dear friends of history: a - ut liberal arts · sumit guha. professor chatterjee joins us, after...

Department of

The University of Texas at Austin2013 • Volume 7College of Liberal Arts

Alumni Newsletter

W W W. U T e x A s . e d U / C o L A / d e p T s / h i s T o r y • 1 0 4 i N N e r C A m p U s d r . B 7 0 0 0 • A U s T i N , T x 7 8 7 1 2 - 1 7 3 9 • 5 1 2 . 4 7 1 . 3 2 6 1

s many of you know, the past year has been marked by much conflict over educational goals

and controversy over how well UT Austin, the College of Liberal Arts (COLA) and departments such as ours carry out our pledge to pursue academic excellence. I trust the contents of our annual Newsletter con-veys something of how your Department of History continues to develop in quality, stature, and reach despite impediments and distractions.

At the heart of our Department’s identity is our professionalism, which our faculty embody. Our cur-rent graduate chair, Professor Jackie Jones has served with distinction during 2012–13 on the Council of the American Historical Society as Vice-President of the Professional Division; Professor Toyin Falola has been twice recognized this past year with honorary doctor-ates; Professor Wm. Roger Lewis joins an illustrious list of honorees of the Royal Society of Literature.

Looking to the future, we have worked to strength-en our professional presence by hiring two eminent South Asianists, Professors Indrani Chatterjee and Sumit Guha. Professor Chatterjee joins us, after teach-ing at Rutgers, as a full professor whose books include Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (1999) and Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeat India (2013). Professor Guha, also from Rut-gers, joins us as the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Pro-fessor of History. His publications include The Agrar-ian Economy of Bombay Deccan, 1818–1941 (1985), Environment and Ethnicity in South Asia, 1200–1991 (1999), Health and Population in South Asia (2001), and Beyond Caste: Power and Society in South Asia (in press). Professors Chatterjee and Guha will strength-en us in South Asian Studies—an area that the University has, for some time, singled out for strong emphasis—and they will also, I’m quite sure, reinforce the collegiality that is very much a component of our departmental professionalism.

U.S. News and World Report testified unequivocal-ly to our professional excellence this year by means of its number one ranking of our Latin American His-tory Program. This is a singular achievement, because our Latin Americanists have maintained that rank-ing continuously for more than two decades despite recent UT budgetary restraints, and because this is COLA’s only first-ranked program and one of a small number for the University as a whole. The 2012–13 ac-complishments of one of our nine Latin Americanists, Professor Ann Twinam, illustrates one dimension of our

Latin Ameircanists’ reputation. Professor Twinam has just won two major graduate teaching awards–one lo-cal and one national. As teachers, but also as scholars, our Latin Americanists set high standards for all UT Austin faculty and for all historians.

Another important facet of our Department’s pro-fessionalism is our Institute for Historical Studies. Conceived of in 2005–06 and launched in 2007 as a center for academic exchange, presentation and dia-logue, the Institute had another extraordinary year. Responsible for its early planning and for developing it into the remarkable success it has become is inau-gural Director, Professor Julie Hardwick. Over the past six years Professor Hardwick has continuously displayed imagination, creativity, and organizational savvy. We all owe her appreciation for her leadership, great gratitude for her sustained commitment to the Institute, and thanks for leaving such a vibrant (and much envied) scholarly center for her successor, Pro-fessor Seth Garfield.

Classroom and on-line teaching, conference par-ticipation, academic debate, interviews, public lec-tures and special workshops for middle and second-ary school teachers are all forums that UT historians use to share their professionalism. Our most ambi-tious effort to “make history accessible” is through our website Not Even Past. Its developer, director, and edi-tor, Professor Joan Neuberger, continues to enrich the site with new initiatives and her visual and conceptual vitality. If you have not done so, do join the thousands (yes, thousands!) who are visiting NEP each month.

All our activities depend on both public and pri-vate resources. On the private side the past year has seen an increase in both the amount and number of gifts to History. With the support of the Dean’s of-fice we have received one very large bequest from the late Gardner Marston, which will be very helpful in providing stipends for our graduate students. And with the ongoing support of our Visiting Commit-tee members we continue to widen the circle of those committed to supporting our activities. To both Dean and Visiting Committee we extend our thanks.

The History faculty continue to be committed to the kind of professional standards that have brought public esteem to UT Austin. We want to continue serving our students in ways consistent with that pro-fessionalism—in ways that give our students the kind of first-class education they expect from UT Austin. Above all, we hope that you will keep on reading his-tory. And do please consider lending your support, whether vocal or practical to our continuing histori-cal adventure. — Alan Tully, Chair

Dear Friends of History:

Hi stor y

AInside

Commencement, 2013 2

Touin Falola receives Awards3

Ann Twinam and Bruce J. hunt Win Teaching Awards

4institute for historical studies

5Graduate students and

honor students6

Normandy scholars7

Booknotes8

Nancy sutherland receives Award8

penne restad “Texas 10” 9

New Ways of Teaching 9

scholars Work with secondary school Teachers

10ihs Conference

12Voices from past and present

13eminent New Faculty

13Latin American history at UT Austin

14Not Even Past

14Nancy Footer on Visiting Committee

15department of history Faculty

16erika Bsumek

17harwick and Garfield

18 Alumnus Gardner marston

18“Tony” hopkins retires

18Wm. roger Louis Wins Award

18Alumni News

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T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S A T A U S T I N D E P A R T M E N T O F H I S T O R Y

has Good News for History MajorsMaidie Ryan, Commencement Speaker

®

NEWSLETTERSTAFF

Newsletter Staff:

Megan Seaholm, Editor

Courtney Meador, Assistant Editor

Writers and Consultants: Iliyana Hadjistoyanova,

Christine Baker, Marilyn Lehman, Jackie Llado

Design, Jane Thurmond

We thank Liberal Arts Instructional Technological Services for providing so

many photos of Department of History faculty.

maidie ryan

1 See, for example, Robin Wil-son, “Humanities Scholars See Declining Prestige, Not a Lack of Interest,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 19. 2013, pp. A8–A9.

2 Ryan; “Employers More Inter-ested in Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Than College Major,” AACU, online: http://www.aacu.org/press_room/press_releases/2013/leapcompact andemployersurvey.cfm U T A u s t i n ’ s m o t t o : “ W h a t s t a r t s h e r e C h a n g e s t h e W o r l d .”

On the evening of May 17, 2013, the Bass Con-cert Hall of the Performing Arts Center was filled with parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends to honor the 150 History majors who graduated in May or August of 2013. Many depart-ment faculty, in traditional regalia and festooned with colors of their doctorate alma maters and their disciplines, were seated onstage along with nine students awarded the Ph.D. degree. A group from

the UT Longhorn Band played Edward Elgar’s time-honored “Pomp and Cir-cumstance March” and, of course, “The Eyes of Texas.” The Department of His-tory’s 2013 Commencement was an august and festive occasion. Dr. Alan Tully, department chairman since 2002, presided. He specifically recognized the students who graduated with Honors in History and the depart-ments’ candidates for the Ph.D. degree; and he more generally recognized stu-dents who graduated with University

Honors and students who studied abroad. He per-sonally congratulated every graduating senior who walked across the stage to formalize the completion of the baccalaureate degree with a major in History. Ms. Maidie Ryan (BA, History, UT, 1996; JD, UT School of Law, 2001), attorney, philanthropist, com-munity volunteer, Assistant General Counsel and Director of Compliance for Ascend Performance Materials (Houston), Communications Director for the Junior League of Houston, and life-long member of Texas Exes who has, incidentally, finished eleven half-marathon runs, gave this year’s Commence-ment Address. She brought good news to the 2013 graduates who majored in History, and she wasted no time in getting to her point: “Your parents, fam-ily and friends may have questioned your decision

to study history, fearing that your career choices could be limited…[but] Please trust me that ... your history degree from the University of Texas at Austin will serve you well.” She credited her own major in History as crucial to her many success, and reminded students that the study of History, as part of a liberal arts education, had “developed and enhanced [their] flexibility, creativity, critical thinking and communication skills.” As our students know, the “word on the street” recommends a narrow, vocational education in order to get a job after graduating. Ms. Ryan chal-lenged this conventional wisdom. According to an April 2013 study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), she reported to students, “74% of the employers surveyed recom-mend a liberal arts education to a young person as the best way to prepare for success in today’s global economy…and over 90% of those surveyed said that those they hire should demonstrate ethi-cal judgment, intercultural skills and the capacity for continued new learning.” Ms. Ryan emphasized the importance of ethi-cal judgment by reminding students of the mes-sage engraved on the UT Tower: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free.” She exhorted these History majors to hold fast to their integrity and to be “stewards of the truth:” “True leadership is built on the small, day-to-day deci-sions in life. Being faithful in these small matters will give you the strength to act with integrity in large matters…Such decisions build your legacy.” Ryan concluded her address by encouraging stu-dents to “be unafraid [to] spend some time out-side [their] comfort zone” and to be “gracious and grateful… [C]hange the world by being a humble and helpful person.” Well said, Ms. Ryan. Thank you.

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A L U M N I N E W S L E T T E R 2 0 1 3

Toyin Falola Receives Trifecta of Awards for Scholarship, Teaching, and Service

By iliyana hadjistoyanova

2013 has been a year of exceptional recognition for Dr. Oloruntoyin Falola, the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair Professor in the Humanities and a Distin-guished Teaching Professor at UT Austin. Professor Falola has been awarded the Pro Bene Meritis Award by the College of Liberal Arts at UT, the University of Texas System’s Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and two honorary doctorate degrees.

