September 2005

News on Katrina:

ARNIE HIRSCH (Ph.D., 1978) of the University of New Orleans has turned up safe in Skokie, by way of Dallas, after the hurricane. He has reason to believe that his house suffered moderate damage but that his research materials for his next book, on U.S. housing policy, are reasonably dry. Meanwhile, ANDY WIEST (University of Southern Mississippi) and his family are also safe, though his mother’s and his mother-in-law’s houses in New Orleans were casualties.

Ratings Games:

US NEWS and WORLD REPORT, which, parenthetically, should be moving up in our esteem as a source for sound journalistic judgment as well as for historical research, ran a report in May which ranked graduate programs. That worthy journal listed UIC History’s graduate program as tied for forty-second in the country. In Modern US History, UIC ranks nineteenth (tied).

Books:

RICHARD LEVY's Antisemitism: Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution 2 vols. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005) came out this summer. It contains notable contributions by Peter D'Agostino, Burt Bledstein, Robert Johnston, John Abbott, Fred Kopp, Keith Green, James Kollenbroich, Benn Williams, Laura Higgins, and 200 others, representing 21 countries.

Prof. Emeritus BILL HOISINGTON’s book, The Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil: A Frenchman Between France and North Africa, was published by RoutledgeCurzon (New York and London) in 2004.

RICK FRIED’s The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America is just of the presses of Ivan R. Dee in Chicago.

Is There a Historian in the House?

In April, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced that Prof. Emeritus ROBERT V. REMINI had been named to serve as Historian of the House of Representatives, a post that has been vacant for a decade. (Discount any rumors that the nomination was in any way a quid pro quo or “corrupt bargain” in exchange for the approval of any of President Bush’s judicial nominees.) Bob also spoke at the much-publicized conference on the legacy of Mayor Richard J. Daley held at UIC in April.

Departmental Awards–Graduate Students:

The following departmental awards to graduate students were announced last May:

Deena Allen Memorial Fellowship: Lauren Braun
Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert Fellowship: Mark Bullock
Marion S. Miller Dissertation Fellowship: Jeff Helgeson and Joshua Salzmann
History of Poland Scholarship: Renee De Bock
Robert V. Remini Scholarship: Catherine Batza
Leo Schelbert Prize: Eric Smith
John B. and Theta Wolf Fellowship: Diane Adams

Summer Reading:
A perusal of Daniel Rodgers’s book on the international cross-fertilization of 20th-century reform impulses, Atlantic Crossings, yielded numerous references to the work of present and former members of the UIC History Department, including: the late Peter Coleman, Bentley Gilbert, Peter D’A Jones, Mel Holli, and David Jordan.

Other News of the Department:

Prof. ERIC ARNESEN, having left the Chair’s office after five years, is now on sabbatical in a witness protection program which, rumor has it, will open an outpost in Sweden. (Source: “My Cousin Vinny.”) He continues to contribute to the Chicago Tribune. His essay “Labor’s Pains" appeared in the June 19 Sunday Magazine; the Sept. 4 Sunday book section carried his “White Collar Blues," on Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest; “Strike Makers," reviewed Watson's Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (August 14); “Battle of the Titans,” on Standiford's Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership that Transformed America (July 10); “A Liberal’s Lament,” on Douglas Massey's Return of the "L" Word (June 26); and “Nuclear Family Man,” reviewed two books on J. Robert Oppenheimer (May 22). For the Boston Globe, he wrote “LBJ and MLK: With Eyes on the Prize,” a review of Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (May 8). This summer he chaired a session at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair with authors Timuel Black and Leon Despres. as well as a session with Kevin Boyle, which appeared on C-Span 2's Book TV. In April, he was respondent to U. of Chicago law prof Geoffrey Stone's “Civil Liberties in Wartime: Adams, Lincoln, Wilson & FDR,” at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Grad student SAMUEL BARNETT presented “The Last Acre Expanded: Environmentalism and Land Use in the Calumet Region since 1967” at the History Graduate Student Association at Loyola University, Chicago. UIC grad students LARA KELLAND and JEFF HELGESON also gave papers. Sam is also the, er, “sire” of a litter of six golden retriever puppies.

Prof. EDWARD BEHREND-MARTINEZ (Ph.D., 2002), Appalachian State University, authored "Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain," which appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of Social History.

FRED BEUTTLER was named Deputy Historian of the House of Representatives this summer. He retains his UIC affiliation, consulting on the UIC history project, and will commute between here and D.C. at least through the end of the semester. He wrote the text for the Maxwell Street history exhibit which will soon be on Maxwell Street.

Prof. ROGER BILES (Ph.D., 1981) has moved from East Carolina University to Illinois State University, where he has been named Chair of the History Department.

Prof. CRISTOPHER BOYER published an essay, "Contested Terrain: Forestry Regimes and Community Responses in Northeastern Michoacan, 1940-2000," in David Barton Bray, Leticia Merino Perez, and Deborah Barry, eds., The Community Forests of Mexico: Managing for Sustainable Landscapes (University of Texas Press, 2005).

DOUG BUKOWSKI (Ph.D., 1989) reports that his daughter Clare just finished her first year of Pony baseball, playing against 13- and 14-year old boys. She batted .322 with a .400 on-base percentage. Her father, whose Chicago souvenir pennants were featured in the July 31 Chicago Tribune Magazine, senses a book in those figures.

JUSTIN COFFEY (Ph.D., 2003) has accepted a full-time teaching position at Bradley University for the 2005-6 academic year.

Prof. Emeritus MEL HOLLI’s book The American Mayor was cited in a June 29 L.A. Times article about the election of Antonio Villaraigosa’s election as mayor of that city.

