper, "The Country in the City: Images of Progress at the American Negro Exposition, 1940" at Macalester College's African-American Studies Conference in St. Paul, MN, in February.

On Feb. 24, Professor Emeritus Mel Holli presented an “Overview of Chicago’s ethnic communities” at a seminar on Ethnic Chicago sponsored by the American Jewish Committee for members of the local consular corps.  On St. Patrick’s Day he was quoted in the New York Times -- concerning what else? -- Chicago’s Irish.  He was numbered among “Ishpeming authors” at that town’s celebration of the centennial of its Carnegie Library.

Professor Brian Hosmer (History and Newberry Library) is an invited speaker for "Listening--Natives and Academics Speak: A New Dialogue fo a new Millennia," a colloquium to be held at Clare College, Cambridge University, May 20-21, 2004, where he will discuss his research on the labor history of the Wind River (Wyoming) Indian Reservation.  He also is curator of "Ni'iihi: In a Good Way: Photographs of Wind River Arapaho, 1976-1996," an exhibition at the Newberry Library April 17-July 17.

Professor Richard R. John’s entry on "postal systems" (neither his first nor, alas, his last) appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Joel Mokyr ed. (2003) vol. 4. On 12 March he gave a paper on "Nickel-in-the-Slot: The 'Consumption Junction' in Urban Telephony" at the Digital Media Center at the University of Minnesota.  His essay "Citizens, Clients, and Consumers: Rethinking the Advent of American Telecommunications" appeared in the April 2003 issue of Antenna. On 29 March, he was quoted in a front-page Wall Street Journal story on the outsourcing of American jobs overseas. He also chaired the Ellis Hawley article prize committee for the Journal of Policy History and commented on a panel on “Government and the Environment” at the Missouri Valley History Conference.

John J. Kulczycki, professor emeritus, published "'Repatriation': Bringing Poles from the Soviet Union Home after World War II," Sprawy Narodowosciowe [Nationality Affairs - a journal published in Poland], No. 23 (2003). Wiez, a monthly journal published in Poland, also carried his "'Propolska' historia w Ameryce" ["Pro-Polish" History in America”].

Professor Richard S. Levy gave the Phi Alpha Theta Banquet address at Northeastern Illinois U. on April 3 on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: the REAL Hoax of the Twentieth Century.”

Professor Guity Nashat commented on a panel on “Modern Islamist Movements” at the Missouri Valley History Conference.

Professor Margaret Power of Illinois Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1997) was awarded the Julia Beveridge Award for her commitment to and impact on women at IIT.  She has also been promoted to Associate Professor.  She chaired and commented on a session on Allende’s Chile at the Missouri Valley History Conference

Dr. Padma Rangaswamy (Ph.D., 1996) is co-founder of the South Asian American Policy and Research Institute whose first report on "Public Policy Opportunities for South Asian Americans presented by the 2000 census" will be released at an event called "New Faces of Chicago:The South Asian American Experience" hosted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on May 5, at the Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel.  She contributed an article on the South Asian diaspora in David and Karen Christensen, et al., eds. (2002), Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002).  She has an entry on the same theme in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Diasporas (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files).  She co-authored _Asian Indians in Chicago_ (Arcadia, 2003)

Grad student Dana Rovang presented a paper on film representations of kingly insanity (e.g. in “Richard III,” “Ran,” and “The Madness of King George”) at the Hawaiian International Conference on Arts and Humanities in January.  In February she spoke at the UIC Graduate Student Conference at the Humanities Institute on "The Passion of George III: Madness, Passion and Sensibiity in Early Modern Britain." A fleshed out version of this paper will appear in August in the "History of Psychology."

Professor Greg Schneider (Ph.D, 1996) is the recipient of Emporia State University's 2004 Presidential Award for Research and Creativity, the highest research honor at ESU. He also just received a contract with Rowman and Littlefield for his book on "The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution."

Professor Katrin Schultheiss delivered a paper called "Madness and the Normal Body in Nineteenth Century France" at the European Social Science History Conference in Berlin over spring break. She will continue to serve as co-coordinator of the Women and Gender Network for the conference, which will next be held in 2006 in Amsterdam.

Orrin Schwarz (MA, 1993) is the Assistant Sports Editor/DuPage at the Daily Herald in charge of local sports coverage, primarily high school sports, in DuPage County.

Professor (Gender and Women’s Study, and Director of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum) Pet Strobel’s first book, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890-1975, was selected for the ACLS History E-Book Project. The project "aims to create a fully searchable electronic library of high quality history books accessible, primarily through libraries, to students and scholars.

Former grad student Nancy Turpin defended her dissertation, "The Blue Ticket: Paradox and Revolt at the 1900 Paris World's Fair," in November.  In March she gave a paper at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association in St. Louis entitled "Scare Tactics: the 1900 Paris World's Fair."

Professor Ben Whisenhunt of College of DuPage (Ph.D., 1997) lectured on "A Russian's View of Philadelphia: Pavel P. Svin'in's Impressions of Early American Life" at the University of Pennsylvania on April 12.  He also published "Between East and West: Russia's Revolutions in Historical Context" in Christian Georgen's Politics in a Globalized World: An Introduction (Kendall/Hunt, 2004) and "American Relief Administration" in The Encyclopedia of Russian History (Macmillan, 2004).

For the 2004-5 academic year, grad student Benn Williams will hold the Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Peter Hayes Research Fellowship and the Tauber Institute Research Award.  He is co-translator of Ewick and Silbey, “La construction sociale de la légalité” Terrains & Travaux, Cahiers du déépartement de sciences sociales de l'ENS de Cachan, 6:1 (February 2004).  He also translated two entries for the forthcoming David Clark (ed.), Encyclopedia of Law and Wociety: American and Global Perspectives (SAGE Publications), David Clark, ed.  In May he will present the paper “Constructing Justice: Denunciation in Postwar Lyon, 1944-1953" at the Law and Society Association Conference in Chicago.

 Please report all news for upcoming bulletins to rmfried@uic.edu