Dr. Falola’s research explores the vast his-torical, cultural, and natural significance of the African continent and its place in the world. A native of Nigeria, he is a promi-nent scholar in the field of African studies. He is the author of over 100 books includ-ing Culture and Customs of Nigeria (Green-wood Press, 2000), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (Kent State University Press, 2004), and A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt: An African Memoir (Uni-versity of Michigan Press, 2005). The As-sociation of Third World Studies (ATWS) selected Falola’s most recent publication, Ibadan: Foundation, Growth and Change, 1830–1960 (Bookcraft, 2012), for the 2013 Cecil B. Curry Book Award. The ATWS also created an award to honor Falola: the Toyin Falola ATWS Africa Book Award.

The Pro Bene Meritis award honors “in-dividuals who are committed to the liberal arts, who have made outstanding contribu-tions in professional or philanthropic pur-suits, or who have participated in service related to the College of Liberal Arts.” An-other purpose of the award is to raise public awareness regarding the integral role that liberal arts play in contemporary society and education. Toyin Falola was presented the award this spring as a scholar “known worldwide for his outstanding scholarship, teaching and academic leadership.”

The Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award is a UT System-wide recognition that honors the institution’s commitment to ex-cellent undergraduate education. The awards “are offered in recognition of those who serve our students in an exemplary manner and as an incentive for others who aspire to such service.” The campus-based selection process relies on student and peer faculty evaluations within individual academic de-partments, followed by evaluation at the de-partment and college levels, and recommen-dation by the university President.

Professor Falola brings the same ener-gy and enthusiasm to his teaching that he brings to his research, writing, and organiz-ing. He describes his approach to teaching as “one where historical narratives meet wis-dom and insight,” and where the classroom becomes a “theater of learning.” His goal is to “impart knowledge of a society’s culture and values through dialogue, humor, and con-versations where ideas are exchanged.” He regularly offers lower-division classes such as “Introduction to Modern Africa” and “The United States and Africa” and upper-division seminars like “Historical Images of Africa in Film” and “Globalism, Internation-alism, and Transnationalism.” In addition, his monumental reputation as historian of Africa attracts many graduate students for whom he is an attentive mentor.

This year Dr. Falola received an honor-ary Doctor of Letters from the Adekunle Ajasin University “for his outstanding and wide-ranging contributions to humanity, es-pecially through his scholarly engagements that have served humanity for over the past four decades.” The City University of New York’s College of Staten Island conferred an honorary doctorate upon Falola at its May 2013 convocation. Such recognitions are, virtually, an annual event for Professor Fa-lola. In the summer of 2011 he was selected for the African Studies Association Distin-guished Africanist Award in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African Studies and service to the Africanist community.

In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Falola has organized a number of con-ferences to promote an interdisciplinary dia-logue about Africa and its historical and con-temporary significance, locally and globally, for scholars around the world. Since 2000, Falola has convened the “Africa Conference” on the UT Austin campus. The largest con-ference on Africa outside of those hosted by academic associations like the African Stud-ies Association is organized around a dif-ferent subject each year. The theme for the March 2013 conference was “Social Move-ments, Religion and Political Expression in Africa” and was attended by more than 100 scholars from Europe, the U.S., and Africa as well as UT Austin faculty and students (See Jeremy Thomas, “2013 Africa Confer-ence focuses on politics, religion and social movements,” The Daily Texan, 3/31/13). The

theme for the 2014 conference will be “Af-rican Diasporas: Old and New.” In addition, in July 2011, the inaugural Toyin Falola An-nual Conference (TOFAC) was held at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria. The conference was organized to honor Dr. Fa-lola’s scholarly achievements and the trans-formative effects of his academic research.

Toyin Falola, remarkably productive and much celebrated for his numerous ac-complishments, said “I receive these awards on behalf of the army of scholars, teachers, students, administrators, and community members who have worked tirelessly in this generation to claim responsibility for the future of Africa.”

department of history staff

Thomas Fawcett, Academic Advisor

Laura Flack, Executive Assistant

Arturo Flores, Accounting Manager

Tom Griffith, Senior Academic Advisor

Martha G. Gonzalez, AdministrAssociate

Judy W. Hogan, Administrative Assistant

Marilyn E. Lehman, Graduate Program Administrator

Jerry Larson, Administrative Associate

Jackie Llado, Front Desk Reception

Courtney Meador, Administrative Associate

Nicole Powell, Accounting and Administrative Services

Nancy A. Sutherland, Academic Advising Coordinator

Tyoin Falola

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“.. . .artists are born and not made,”* but what about scholars and teachers? Pro-fessor Ann Twinam believes that many aspects of becoming a professional aca-demic can be taught. In March 2013, UT’s School of Graduate

Studies affirmed that Twinan does this ex-ceptionally well by presenting her with the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. This award is presented annually to faculty mem-bers for outstanding teaching at the gradu-ate level and for excellence in mentoring graduate students. Also, the Rocky Moun-tain Council for Latin American Studies, the oldest Latin American academic orga-nization in the world, chose Twinam for the Edwin Lieuwen Prize for the Promotion of Excellence in the Teaching of Latin Ameri-can Studies.

Professor Twinam joined the UT Austin’s Department of History faculty and the nation’s

Ann Twinam Wins Two Teaching Awards,“brings honor and credit” to History

top-ranked program in Latin American Stud-ies in 2004. She came to UT Austin with a na-tional reputation in her field. Her first book, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Span-ish America (Stanford University Press) won the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin Amer-ican Studies Thomas F. McGann Book Prize for the best book of 1999 in Latin American Studies.

Twinam teaches several courses for un-dergraduates including “Colonial Latin America” and “Film and History in Latin America.” Her graduate level courses in-clude “Research Seminar in Colonial Latin America,” “Historiography of Gender in Co-lonial/Nineteenth Century Latin America,” and “Supervised Teaching in History.”

In her graduate courses, Twinam teaches students the skills that they need to become successful professionals. In her research seminar, students learn how to write re-search proposals, how to conduct research in archives, how to read documents “expe-ditiously”, and how to improve their writ-ing. Students submit several drafts of their

work for review by Twinam and the other students. “Supervised Teaching in History” is the course for Ph.D. candidates in History, in all fields, who will soon be facing the com-petitive job market. She requires students to present lectures and lead class discussions. Students must also write and critique appli-cation letters and curriculum vitae. Perhaps most daunting, students must deliver a “job talk” to the class. The “job talk” is the appli-cant’s scholarly presentation to faculty of the prospective institution.

Graduate student Libby Nutting, who has taken Twinam’s research seminar and “Su-pervised Teaching in History” said Professor Twinam “is indeed an outstanding graduate instructor. She genuinely cares about im-proving our research and writing skills, and she ‘tells it like it is.’ She is both warm and strict—a highly effective combination.”

Professor Jacqueline Jones, the depart-ment’s Graduate Advisor, called Twinan an “innovative mentor…[who] brings hon-or and credit to the graduate program of History as a whole.”* Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, 1957.

Teaching the History of Science is a Unique Challenge, but Dr. Bruce J. Hunt Excels

The College of Liberal Arts (COLA) awarded Dr. Bruce J. Hunt, who joined our faculty in 1985, with the Raymond Dickson Centenni-al Endowed Teach-ing Fellowship for 2013–14. Created in

1982 to honor Raymond Dickson of Hal-lettsville, Texas, the fellowship is awarded annually to recognize excellence in teaching and commitment. COLA Dean Randy Diehl wrote “[Bruce’s] commitment and outstand-ing performance, as well as high academic standards not only instruct but also inspire. We express [to him] our deep appreciation and heartfelt congratulations.” So say we all.

Dr. Hunt teaches and publishes in the History of Science and Technology. He teaches large and small undergraduate class-es, upper-division undergraduate seminars, and graduate-level seminars. His large en-rollment classes include “The Scientific Rev-

olution of the 17th Century,” “The History of Modern Science” (from Newton to the Pres-ent), and “The History of the Atomic Bomb.” His upper-division seminars are also popu-lar. “Electrification” traces the development of electrical power systems and how electri-cal technologies have affected ordinary peo-ple and the world economy using the “elec-trical history of Austin” as a case study. In “The Galileo Affair,” students study Galileo’s conflict with church authorities in the early 17th century and the subsequent history of the relation between science and religion. Graduate level courses focus on “themes and problems” in the History of Science. Dr. Hunt has also supervised undergraduate honors’ theses, and he has served on doc-toral committees for students working in a wide variety of academic disciplines.

Teaching the history of science is a unique challenge because most students, most peo-ple of any age, think that science is, well, “science”—a collection of “timeless truths.” Dr. Hunt explains that his first challenge is to help students “grasp the historical context

of past scientific thinking and to appreciate it on its own terms.” For example, how could the seventeenth-century astronomer Jo-hannes Kepler, the first to accurately explain planetary motion, also believe in astrology? Hunt’s second challenge is to help students understand “how science has developed over time, to trace lines of continuity and influ-ences, and to chart major shifts in direction.” Dr. Hunt excels with these challenges. As a former student observed, “Bruce Hunt has an uncanny ability to get to the core essence of an idea, to explain complex scientific con-cepts clearly and accurately, and to tie con-tent together in historical themes that are so much more meaningful than just the sum of their parts.”

Dr. Hunt’s scholarly publications have made significant contributions to his field. In 1991, reissued in 2005, Cornell Univer-sity Press published The Maxwellians; and Johns Hopkins University Press published Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein in 2010.

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This year’s IHS conference, “Trans-Pacific China and the Cold War,” led by Madeline Hsu, brought researchers from around the world to present cutting-edge scholarship on the little known role of China and Chinese emigrants during the Cold War. Randy Diehl, Dean of Liberal Arts, noted in opening the conference that “some of the best work being done in academia is in the interstitial spaces addressed in this kind of conference.”