Prof. BRIAN HOSMER spoke at the ALA’s annual meeting in June on “The Research Library as Steward of American Indian History and Culture: Sounds Reasonable, but what does it really mean?" and gave a repeat performance in Wellington, New Zealand, at a conference at the National Library of New Zealand on Sept. 2.

Grad student BOB HUNTER presented a paper, "Expecting the Unexpected: Nuclear Terrorism in 1950s Hollywood Films," at the Center for the Study of War and Society's "Atomic Bomb and American Society" conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in July.

Prof. GEORGE HUPPERT has assumed the editorship of the Journal of the Historical Society in June of this year.

GWEN JORDAN (Ph.D., 2004) has begun a two year postdoc legal history fellowship at the Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her new email is gjordan@wisc.edu.

Prof. Emeritus JOHN J. KULCZYCKI presented "An Ethnic Poland: A Failure of National Self-Determination" at the VII World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies in Berlin, in July. Kulczycki has given a paper (not the same one!) at each of the seven ICCEES congresses, which are held every five years.

Prof. RICHARD S. LEVY (see “Books”) spoke in the American Jewish Committee's Antisemitism 2005 Lecture Series on June 22 about “Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Egypt to Modern Iran: The Making of an Encyclopedia on Prejudice and Persecution.”

Prof. JOHN LYONS (Ph.D., 2000) reports from Joliet Junior College, his home for five years, that he is tenured, as well as fat and sassy, teaching US, World, and British history. He is finishing revisions of his dissertation on the Chicago Teachers Union and hopes to see it in print by next year. He has written articles for various teaching journals, most recently "Teaching US History Online: Problems and Prospects" The History Teacher 37 (August 2004).

Grad student WILLIAM MALONE is currently luxuriating on a Fulbright research grant to Guatemala. When that ends in March, he will continue there on a Boren NSEP fellowship.

Grad student JAMES G. MENDEZ presented on paper on “Northern African-American Community Issues Leading Up to the Civil War, 1830-1861" at the Conference on African Americans and the Civil War (CAACW) at Virginia State University in May.

Prof. DOMINIC PACYGA of Columbia College Chicago (Ph.D., 1981) presented a teacher workshop on race and ethnicity in Chicago for FACING HISTORY/FACING OURSELVES on July 28. His article, "Assimilation and Its Discontents: Chicago's Polish Community and the Murder of Alvin Palmer," will appear later this year in a Polish journal.

On May 14, Prof. BARBARA RANSBY moderated a public forum co-sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council, the Public Square, the Herald Washington Library Center, and Lambda Legal on “Our Echoing Demands: The Legacies of Brown v. Board Today.”

ZAC RICHARDSON, a 2005 UIC History B.A., has been awarded a Teaching Assistantship in the Sport History program at Ohio State University, where he will begin graduate work this fall.

Grad student SARAH ROSE has raked in multiple awards and grants: a King V. Hostick Disssertation Award from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and Illinois State Historical Society, the Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship from the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, and a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

Prof. JAMES SACK became President of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association in April 2005.

Prof. GREG SCHNEIDER (Ph.D., 1996) of Emporia State University is currently on sabbatical working on a book for Rowman and Littlefield. His third book, Equality, Decadence and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, has been published by ISI Books. His weekly column (Mondays) in the Topeka Capital-Journal gives “the local conservative opinion” and can be accessed at cjonline.com.

Prof. MAREK SUSZKO (Ph.D., 2004), currently teaching at Purdue University Northwest, has been announced as the winner of this year’s Ambassador Dziewanowski Memorial Dissertation Award for the best dissertation on a Polish topic at an American university. The annual award, made by the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA) in cooperation with the Polish Embassy in Washington, consists of a $1000 prize plus an appropriate diploma. It was presented at PIASA's 63rd Annual Meeting banquet on June 4 at the University of Pittsburgh.

Prof. Emeritus EDWARD THADEN published the article “Historicism, N. A. Polevoi, and Rewriting Russian History” in the September 2004 East European Quarterly. He took part in a Round Table on this and related issues at the 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Sydney, Australia, in July.

MARY TODD (Ph.D., 1996) of Ohio Dominican University has been invited to contribute a chapter on the Lutheran experience in America to the Lilly Endowment-funded “Confessional Traditions in American Christianity” project of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. At an ISAE invitational seminar in late September, the contributors will confer with each other, church leaders, and other religion scholars and writers. She has also been named to the Executive Board of the Ohio Council on Holocaust Education.

Prof. DEBORAH GRAY WHITE (Ph.D., 1979) of Rutgers University will be a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars this academic year.

Professor ANDREW WIEST (Ph.D., 1990) – see “Katrina” above – reports in from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is married and has “two beautiful kiddies.” This year he is visiting professor at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. In August his book, Haig: The Evolution of a Commander, was published by Potomac Press. Although all family members are safe, he has visited scenes of devastation in both Hattiesburg and New Orleans to assess the obviously massive damage.

In June Grad student BENN WILLIAMS was a Fellow at the Holocaust Education Foundation's Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University.

Prof. JACKIE WOLF has received a two-year National Institute of Health/National Library of Medicine publication grant to write her second book, a social history of obstetric anesthesia to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Prof. CHRISTOPHER YOUNG (Ph.D., 2001) of MacMurray College received that school’s Dewey Wilkins Award for Excellence in Teaching in May. His “St. Stanislaus Kostka: A Brief History of a Landmark Chicago Church,” appeared in the July/August edition of Illinois Heritage.

Please send your news to rmfried@uic.edu