PAST PERFECT

                NEWS of the UIC HISTORY DEPARTMENT

                                       November 2004

Book Awards:

Professor Leon Fink’s The Maya of Morganton has received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Prize, given by the Board of Trustees of the Western North Carolina Historical Association and the Smith-McDowell House Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. The award recognizes significant works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by WNC writers or about Western North Carolina, has been given for over the past fifty years.  Maybe “you can go home again.”

Professor Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement received a 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award, presented in October by the Southern Regional Council in league  with the University of Georgia.  Since 1968, these awards have honored “those authors who, through their writing, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding.  Past recipients include: Alex Haley, Alice Walker, C. Vann Woodward, William Chafe, and Marian Wright Edelman.”

Recent Books:

Professor Jonathan Daly’s The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917 has just been published by Northern Illinois University Press.

Professor Brian Hosmer’s co-edited Native Pathways: Economic Development and American Indian Culture in the Twentieth Century has just been published by the University Press of Colorado.

Other History Department News:

Professor Eric Arnesen reviewed Kevin Boyle’s book on the Ossian Sweet case in the Chicago Tribune on October 10.  He spoke on “The Pre-History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act” at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights’’ 40th Anniversary Commemoration of the Enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on October and on ““Labor and Civil Rights”” at a conference on Louisiana and the Civil Rights Revolution Fifty Years Later” at University of Louisiana Lafayette in September. 

Professor Bruce Calder published a chapter, “Interwoven Histories: The Catholic Church and the Maya, 1940 to the Present,” in Cleary and  Steigenga, eds., Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization and Religious Change (Rutgers, 2004).   At October’s Latin American Studies Association meeting in Las Vegas, he chaired a panel and gave a paper on “The Deep Roots of Catholic Social Justice: The Irony of Progressive Anti-Communism in Guatemala.”

Professor Peter D’Agostino gave two public lectures:  The St. Joseph College (Indiana) Annual Faculty Lecture, November 7, "Holy Island or Modern Idol": Papal Rome Lost and Regained"; and the Feltre School Alumni Association Lecture (Chicago), Nov. 14, "Strangers at Home: American Catholics and Papal Rome."

Barbara Dobschuetz (Ph.D., 2002)  will be visiting lecturer in American History at Indiana University Northwest for Spring Semester 2005.

Professor Rick Fried gave two lectures at the Field Museum in connection with the Jackie Kennedy exhibit.  Sample swatches of dress materials on display are available.

Grad student Cheryl R. Ganz was appointed to a three-year term as the OAH representative on the AHA NASA Fellowship Committee. She presented "Public Historians of Chicago's Pioneer Black Heritage: The National De Sable Memorial Society" at the Social Science Historical Association Conference in Chicago in November.

Professor Arnold R. Hirsch (Ph.D., 1978) of University of New Orleans has the lead article, “E Pluribus Duo?: Thoughts on ‘Whiteness’ and Chicago’s ‘New’ Immigration as a Transient Third Tier,” in the Summer 2004 Journal of American Ethnic History.

Professor Emeritus Melvin Holli delivered a talk, "America's First Presidential Pollster: Emil Hurja," on Oct. 30 at the conference, "Cultural Encounters, Migration and Ethnicity, Finn Forum VII," at the University of Minnesota.  He is also a member of the Editors Advisory Board of Annual Editions: American History (v. 2), 2004-2005.

Professor Laura Hostetler presented a paper entitled "Contending Cartographic Claims? China in Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps" as part of the Nebenzahl Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, October 7-9.  She spoke on Europeans in the Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples as part of a conference on "Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe" at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, November 12-13.

A busy fall for Professor Brian Hosmer (History and Director, D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at Newberry Library).  He was the “centerfold” in the Oct. 20 UIC News.  The news hook was the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, which met Oct. 27-31 at the Newberry.  He chaired the program committee for that meeting as well as for the CIC American Indian Consortium Annual Research Conference in September.  He was also elected to the Executive Board of the American Society for Ethnohistory.  See above under “Recent Books.”