The “Reinventing Diplomacy” theme also provided a focus for our social studies in K–12 projects. Professor Jeremi Suri led a seminar for U.S. history and social studies teachers en-titled “The History of United States Foreign Policy since 1898” (see “Gilder-Lehrman,” page 11). We also welcomed a Model United Nations Conference organized by students and teachers from the Austin Independent School District (AISD) Liberal Arts and Sci-ences Academy high school. Over 100 AISD students and teachers from five local schools participated in the day-long program.

UT Austin faculty research remains at the core of the IHS mission, and five UT profes-sors held IHS research appointments. Huia-yin Li reexamined the long history of the Qing empire in China since the seventeenth century in terms of geopolitics, fiscal consti-tution, and statecraft. Daina Ramey Berry analyzed the commodification of enslaved bodies in Antebellum America, focusing on slave mortality and end of life issues. Denise Spellberg explored late-eighteenth century diplomatic negotiations and treaties between the U.S. and Islamic states south of the Medi-terranean. Karl Hagstrom Miller highlighted amateur musicians’ role in the development of U.S. popular music in the twentieth cen-tury. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra challenged how we categorize the past with terms such as “The Reformation” of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries, arguing that these categories

By Christine Baker

obscure more than they reveal.The Institute continues to encourage the

ongoing research of graduate students, and three dissertation writers presented work-in-progress. Laurie Wood circulated a chapter from her project on the importance of law in the first French Empire that stretched from New France (now Canada) to Haiti to the Indian Ocean territories. Shannon Nagy ex-amined how the production and purchase of toys in East Germany after World War II was a key way in children and families learned about the values of the new communist state. Claudia Rueda analyzed the role of student movements in Somoza-Era Nicaragua in shaping political developments in Central America. This programming is much appreci-ated by graduate students. Wood commented: “[It] attracts a diverse range of faculty and graduate students who form a lively and astute audience. This forum enabled me to test and strengthen one of my dissertation’s core argu-ments at a critical point in the writing pro-cess.” Rueda observed that “the comparative perspective that the faculty and grad students brought to the workshop helped me con-nect to different bodies of literature and bet-ter contextualize my argument and the story I’m telling.”

Julie Hardwick has led IHS since its in-ception in 2007 and Seth Garfield, who will become the new director, notes that “Next year’s theme, ‘Trauma and Social Transfor-mation,’ continues in the Institute’s tradition of bringing together a cohort of fellows and scholars from around the nation and the globe to analyze the historical origins of some of the most troubling problems of our times.” In all these ways and in many other events, the IHS continues to promote excellence in the disci-pline of History, and enhances the national and international footprint of the University of Texas at Austin as a major research center.

Institute for Historical Studies: Scholars Rethink Diplomacy

The Institute for Historical Studies (IHS) as an intellectual community took stock and looked ahead this year. The annual theme, “Reinventing Diplomacy,” provided opportu-nities for many forms of innovative scholar-ship and collaboration between historians, between campus units and between UT Austin and the K–12 community. The year was Julie Hardwick’s last as director and Seth Garfield will take over in the fall of 2013.

The IHS assembled a diverse group of scholars to re-think diplomacy as a worldwide, multi-disciplinary historical process and vital contemporary practice. In collaboration with the LBJ School for Public Affairs, the IHS spearheaded initiatives to foreground new ways of thinking about diplomacy with Jeremi Suri, who holds appointments in the Depart-ment of History and the LBJ school, as the human glue between the discrete parts of the project. The IHS funded three scholars to work here on different aspects of rethinking the his-tory of diplomacy: Stephen Porter (University of Cincinnati), Edward Kolla (Georgetown University–Qatar), and Christopher Lee (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of the Witwatersrand ). Their projects explored the legal, political, and his-torical ramifications of ‘rethinking diplomacy’ in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations, Revolutionary France and international law, and the Cold War in the Indian Ocean. All three were active in many ways on campus, presenting papers in other departments and colleges, mentoring graduate students, using the research materials in libraries, participat-ing in many programs. Dr. Kolla expressed his appreciation for the climate at UT Austin: “I really enjoyed the vibrancy of being part of such a big and excellent history depart-ment—talking over coffee, lunch, drinks, or just around Garrison not only with my fellow historians of France, but also all sorts of other congenial, brilliant, and very welcoming col-leagues, both faculty and grad students.” Eight other scholars came to UT Austin with fund-ing from their home institutions to spend all or part of the year at the IHS.

students participate in model United Nations Conference.

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The UT History graduate program is one of the most comprehensive, high-level pro-fessional training centers in the nation. Our department boasts over 65 faculty mem-bers who mentor more than 150 graduate students in 11 major fields. The program consistently receives the highest national rankings, with our Latin American specialty ranked number one in the country. Dr. Jac-queline Jones, Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History, serves as the Faculty Advisor for the program. In addition, the Graduate School presented our very own Dr. Ann Twinam with the 2013 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award (see page 4). In 2012, Professor H.W. Brands was recognized as Outstanding Graduate Alum-nus and Marilyn Lehman, was named Out-standing Graduate Coordinator.

This school year has been particularly successful for our faculty and graduate stu-dents. Cameron Strang received the presti-gious Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for the best essay in American history submitted by a graduate student for “Violence, Ethnic-ity, and Human Remains during the Second Seminole War.” The essay will appear in the Journal for American History. Meanwhile, another one of Strang’s articles has been ac-cepted by the William and Mary Quarterly. Strang, who will complete his Ph.D. in sum-mer 2013, will start a post-doctoral appoint-ment as the Smithsonian Institution Librar-ies’ Margaret Henry Dabney Penick Resident Scholar in September 2013.

Three other students, Chris Heaney, Felipe Cruz, and Ben Breen, have launched The Appendix, an online quarterly journal of experimental and narrative history that has already attracted media attention. Breen also has an upcoming article in the Journal of Early Modern History.

In addition, six graduate students re-ceived special awards from the department:

Matt Gilder , Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation: “Indomestizo Modernism: National Development and Indigenous Integration in Postrevolutionary Bolivia, 1952–1964.”

Rachel Herrmann, Lath-rop Honorable Mention for Dissertation: “Food and War: Indians, Slaves, and the American Revolu-tion”

Nathan Jennings, Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report, for MA Thesis, “Rising to Victory: Mounted Arms of Colonial and Revolutionary Texas, 1822–1836.”

Hannah Ballard, Ellis Prize for Best Seminar Paper in Texas History for “Mastery in Diaspora: Creek Indian Slaveholding and the Sto-ry of Rebecca McIntosh Hawkins Hagerty.”

Chris Heaney, Gould Prize for Best Seminar Paper in U.S. History for “Crania Peruviana: Samuel George Morton and the Challenge of Pre-Columbi-an Skulls.”

Nick Roland, Burleson Texas History Prize for “Empire on Parade: Racial Ideologies and the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposi-tion.”

In the spirit of strife for excellence, this summer some of our students participated in a new initiative at UT: the dissertation boot camp. The creation of four Graduate Coordinators serving departments in the College of Liberal Arts, including Depart-ment of History Graduate Coordinator, Marilyn Lehman, the boot camp convened

History Graduate Students Win Awards, Publish Scholarship


eleven graduate students from various departments for two weeks of writing work-shops, faculty visits, and wellness activities to prepare students to finish their disserta-tions in a productive and healthy manner. According to history graduate student Mi-chelle Reeves “[t]he boot camp was an in-credible opportunity to improve my work habits and time management skills, receive valuable advice from peers, staff, and faculty, and build a writing community. The special emphasis on health and well-being…helped provide an antidote to the unhealthy habits and lifestyle choices that stressed-out grad students often make.”

Top roW: Nick scott, Abhi ravinutala, Kevin stewart

middLe roW: Judith Coffin, Ady Wetegrove, susannah Jacob, steven plante

BoTTom roW: madeline schlesinger, Jacob Troublefield, emily Arnold

Honors Students

Visit our department of history website

for information about events, courses, alumni,

faculty, special programs, and online giving:

www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/

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Twenty Normandy Scholars Study World War II

This spring twenty students from dif-

ferent departments and backgrounds, led

by Associate Professor of History Charters Wynn, joined together to participate in the History Department’s Frank Denius Normandy Scholar Program (NSP). The other History Department facul-ty members who taught in the program this year were David Crew, Judith Coffin, H. W. Brands, and Francoise Debacker.

The NSP, an academic program that focus-es on the Second World War, was launched in the spring of 1990. Since then, over five-hundred students have devoted a semester to studying the causes, conduct, consequences, and contemporary representation of WWII. The NSP is supported by generous donations from Friends of the NSP, the College of Lib-eral Arts, and a program fee.

The 2013 Normandy Scholars, over the course of the spring semester, took classes to-gether, read dozens of books, wrote numer-ous papers, attended guest lectures, watched fourteen films, and met with a Holocaust survivor. After this academically demanding semester, the NSP took a three-week trip to Europe that allowed the students to further contextualize their knowledge. Students vis-ited various sites related to World War II in London, Paris, Normandy, Berlin, and for the first time this year, Cracow in Poland. These sites included the British War Cabinet

Rooms and numerous museums that fo-cused on the Battle of Normandy and Nazi atrocities. The expansion of the program to Cracow meant Normandy Scholars this year were able to visit the notorious Aus-chwitz extermination camp. On another unforgettable day, students walked for miles along Omaha Beach, then up the bluff to the American Cemetery and Memorial, where each Normandy Scholar placed a yellow rose on the grave of a Texan buried there.

Perhaps the most valuable component of the NSP is the sense of community, friend-ship, and personal development and intel-lectual growth that turns the program into an all-around life-enhancing experience. In the words of Max Alspach, a student in the Liberal Arts Honors Program who is major-ing in History, “I learned so much from these great professors both in Europe and in the classroom, all the while making friendships that will last a lifetime.” “I am not aware of any other program that allows students to study alongside one another all semester and then travel to Europe. The diversity of the program allows for rich discussion both in the classroom and on subways and trains throughout Europe,” he said.

One of the highlights of this year’s pro-gram was a talk by Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst to the Normandy Schol-ars in March, attended by University of Texas President Bill Powers, NSP benefactor and decorated World War II veteran Frank

Denius, Liberal Arts Dean Randy Diehl, and History Department Chair Alan Tully, among others.

Dewhurst’s father, one of the most highly decorated bombers in the 9th Air Force, participated in the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. But Dewhurst knew little more than that because a drunk driver in Hous-ton killed his father shortly after the war. In 2007 Dewhurst discovered a museum that provided details of his father’s D-Day mis-sion to provide aerial cover for the U.S. sol-diers landing on Utah Beach. After that, he decided to donate generously to the Utah Beach museum and seek out the rest of the members of his father’s outfit. Dewhurst said he was certain that visiting the muse-ums, beaches, and American Cemetery in Normandy would make every Normandy Scholar “proud to be an American,” which it indeed did.

Nsp students with professors Wynne and debacker in front of Westminster Cathedral in London.


Lieutenant Governor david dewhurst talks with Normandy scholars about his father’s role in Normandy d-day invasion.Pe

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BooknotesAlberto A. MartinezThe Cult of Pythago-ras: Math and Myths. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

Anne M. Martinez Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism into U.S. Empire, 1905–1935. Forthcom-ing, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Mark MetzlerCapital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle. Cornell Uni-versity Press, 2013.

Steven Mintz The American Journey Through Adulthood. Forthcoming, Harvard University Press, 2014.

Denise A. SpellbergThomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. Knopf Press, October 2013.

Robert H. AbzugThe Varieties of Religious Experience by William James; abridged with an introduc-tion by Robert H. Abzug. Bedford St. Mar-tin’s Press, 2013.

Daina Ramey Berry Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia, co-editor. Greenwood Press, 2012. Named by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association for the 2013 Outstanding Reference Sources List.

H.W. BrandsThe Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace. Double-day Press, 2012. Winner of the Wiliam Henry Seward Award for Excel-lence in Civil War Biog-raphy and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.

Erika Marie Bsumek and Mark A. Lawrence, editors with David Kin-kela. Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to Internation-al Environmental History. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Brian P. LevackThe Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. Yale University Press, 2013.

The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonia America, editor. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Philippa Levine The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset, 2nd revised edition. Longman Pearson, 2013.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories, editor. Ashgate, 2012.

B O O K N O T E S

Faculty Books published, 2012–2013, and forthcoming

The forty-five academic advisors for the departments and Student Affairs Office of the College of Liberal Arts (COLA) selected Nancy Sutherland for the Distinguished Ser-vice to Advising Award. Assistant Dean for Student Affairs in COLA, Kimberly Krieg, explained that this award is “a career achieve-ment award [that] recognizes sustained ex-cellence in and dedication to advising over many years.” This award is the equivalent of induction into a Liberal Arts Advising Hall of Fame, and the names of recipients are engraved on a permanent plague that hangs in the Gebauer Building.

Nancy Sutherland Receives Highest Award for Academic Advising in the College of Liberal Arts

Ms. Sutherland, Academic Advising Co-ordinator for the Departments of History, Classics, and Philosophy, has served the Uni-versity of Texas at Austin community as an academic advisor for over 25 years. Through her years of service—in the College of Fine Arts Office of the Dean, as senior advisor for the Department of History, and, now, coor-dinating advising for three departments—she has never flagged in her enthusiastic ser-vice to students and to the university. She is a two-time recipient of the Texas Exes James W. Vick Award for Academic Advising.

Dean Krieg said that “Nancy is one of the

most caring advisors I know.... She makes each student feel as if they attend a small liberal arts college instead of a huge univer-sity. In some ways, she touches the lives of every history major, whether through her timely email reminders, her ‘This day in his-tory’ emails, or the way she walks a student over to another office when it is apparent the student is a lost freshman on a big campus.”

Department Chair, Alan Tully, spoke for department faculty and students when he said, “It is a wonderful and fitting acknowl-edgement of Nancy’s committed service to students, the Department and the University.”

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In 2009, Drs. Penne Restad and Karl Hagstrom Miller, along with Dr. G. Howard Miller (emeritus), were the inaugural re-cipients of the Re-gents Outstanding Teaching Award. During the 2013–2014 academic year, Restad and K.

Miller will create “a hybrid survey course, a lab, designed to immerse students in the processes of historical inquiry and analy-sis.”1 The course, set to pilot in Spring 2014, merges two different species of 21st century education: personal instruction and tech-nology. This new class will not be a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)—the much talked about “new thing” in higher educa-tion that allows students to watch videos of lectures, submit assignments electronically, and participate in online discussion groups. Moreover, the new class will not be a pre-scription for all future U.S. History survey classes. Rather, the transformed class will serve as a model of possibilities.

With funding from the university’s Course Transformation Project (CTP), Res-tad and Miller will develop online resources available to students and faculty, a Faculty Workshop Series for the exploration of new pedagogy, a research seminar for history graduate students about old and new ways of teaching U.S. History (“Designing Histo-ry’s Future”), and a three-day training pro-gram for teaching assistants who will work with the newly designed class. Executive Vice President and Provost Gretchen Ritter began the CTP in 2010 to “redesign large en-rollment, lower division classes to improve student learning and early college success.”2

Since 1955, all students who gradu-ate from any school or college at a public university in Texas must have completed six hours of U.S. History or three hours of U.S. History and three hours of Texas his-tory. Most UT Austin students satisfy this requirement by taking the department’s U.S. History survey classes: “U.S. History: Co-lumbus through the Civil War” and “U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present.” These classes are usually large lecture classes of 300 or more students. Senior faculty such as Jacqueline Jones, H.W. Brands, and Jeremi Suri teach this class, as have award winning teachers such as George Forgie, Michael Stoff, as well as Restad and Miller. Still, no

Restad and Miller to Model New Ways of Teaching History

matter how eloquent, entertaining, inspiring, or charismatic the instructor, being one of 300 students in a large lecture class is not al-ways an effective learning environment for everyone. University faculty in different disciplines throughout the United States have been experimenting with new forms of pedagogy aimed at increasing student en-gagement and student learning. Restad and Miller crafted the CTP for the U.S. History survey class based on their experience as teachers and their study of new ideas for col-lege instruction.

The organizing principle for the new class is that students will learn history by learn-ing to “do” history, to “perform historical analysis using the same steps that working historians use to transform the chaotic and fragmentary record of the past into com-pelling and defensible narratives.”3 To that end, students will be encouraged to explore the historical record, learn to ask historical questions, find source documents, compare and contrast different interpretations, review and evaluate the evidence in a larger histori-cal context. Students will do much of this work in small teams in class. The instructor will be less the “sage on the stage” and more “the guide on the side.”4

The CTP grant will enable Restad and Miller to create two websites that can be used by UT students and faculty indepen-dent of the new class. The “UT History Lab” will be a diverse collection of resources, “a rich online learning environment,” that will include primary documents, interac-tive maps, study guides, reading exercises, micro-lecture videos and links to other on-line sources. The “Faculty Resource Website” will be a collection of materials provided by faculty and graduate students that any teacher can use or modify for U.S. History classes: exams, in-class activities, ideas for in-class discussion or debate, and assess-ment tools.

Look for this space next year for a report of the History CTP in 2013–2014.1 Penne Restad and Karl Miller, “History Department,

Course Transformation Program, Summary Proposal, February 20, 2013.

2 See https://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctp/.3 Restad and Miller.4 Alison King, “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the

Side,” College Teaching, 41:1 (Winter 1993), 30–35.

Each year the Tex-as Exes, UT Austin’s premier alumni or-ganization, chooses ten professors who are among “the best and most inspiring on the Forty Acres.” Distinguished Senior Lecturer Penne Res-

tad was selected as one of the “Texas 10.” One of her former students wrote, “She’s abso-lutely the best professor I’ve ever had! I actu-ally changed my major to history after I took her class. She has a very creative and narra-tive approach to teaching. Her lectures aren’t lectures at all—they’re stories...and good ones too! She is very witty and playful in her ap-proach to teaching. Lectures are super fun and impossible to forget.” One of the most innovative teachers at UT, Restad’s success in undergradu-ate teaching was recognized in 2009 when she was one of sixteen Forty Acres faculty named by the UT Regents as an “Outstand-ing Teacher.“ In 2009, she also received a grant from the Regents to develop a new method of teaching one of the Department of History US survey classes, “U.S. History: from Reconstruction to the Present.” Pro-fessor Restad provides lectures to the class, but the most prominent feature of the class is the work that students do in teams of 4–5. These teams meet during class time to dis-cuss and debate readings and lectures be-fore they collaborate on answering quizzes. Dr. Restad explains that this means a “loud classroom.” As students consider questions presented to them, they find themselves teaching themselves and each other—in other words, learning. As another former student commented, “I really loved this class! I feel like I learned so much and she did an excellent job. The group work isn’t as bad as people think, because you get to do quizzes together…. I would take this class again!” For the past two years, Restad has worked with the Center for Teaching and Learning as a faculty facilitator for a Faculty Learning Circle in collaborative learning. This year, she and Department of History Associate Professor Karl Miller submitted a proposal to the Course Transformation Project to cre-ate a hybrid U.S. history survey. The propos-al was approved with acclaim in a letter from Vice Provost Gretchen Ritter who supervises the Course Transformation Project.