Professor Richard R. John published two essays:  "Farewell to the 'Party Period': Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America," in the Journal of Policy History (2004); and "Private Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839-1851," in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). In May, his paper, "Nickel-in-the-Slot:  The 'Consumption Junction' in Urban Telephony, 1894-1907," graced the Policy History Conference.  In June he (thriftily) gave the same paper at the Historical Society’s conference in Maine.  And he took part in the Business History Conference in Le Creusot, France, for which he was the program chair.  (Ed. note: this comes under the heading “triumphal progress.”)  The conference on “networks” was the largest in BHC’s history, drawing over 200 scholars from four continents.   In July, he gave the paper “Communications and Union” (antebellum telegraphy) at SHEAR, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.  He also was part of a panel (chaired by Gordon Wood) on state and society in the early American republic.  In October, he gave the paper "Networks" at the American Political Development workshop at the University of Chicago. Later that month, he gave a paper (again!!) on Chicago telephony to the American Society of Legal History in Austin, Texas, and the Urban History Association meeting in Milwaukee.  At the Kent School of Law, he joined Garry Wills for a public presentation at the Law and Humanities Forum; he treated "The Imperial Presidency and the War-Making Power."

Professor Emeritus John J. Kulczycki published an essay, “The Western Allies and the Creation of an Ethnic Poland,” in Studia z Dziejow Polski i Europy w XIX i XX wieku [Studies in the History of Poland and Europe in the 19th and 20th Centures: A Volume Dedicated to Professor Piotr Stefan Wandycz] (Gorzow Wlkp, 2004).

Professor Richard S. Levy gave a paper, “The Migration of Discredited Myths: the Wandering Protocols” at a conference on “Antisemitism and the Contemporary Jewish Condition” at the University of Judaism Conference Center, Bel Air, CA, on October. 18.

Professor John Moreollo (Ph.D., 1998) of DeVry University chaired a panel on World War I Studies at the Ohio Valley History Conference, at Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, TN, in October.

Professor George S. Pabis (Ph.D., 1996) co-presented the paper "Exploring Cultural Diversity through Literature and History: Jose Marti and Guantanamera," at the Southern Division of the Community College Humanities Association Conference, Atlanta, on Oct. 28.  He recently signed a contract with Greenwood for a book on daily life along the Mississippi River. It will explore how technology and the environment shaped the material, social and cultural world of the people who have lived and worked on the river from the era of Native American settlement to modern times.

Professor Dominic Pacyga (Ph.D., 1981) of Columbia College gave a talk (sponsored by History and Slavic and Baltic Studies) on “Slavic Chicago: Creating Community among Chicago’s Poles and Czechs before World War I” at UIC on Oct. 21.

Professor Elizabeth Payne reported in from the University of Mississippi after twelve years at the University of Arkansas.  She had headed the Razorback honors program (and launched a research project on the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union).  She went to Ol’ Miss in 1997 to be Dean of their new Honors College.  She co-edited Mississippi Women with two other historians (University of Georgia Press, 2003) and plans a second volume due out in 2005.  She will also publish a book about Myrtle Lawrence, a sharecropper, described as the best (white) female organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, through the University of Arkansas Press.  She lives in Oxford with her husband, who practices law, and her daughter, Conwill Payne-Finley.

Professor Wendy Plotkin (Ph.D., 1999) of Arizona State University was in charge of one of four panels developed by the ASU history department and Phoenix area public libraries in conjunction with the Presidential Debate held at ASU on October 13.  Hers was on Presidential Elections and Domestic Policy.  (Web address available.)

Grad student Sarah Rose won the UIC Provost's Award for Graduate Research and the Clark Research Grant from the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford (otherwise known as the Ford Motor Company Archives) in October.

Professor Katrin Schultheiss reviewed Richard Rhodes biography of John James Audubon in the October 17 Chicago Tribune.

Professor Deborah Gray White (Ph.D., 1979) of Rutgers University gave the 2004 Allison Davis Lecture, titled “Judged Not by the Color of Their Skin: The King Dream in Post-Modern America,” at Northwestern University, on Oct. 25.

Grad student Benn William, currently a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Center for French Colonial Studies for a one-year term.

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