Penne Restad Named One of “Texas 10”

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UT Austin Scholars Work with Middle and High School Teachers

In early June, over fifty middle and high school teachers from north and central Tex-as came to the University of Texas at Aus-tin to attend the Humanities Texas Summer Institute for Teachers. Dr. Michael Gillette, Executive Director of Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, convened the 2013 Institute for Teachers. The topic for this summer’s in-stitute was American military history from the colonial era through Reconstruction. Humanities Texas held similar conferences in summer 2013 in Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio.

Dr. Erika Bsumek served as faculty di-rector for the UT Austin Institute. Meeting in the LBJ Library, the teachers heard pre-sentations from four UT Austin Department of History professors: Robert A. Olwell, Er-ika M. Bsumek, George B. Forgie, and H.W. Brands. Pulitzer Prize winners Gordon S. Wood and Daniel Walker Howe as well as local historian Jesus F. de la Teja made pre-sentations.

After the plenary presentations, the teachers and scholars worked together in small groups: “[The] institute emphasizes close interaction with scholars, the exami-nation of primary sources, and the develop-ment of effective pedagogical strategies and engaging assignments and activities. The programs were designed ultimately to en-hance teachers’ mastery of the subjects they teach and to improve students’ performance on state assessments.”

Dr. Robert A. Olwell, spoke on “Turning Points of the Revolutionary War.” As Olwell explained, “I focused on British plans and strategy; they were in the ‘driver’s seat,’ so they did all the turning.” He compared dif-fered turning points in the war to different phases of American strategy in the Vietnam war. He introduced the teachers to entries from the diary of Albigence Waldo—a Con-necticut surgeon who served the Continen-tal Army—during the first month of the ar-my’s winter encampment at Valley Forge on the Schuylkill River north of Philadelphia. A notoriously difficult time, Waldo described one of the soldiers: “...his bare feet are seen thro’ his worn out Shoes, his legs nearly na-ked from the tatter’d remains of an only pair of stockings,...his whole appearance pictures a person forsaken and discouraged.”

George B. Forgie, Distinguished Teach-ing Associate Professor, spoke to the teach-ers on “Nine Questions About the Civil War.”

His upper division course on the Civil War and Reconstruction is legendary for several generations of UT Austin undergraduates. Forgie encouraged a more complicated and nuanced understanding of this historic and still-resonant conflict. For example, as For-gie led the teachers through a close reading of the Gettysburg Address, he observed that the eloquent, gracious, and inspiring prose notwithstanding, President Lincoln did not “mention the Union, the U.S., secession, slavery, the North, the South, or explain who or what threatened either the nation’s life or popular government.” H. W. Brands, Dick-son, Allen, and Anderson Centennial pro-fessor, spoke about Ulysses S. Grant. Brands recently published a much praised biography of Grant that emphasized his military acu-men during the Civil War and his commit-ment to the protection of newly freed slaves during Reconstruction: The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S. Grant in War and Peace (Random House, 2012).

Erika Bsumek provided the teach-ers with an enriched view of “Indian Wars in the Southwest.” “Manifest Destiny,” the phrase coined in 1845 by journalist John L. O’Sullivan that came to be understood as the divine justification for the expansion of Americans across the continent, is one of the terms that the National Standards for Amer-ican History identify as important for high school students to understand. In her work-shops with teachers, Bsumek shared two dif-ferent views of “Manifest Destiny.” First, she had teachers study John Gast’s 1872 paint-ing, “American Progress” that depicts the United States as a fair-skinned maiden tra-versing the plains (See it here: http://www.csub.edu/~gsantos/img0061.html). Second, she showed teachers a drawing made by a Kiowa Indian while imprisoned in Florida. The Kiowan picture story is punctuated with gravestones: seasons pass as an owl—a fearful omen—appears; wagon trains bring settlers; a solitary Native American faces an army with sabers drawn; and the “stars and stripes” are planted. This drawing by an anonymous captive, far from home, suggests unhappy changes to Native American life in the late-nineteenth century. One student remarked that Bsumek’s presentation was “[e]xtremely illuminating” and provided “a multitude of ideas with regard to injecting an often overlooked aspect of our American identity into lessons and discussions within the classroom.”

By Christine Baker

in June 2013, the University of Texas at Aus-tin hosted two week-long professional de-velopment institutes for secondary school teachers. Through presentations by UT Austin faculty and other renowned scholars and in workshops that focused on primary sources, the Gilder Lehrman institute and the humanities Texas institute for Teachers

humanities Texas institute for Teachers

dr. George Forgie (left) with teachers

dr. Jeremi suri (left) with teachers

dr. robert olwell

Photos by Humanities Texas

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UT Austin Scholars Work with Middle and High School Teachersreached out to support the teachers who are the first to introduce the American past and its significance to the nation’s youth. The College of Liberal Arts, the UT Austin department of history, the institute for his-torical studies, and the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential Library were co-sponsors for both institutes.

On June 23, UT Austin welcomed twenty-three teachers from around the United States to this nationally recognized program. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, a New York-based non-profit organization devoted to improv-ing history education, funded this institute with support from the LBJ School of Public Affairs (LBJ), the UT Austin Harry Ran-som Center, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, and from Humanities Texas. This was the second year that Gilder Lehrman selected our campus for this pro-gram. This year’s institute was devoted to the history of “U.S. Foreign Relations” and particularly the key events in America’s emergence as a world power during the late nineteenth century and the continued trans-formations in American society and policy through two world wars, the Cold War, and the early twenty-first century. Sessions ana-lyzed major conceptual issues, such as na-tional security, imperialism, decolonization, nation-building, democratization, and fiscal (in)solvency.

Professor Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Global Leader-ship, History, and Public Policy, lectured to the teachers and led workshops with them each day. His twelve lectures includ-ed “1898 and the New World of the 20th Century,” “The Origins of the Cold War,” and “9/11 and the Global War on Terror-ism.” Professors Erika Bsumek and Mark Lawrence delivered well-received guest presentations on, respectively, “Native Americans, Commodities, and Post-War American Society,” and “The Vietnam War.” Professor Joan Neuberger and LBJ Dean Robert Hutchings joined the teachers for two spirited lunch discussions.

One of the highlights of the program was its emphasis on introducing participants to archival materials from various locations on campus including the LBJ Presidential Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. This focus on primary sources and archival materials was aimed at demonstrating to teachers how they can incorporate these re-sources into their teaching, giving students a first-hand opportunity to interpret the his-tory they study. Katie Schnittker from Po-teet High School in Mesquite, TX described some of the activities in the archives: “We learned a whole lot and got to see the inter-esting artifacts and resources available in the university archives, such as Congressional

letters and poster-sized political cartoons at the Blanton Museum of Art.”

In addition to lectures and explorations in the archives, teachers were asked to pres-ent possible lesson plans using the sources they examined. Lauren Taylor, from Weiner High School in Arkansas highlighted the usefulness of these activities: “I was a first-year teacher and this was such a great experi-ence, especially learning how to break down documents from the archives and focusing on different strategies for introducing them to my students.”

Professor Suri discussed the importance of emphasizing historical research and in-quiry in teaching about history at the high-school level: “This workshop is a great ex-ample of how our research and teaching on campus add enormously to the public expe-rience for citizens in Texas and other states. This workshop is part of our broader effort at UT Austin to train the future leaders of our society. Our future leaders will need high-quality history education in their lo-cal schools.” Professor Suri also encouraged participants to tweet out their experiences and interact with one another and the ar-chival institutions of the university through social media. Tweets and photos were aggre-gated in a Storify piece at https://storify.com/ TheLBJSchool/2013/gi lder-lehrman- institute-seminar.

The Gilder Lehman Institute has already asked UT Austin to host another group of teachers in June 2014, and Professor Suri will direct that workshop.

The Gilder Lehrman institute for American history

UT Austin has clearly become

one of the places to train the best

history teachers in the country

because of the high-quality of

research and teaching in the UT

Austin Department of History.

— Professor Jeremi Suri

Gilder Lehrman institute Teachers

dr. erika Bsumek (middle) with teachers

Gilder Lehrman teachers in LBJ Library archives

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IHS Conference Examines Chinese Diaspora during the Cold War through Interdisciplinary Lens

Scholars, students, and guests from Hong Kong, Taiwan, England, the United States, and Canada gathered at the Uni-versity of Texas last week to attend the “Transpacific China in the Cold War” conference hosted by the Institute for Historical Studies. Randy Diehl, the Dean of Liberal Arts at UT, opened the confer-ence and highlighted its interdisciplinarity. The two-day conference highlighted new research focusing on the cultural and social productions that emerged from Chinese communities during the Cold War.

Madeline Hsu, Associate Professor of History at UT and the Director of the Center for Asian American Studies, organized the conference with Poshek Fu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Zijiang Professor of Humanities at the East China Normal University in Shang-hai), and Hon Ming Yip, (Chinese University of Hong Kong). Professor Hsu remarked that this conference was particularly significant because it painted a “more complicated pic-ture of the various struggles to assert identity and belonging during the Cold War. In these struggles, Great Power conflicts shaped but did not determine intellectual formations and pursuits of belonging by Chinese communities.”

The conference included four pan-els that addressed issues and questions relating to diasporic Chinese com-munities. In the first session of the conference, entitled “Orphans of Em-pire: Refugees,” the panelists explored questions affecting Chinese refugees during the Cold War, an issue often overlooked by diplomatic historians. Helen Zia, a journalist, discussed the mass exodus from Shanghai on the eve of the communist “liberation” while Glen Peterson, University of British Columbia (UBC), examined the politics surrounding the Chi-nese refugees in Hong Kong after the communist takeover of the main-land. Madeline Hsu analyzed how the Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectu-als, ostensibly a non-governmental

organization (NGO) not yet funded by the State Department, politicized refugees by transferring Chinese intellectuals in Hong Kong to Taiwan in support of Chiang Kai-Shek’s efforts to retake the mainland. Finally, Dominic Yang (UBC), one of the 2013–2014 IHS fellows, demonstrated that the Rennie’s Mill Community, a refugee community in Hong Kong, was not only a product of the Cold War but also a reflection of British be-nign neglect to the hardship of refugees.

In the second session, “The Politics of Cultural Production,” the panelists exam-ined the ways that cold war politics influ-enced literature, film, and literary criticism. Poshek Fu analyzed Hong Kong film cul-ture and argued that Hong Kong cinema should be understood within the context of cold war politics in Asia as a battleground of the global competition between the U.S. and China in winning over the Chinese di-aspora. Ping-hui Liao (UC San Diego) jux-taposed the works of two Chinese authors, Eileen Chang and Chen Ying-Chen, to

analyze their responses to Chinese commu-nism and American neocolonialism. Chih-ming Wang (Academia Sinica) analyzed the works of Yan Yuanshu in order to explore how literary criticism reflected the ideologi-cal struggle of cold war Taiwan.

“Propaganda and Discourse” was the third session. In his discussion of leftist newspapers published in Hong Kong and their reporting of the anti-colonial riots in 1952 and 1967, Chi-kwan Mark (U. London) argued that Hong Kong was a contested space of constantly redefined cold war rhet-oric. Shuang Shen (Penn State U.) located cold war discourse within Chinese literature and demonstrated that refugee literature revealed intricate intra-Asian connections. Finally, Xiaojue Wang (U. Pennsylvania) broadened the panel’s discussion by analyz-ing the rise of modern Chinese literature in the mid-twentieth century as discourse about the Cold War.

In the last panel of the conference, “Ne-gotiating Nonalignment during the Cold

War: Hong Kong,” the panelists chal-lenged current scholarship by placing Hong Kong in the center of Cold War dynamics. Peter Hamilton (PhD Can-didate, UT Austin) focused on Pop Gingle, an American veteran and en-trepreneur who moved to Hong Kong in 1937 and successfully established a business in the British colony. Simon Shen (Chinese U. of Hong Kong) ex-amined the 1967 riot in Hong Kong in a cold war context that involved connections among China, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Finally, Hon-Ming Yip (Chi-nese U. of Hong Kong) used the 1940s Chinese Democratic Movement in Hong Kong to argue for the impor-tance of Hong Kong as a node of Cold War politics.

The conference was an over-whelming success. One of the par-ticipants, Shuang Shen, commented that “Without exaggeration, this was the conference from which I have learned the most. The circulation of full-length papers ahead of time really gave me a chance to read and think about the other partici-pants’ work while also forcing me to conceptualize more rigorously my own project.”

An anthology collecting the pa-pers from the conference is planned.

By Christine Baker

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Students and Teachers Listen to Voices from the Past and the Present“siberian Voices”This summer Dr. Mary Neuburger, associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eur-asian Studies (CREEES) at UT Austin, led a group of 13 faculty, students, and K–12 teach-ers through a stretch of Siberia. Neuburger was awarded a Department of Education Fulbright grant for the “Siberian Voices” travel-seminar to help current and future U.S. educators develop curricula.

The group included an exemplary UT

Eminent Historians of South Asia Will Join History Department

Indrani Chat-terjee (Ph.D., School of Ori-ental and Af-rican Studies, University of London, 1996) has authored, e d i t e d , a n d co-edited sev-

eral books including Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Rutgers University Press and Permanent Black, 2004), Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1999), and Slavery and South Asian History (co-edit-ed with Richard Eaton, Indiana University Press, 2007). Her most recent book, Forgot-ten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2013) looks at monks, material culture, and the gender of memory in South Asian history. Her research interests include slavery in early modern and modern South Asia, the histories of women and sexuality, and the cultural and intellectual histories at the intersection of the family in the subcontinent.

Sumit Guha (Ph.D., University of Cam-bridge, 1981), will hold the Frances Higginbo-tham Nalle Centennial Professorship in His-tory. Guha studies western and central India, with increasing interest in the political, cul-tural and linguistic processes by which identi-ties take historical shape. He edited a recent special issue of the Medieval History Journal (vol. 14, no. 2) organized around the theme of literary cultures of frontier zones, extending from sixteenth century Mexico through the Mediterranean to eastern Burma. In spring 2013, he served as visiting Directeur d’Etudes of the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences So-ciales in Paris. He has published three books including Environment and Ethnicity in South Asia, 1200–1991 (1999) and Health and Popu-lation in South Asia (2001). Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present will be published by E.J. Brill later this year. He is also participating in a major book project led by Professor Benjamin Ellman and Professor Sheldon Pollock that aims to write a comparative history of India and China in the early modern era.

Austin undergraduate history major, Daniel Rusnak, who gathered information for a fu-ture course on the Trans-Siberian railroad. The journey first diverged from and then fol-lowed the Trans-Siberian, revealing the great impact of Russian expansion into Siberia’s vast reaches. Beginning in Kyzyl (part of the Russian Federation’s Tuvan Republic), pro-ceeding to Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, and finally Ulan Ude (in the Buriat Republic), the trip skirted the Russian-Mongolian border. The group explored this fascinating cultural bor-derland, layered with various indigenous, as well as Mongolian, Chinese (past and pres-ent), Turkic, Russian, and even Tibetan his-torical influences. Shamanistic sites peppered the landscape along with Buddhist temples and shrines, Orthodox Churches, Russian colonial architecture, a surprising number of Lenin statues and Lenin-named main streets, as well as newly built monuments to past heroes, Russian and indigenous. Without a doubt the trip provided the group with the opportunity to observe and ponder the visual impact of history on the region, as well as how Siberian peoples are actively negotiating their own past and present in ‘New Russia.’

Dr. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, associate pro-fessor and associate chair in the Department of History, studies religion in Latin America. She wrote Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (UT Press, 1998). More recently, she published Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982–1983 (Oxford, 2010) about a particularly violent period in Guate-mala’s long civil war. A Spanish edition of this book was published in 2013. In spring 2013, Garrard-Burnett taught a graduate-level seminar, “Exploring the Ar-chive: Guatemala History through the Na-tional Police Archives.” The class spent a week in Guatemala City to study the Historical Archives of the National Police (AHPN). The trip was funded by the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, the Lozano Long Insti-tute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS), the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Jus-tice, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program.

The digital AHPN was created in 2011 as a collaborative project between Guatemalan experts and three UT Austin centers: LLILAS, the Rapoport Center, and the Benson Latin American Collection. The physical AHPN was

discovered only in July 2005. Graduate students visited the APHN, which includes documents about dis-appearances and persecutions during the civil war. The students spent two days using the ar-chives for their individual research projects.

While in Guatemala City, students attended the trial of General Efrain Rios Montt who was on trial for genocide and crimes against hu-manity.2 They also visited the laboratory of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Founda-tion, where the staff was analyzing bodies re-cently exhumed from a mass grave at a military base. Near the end of the trip that examined and witnessed history, the students pondered a statue that is in front of the AHPN. It is two large concrete walls that are broken in half. The plaintive message enscribed on the statue is “Memoria y Esperanza: Dignificar a todas las victimas, Unificar un pais fracturado.”3

1 Based on a report by Giovanni Batz and Edwin Rene Román-Ramirez.

2 Rios Montt was convicted on May 10, 2013, but the sentence was annulled ten days later.

3 “Memory and Hope: Respect the victims, Unify a broken country”

Guatemala: Archives from a Bloody Civil War1

sumit Guha and indrani Chatterjee

“serge,” replicas of traditional steppe hitching posts with Buddhist prayer flags overlooking Lake Baikal. Creating “serge” is a practice that combines the traditional shamanism of indige-nous peoples of siberia with Buddhist traditions to mark a place of spiritual significance.

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Not Even Past is Always New

Created in 2010 to provide short articles to the public on every field of history, Not Even Past (NEP) de-buted a spectacular new feature in Octo-ber 2012: “15 Minute History,” podcasts of discussions with UT faculty and graduate students on a wide range of historical topics. A joint project with Hemispheres—a UT Austin outreach program that works with educators and public institutions to increase understand-ing of Western Europe; Latin America; the Middle East; Russia, East Europe, and Eur-asia; and South Asia—“15 Minute History” is the brainchild of Professor Joan Neu-berger (NEP editor) and Christopher Rose (Outreach Coordinator for the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CMES), a doctoral student in History.

Ever creative and committed to mak-ing history accessible and to promoting a public conversation about “the past and the ways the past lives on in the present,” Neu-berger and Rose wanted to make Not Even Past specifically helpful to K–12 social stud-ies teachers, students, and anyone interested in history. Anyone can listen to a podcast from the NEP “15 Minute History” website

by clicking on “Listen to the podcast” or by downloading the podcasts from iTunes. “15 Minute History” already has 1,000 sub-scribers on iTunes.

The podcast topics are drawn from the 2010 state standards for social studies out-lined in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). For example, the twenty-four podcasts that are available include conversa-tions about the U.S. Civil War with Dr. George Forgie, the Declaration of Independence with Dr. Robert Olwell, European imperialism in Africa with doctoral student Cacee Hoyer, the Indian Independence Movement with Dr. Aarti Bhalodia, and the 1917 Russian Revolutions with Dr. Joan Neuberger. The website includes podcast transcripts, sugges-tions for additional reading, and a section for teachers on “Standards Alignment”—how the podcast corresponds to specific TEKS re-quirements and to the National Standards for History, Basic Edition.

Not Even Past continues to feature short articles, book and movie reviews, and com-mentary on historical documents and im-ages. Read, for example, articles by doctoral student Robert Whitaker about video games that place gamers in a real, or imagined, historical setting. Read what Dr. Daina Ra-mey Berry thought about Quentin Taran-tino’s movie Django Unchained. Read Dr.

Cynthia Talbot’s review of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011). Look at a truly creepy sixteenth century painting (artist unknown) that depicts an exorcism, and read Dr. Brian Levack’s analy-sis of the painting. Listen to a song that hails a late-nineteenth century spirit medium and anti-colonial martyr in Rhodesia who became popular with Zimbabwe national-ists during the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Ruramisai Charumbira writes about Nehanda-Charwe, the subject of the song, and her place in the history and politics of Zimbabwe’s struggles for independence.

With such a cornucopia of sights, sounds, and documents, dozens of articles that pro-vide information and analysis, and, now, “15 Minute History,” it is not surprising that the Not Even Past audience has grown from 4,000 visits per month to 10,000 visits per month. These numbers will continue to rise.

Next year, Not Even Past will feature sto-ries about teaching history, at the university and in K–12 schools, and how UT Austin collaborates with teachers. Dr. Neuberger and her team are developing more new ways to explore the past.

See http://www.utexas.edu/cola/orgs/hemispheres/.See http://www.notevenpast.org/about.https://blogs.utexas.edu/15minutehistory/.

Every February millions of Americans watch the “Academy Awards” on television, and every Fall, thousands of Americans read about another set of academy awards in the US News and World Report (USN-WR): the U.S. college rankings. For twenty years in a row, UT Austin’s Latin American History program has walked away from those academy awards like Ben Affleck’s Argo. Read about the remarkable Latin American History faculty at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/news/6568.

US News and World Reports ranks UT Austin’s Latin American history program as Tops in the Nation

Numero Uno:

BACK roW: Jonathan C. Brown, matthew J. Butler, seth W. Garfield, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Jorge Canizares-esguerra, and Frank A. Guridy. FroNT roW: Lina del Castillo, susan deans-smith, and Ann Twinam.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner

Tam

ir Ka

lifa

Joan Neuberger

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Meet Nancy Footer (UT Austin, History Honors, 1980; JD, Law, 1983). Ms. Footer serves on the department’s Visiting Commit-tee, delivered the History Department Com-mencement speech in 2007, and is a donor and tireless advocate for the department. When she is not doing volunteer work for History, Ms. Footer serves as the Vice Chan-cellor and General Counsel for the Univer-sity of North Texas (UNT) System. Before that, she was General Counsel and assistant to the president for legal affairs and adjunct faculty member in the College of Education and Human Development of Bowling Green State University (1994–2004) and associ-ate university counsel for the University of Houston system from 1985–1994. She is a former president of the Texas Association of State University Attorneys and a member of the board of directors of the National Asso-ciation of College and University Attorneys. She is a graduate of Leadership Dallas 2010.

Ms. Footer clearly enjoys her legal ca-reer in service to higher education, and she comments that the “most interesting job in a university is the lawyer’s job; you see all of the university at work and you work with ex-tremely smart people.” With eight lawyers on her staff at the UNT System, she supervises an expansive realm of transactions, consul-tations, and conflict resolutions, research agreements, construction contracts, student affairs, faculty and employment issues, regu-latory compliance, athletics, gift agreements, and much more.

But despite the demands of her work, she has been an eager and generous supporter of the UT Austin Department of History. She “treasures” her work with the Visiting Committee as a way to “be a champion for the department, and as a way to give back.” It is terrific, Footer comments, “to see the work of an extraordinary department up close.” She has been especially impressed

Nancy Footer Champions UT History by Serving on Visiting Committee

to learn about faculty and student research, about the Frank De-nius Normandy Scholar Program, and about the department’s work with high school his-tory teachers. “Higher education and the dis- cipline of history need advocates these days,” and Ms. Footer is an able and enthusiastic advocate.

When asked about her eager and gener-ous support of the UT Austin Department of History, Ms. Nancy Footer has a quick response: “Personally and professionally, studying history at UT prepared me for life; I love what it did in my life.” She recalls a lackluster first semester as a freshman and describes herself as “a lost little freshman.” In the second semester of her freshman year, she was one of 500 students in Profes-sor Howard Miller’s “US History: Columbus through the Civil War.” Even then, Professor Miller was well-regarded as an outstanding teacher; she reports, “I was captivated.” Her interest in the study of history well-stoked, she went on to take courses with other de-partment luminaries: Robert Divine, Louis Gould, Brian Levack, and George Forgie. When Footer was a senior enrolled in the History Honors Seminar, she felt as if she finally understood the “genuine life of the mind” and how it affects all aspects of life. For example, Ms. Footer recollects that such seminars are a wonderfully “covert way of engaging conversation about values.” It was, she explains, in studying History at UT Aus-tin that she learned the value of intellectual discovery, of curiosity, of debate, of thinking clearly and critically. “These are the things that enable success in life. I learned them from my parents, but they were solidified in college” when I was at UT Austin.

The Honorable Mark and Vicki Atkinson

John and Radonna Curtis

Josiah and Susan Daniel

Darrick Eugene

Martin V. B. Fleming II

Nancy S. Footer

Joel M. Hammerman

Ramona Houston, Ph.D.

Robert E. Icenhauer-Ramirez

Admiral B. R. Inman, U.S.N. (Ret.)

Dee J. Kelly, Jr.

Suzon Kemp

Joseph D. Lesley

David McArthur

Richard T. McMillan II

Dan and Andrea Nicewander

William A. Paddock

Rick Poppe

Dan and Emmy Lou Prescott

Hervey and Dianne Priddy

Blake Purnell

David A. Sheppard

Paul Terrill

Lee Thompson, Ph.D., and David Thompson

Peyton and Carolyn Townsend

Richard Vigness, M.D.

Barron Wallace

Tom Ward

Melba and Ted Whatley

history majors Ady Wetegrove and Lidia plaza have been selected as recipients of this year’s rapoport-King Thesis scholarships. dr. Neil Kamil, associate professor of history, is the academic adviser for their honors theses.

Visiting Committee for the

department of history

Nancy Footer

Horacio Villareal,University of Texas at Austin senior and history major,

will be UT Austin’s student-body president

in 2013–2014.

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They Teach, Research, Publish, Serve, Speak, and Lead:An incomplete List of Last year’s of Activities and Accomplishments by the department of history Faculty

Drs. Robert Abzug, Frank Guridy, and Karl H. Miller were each invited by the University of Texas Press to contribute to a sixteen book series on the history of Texas that the press will publish over the next five years. Abzug will write As Others See Us: The Idea of Texas; Guridy will write about sports in Texas, and Miller will write about Texas music.

World History is a big topic even if you cover only a few millennia or a mere 500 years. Many students want to take world his-tory classes, and future K–12 teachers who may teach world history need college-level instruction. Drs. Cynthia Talbot and Ali-son K. Frazier stepped into the breach when they collaborated to co-teach “The History of the Pre-Modern World” in the fall 2011 and fall 2012 semesters. Spanning 30,000 BCE to 1500 CE, the Talbot-Frazier team in-troduced students to premodern societies in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. Dr. Tracie Matysik bravely soloed with “Modern World History” in fall 2012, and Drs. Ben Brower and Mark Metzler co-taught the course in spring 2013. The subject of the spring 2013 class was modestly described as “themes in the history of the planet over the past half millennium...the movements of people and ideas, technology, economy, and institutions that have made possible our interconnected world.”

The Cold War, perhaps the most significant historical era of the twentieth century, is “hot.” Professor Jonathan Brown is writing and teaching about the Cold War. In Spring 2013, he taught a new course: “The Cold War on Five Continents.” Brown led students in the exploration of the ideological divide be-tween the East (the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and China) and the West (Western Europe and the U.S.) and the challenge this pre-sented to developing nations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. He also presented pa-pers at four conferences including one in Beijing, China.

A division of the Ameri-can Library Association chose Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclo-pedia (Greenwood Press, 2012), co-edited by Dai-na Ramey Berry and Deleso Alford, for the 2013 Outstanding Refer-

ence List. Dr. Berry worked on this project for more than six years and used entries writ-ten by more than 75 scholars. In summer 2013, Berry presented a talk on “Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia” at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. She also spoke to the Library Company of Philadel-phia’s Juneteenth Symposium on “African American Women in the Era of Emancipa-tion.” Read more at her new website: http://www.drdainarameyberry.com/.

Professor Miriam Bo-dian was elected to the American Academy of Jewish Research, the old-est organization of Judaic scholars in North Amer-ica. She has authored two books: Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish

Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Indiana University Press, 2007) and Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Commu-nity in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997).

Professor H.W. Brands, who has written more than 25 books including a biography of Frank-lin Delano Roosevelt, gave a lecture at the University of Oklahoma titled “Franklin Roo-sevelt and Presiden-

tial Leadership.” This lecture was broad-cast on C-SPAN’s “American History TV”: http://www.C-Span.org.

Professor Virginia Garrard- Burnett taught a two-week graduate course, “Religion in Latin Amer-ica,” at the University of Oslo in Norway. Edgar Esquit, prominent Gua-temalan historian and a UT Austin Lozano Long Institute of Latin Ameri-

can Studies (LLILAS) Visiting Resource Pro-fessor, taught her UT Austin class while she was in Norway.

The University of War-wick’s Institute for Ad-vanced Studies (IAS) hosted a week-long conference in March 2013 to study the much acclaimed work of Pro-fessor Jorge Canizares-Esguerra . Canizares-Esguerra, the Alice

Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at UT Austin, gave the public keynote lecture: “Bible and Empire: The Old Testament in the Hispanic World from Columbus to In-dependence.” Lina Del Castillo, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UT Austin, gave a talk (“Representing the Gran Colombian Republic through maps, landscapes and interiors, 1819–1830”) and participated in panel discussions. In 2012, Canizares-Esguerra also delivered keynote addresses or guest lectures in Groningen, Berlin, Madrid, Mexico City, Bogota, as well as at several state-side universities.

In addition to being the on-site organizer for the TransPacific China in the Cold War confer-ence, Madeline Hsu was a guest speaker at four venues in Austin during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May,

2013). As director for UT Austin’s Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS), Dr. Hsu writes about activities and programs spon-sored by CAAS in the center’s online newslet-ter: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e6b5627c1fb4e5d7062c2e695&id=470cc0f077

daina ramey Berry

Jorge Canizares-esguerra

h.W. Brands

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Neil Kamil will spend the fall 2013 semester at the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Ka-mil received the Charles H. Watts II Memo-rial Fellowship to support his work at the library, an institution for advanced research in history and the humanities. His current research project is “Artisans of ‘Inventive Genius’: Atlantic Refugees, Niche Econo-mies, and Portable Devices in the Manufac-ture of Polite Matter, 1640–1789.”

Mark. A. Lawrence will serve as lead historian and “content specialist” for a new museum, the Education Center at the Wall. A project of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Fund and autho-rized by Congress in 2003, the Education Center will be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Tom Ashbrook, host of National Public Radio’s program “On Point,” inter-viewed Professor Brian Le-vack on April 22, 2013. Ash-croft queried Levack about demonic possession and exorcism. Listen to the pod-cast: http://onpoint.wbur.

org/2013/04/11/possession-exorcism

Dr. Tatjana Lichtenstein spent the 2012–2013 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as a fellow of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Studies. While there, she com-pleted her book on Zionism in interwar Czechoslovakia, and she began work on a new project—looking at the experiences of Jews married to non-Jews in Prague from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Dr. Alberto A. Martinez offered a provoca-tive course in the spring 2013 semester. Titled “Biology, Behavior and Injustice,” stu-dents read works of past scientists who made some extraordinary, and largely discredited, claims. Topics included causes of criminal behavior, IQ testing, Nazi “racial hygiene,” cloning, and free will. Professor Martinez did not instruct students that these “scien-tific” theories were wrong or biased. Rather, the students worked in small groups to ex-amine the evidence that the past scientists presented. In the process, students learned to examine their own belief systems.

Anne M. Martinez par-ticipated in the Univer-sity of Utah’s “At Work” lecture series in Sep-tember 2012. Her lec-ture was titled “At Work in the Vineyards of the Lord: Catholic Mission-aries and the Spanish Past in the U.S.”

The American Historical Association’s blog, “AHA Today,” includes an AHA Member Spotlight series. In May 2013, Professor Joan Neuberger was in the spotlight. Neuberger is completing a book on the political and cultural history of Sergei Eisenstein’s master-piece film, Ivan the Terrible. She is the editor of Not Even Past.

Juliet Walker was the Distinguished Visiting

Professor in History at the United States Air

Force Academy in Colo-rado Springs, Colorado for 2012–2013. She taught classes in Ameri-can History and African

American History. She also participated in “At the Crossroads of Freedom and Equal-ity: The Emancipation Proclamation and the March on Washington,” the Black History Month program sponsored by the White House and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Jeopardy,

“America’s

Favorite

Quiz show”

With the unique answer-and-question format, Jeopardy recently challenged contestants to come up with the question that fit this answer: British historian philippa Levine wrote “sunrise to sunset” about this entity. The question the statement answers is “What is the British empire?”

dr. Levine, mary helen Thompson Centennial professor in the humanities and Co-director of the British studies program, also gave guest lectures at four universities in the U.s. and Canada and spent december 2012 on a lecture tour in Japan.

Dr. Erika Bsumek asks, “Is history set in stone.... or concrete?” Dr. Erika Bsumek, associate professor in the Department of His-tory, teaches courses and publishes about the U.S. West, Native American history, and environmental history. She has been especially busy and productive, this year. In addition to her regular teach-ing duties and research and the publication of a book she co-edited, Bsumek offered ex-pertise and leadership to summer programs for high school history teachers. She is also currently working on two book-length projects: Engineering Glen Canyon: Mormons, Indians, and Damming of the American West and The Concrete West: Engineering Society and Culture in the Arid West, 1900–1970.

In April 2010, Dr. Bsumek received the Humanities Research Award from the Col-lege of Liberal Arts (COLA) to support research-related expenses for The Concrete West. Her research will “examine how the American West was transformed by con-crete, and how the profession of engineering changed over the course of the 20th centu-ry.”1 COLA Dean Randy Diehl created this annual award in 2009 to assist faculty doing research in the humanities.

Continued on page 19.

mark A. Lawrence

Brian Levack

Anne m. martinez

Juliet Walker

philippa Levine

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Gardner Marston (1924–2011), UT Aus-tin class of 1953, gave $6.6 million to support the graduate program in the Department of History. Professor Jacqueline Jones, fac-ulty Graduate Advisor in History, said that the Marston bequest will be used to recruit outstanding students, provide fellowships and summer stipends, support travel for re-search, and “maintain the overall excellence of our program.”1

Marston was known to his friends in his native La Jolla, CA as a “remarkably unique man,” a “generous and gentle soul” with a “prodigious and uncanny memory” who loved to “cite facts of history, geography, and current events.”2

In 1998, Mr. Marston donated $250,000 to the department to establish the Gardner F. Marston Endowed History Scholarship Fund. Since then, 21 graduate students have

Alumnus Gardner Marston Makes $6.6 million Gift to Department of History

received this scholarship. His recent multi-million dollar gift was specified in his will. Randy Diehl, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, praised Marston’s generosity: “This is a tremendous example of what planned giv-ing can do for the future of the university….We are grateful for the generosity and fore-sight of people like Gardner Marston, who valued their education at the university and wanted to give back so that others might en-joy the same benefits of higher education.”3

1 “Gardner Marston’s $6.6 Million Gift to Support History Graduate Students at The University of Texas at Austin,” UT Austin, College of Liberal Arts: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/public-affairs/news/6399

2 San Diego Community Newspaper: http://www.sdnews.com/view/full_story/15520880/article-A-life-lived--Gardner-Frank-Rutherford-Marston?

3 College of Liberal Arts: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/public-affairs/news/6399

Professor Antony Ger-ald Hopkins, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History, will retire after fifty years of service to the academy. Hopkins taught at the Univer-sity of Birmingham (England), the Uni-versity of Geneva, and

Cambridge University before joining the University of Texas at Austin faculty in 2002. He has taught graduate and under-graduate classes in the history of the non- Western world and the history of Euro-pean imperialism. In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate of University degree from the University of Stirling (Scotland); and, in 2012, he received the honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the Univer-sity of Birmingham.

Hopkins’ Economic History of West Af-rica (1973) was a seminal work that has been published in over 31 editions. In 1993, with P.J. Cain, Hopkins published the authoritative and influential British Imperialism, 1688–2000. The American Historical Association recognized British Imperialism with the Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best book of 1993–1994 in the field of British, British Imperial, or British Commonwealth history. Most re-cently, Hopkins is hailed for compiling and editing Globalization in World His-tory (Norton, 2002) and Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006). All the while, Hopkins has mentored numerous graduate students. His students and col-leagues celebrated him with a festschrift in April 2011.

Denizens of Garrison Hall will miss seeing Professor Hopkins bounding up the stairs in his running shoes. He will long be appreciated for his service, teach-ing, and scholarship.

Professor “Tony” Hopkins Retires after 50 Years of Scholarship and Teaching

Hardwick Steps Down and Garfield Steps UpWhen the Institute for Historical Stud-ies (IHS) was created in 2007, Department Chairman Alan Tully knew the best person for the job was Professor Julie Hardwick, and she agreed to take on the daunting task of di-rector. After six years of superior service, the Institute is well-established among its peers having provided support and intellectual community for over sixty external and inter-nal fellows and sponsored or co-sponsored over a dozen major conferences. As David Kinkela, IHS fellow in 2008–2009, said, “My year in Austin was one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career. Julie Hardwick was steadfast in her commitment to provide a wonderful work environment that was collegial and intellectually stimulating.” Venkat Dhulipala (2010–2011), upon receiv-ing an offer from Cambridge University press to publish his book on Pakistani statehood, wrote to Dr. Hardwick: “I remember you and IHS with gratitude, for all the help, support, and encouragement I received during my year at Austin.”

Professor Hardwick joined the UT Austin faculty in 2001. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early modern European social and cultural history, and her research focuses on women’s history and legal history in early modern France. While serving as IHS

Director, she continued to publish articles in scholarly journals and anthologies. Her sec-ond book, Family business: litigation and the political economies of daily life in 17th century France, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Dr. Hardwick serves on the Ex-ecutive Committee of the Society for French Historical Studies and has served on the Edi-torial Board for French Historical Studies, the Journal of Women’s History, and Renaissance and Reformation.

A look at the Institute’s web site (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/historicalstudies/) reveals an amazing array of Institute activities during Professor Julie Hardwick’s tenure, and the Institute will continue to flourish under Hardwick’s successor, Seth W. Garfield. Dr. Garfield, associate professor who joined the faculty in 2001, is a Latin American histo-rian who specializes in Brazilian history. His book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Bra-zil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988 was published by Duke University Press in 2001, and his cur-rent book manuscript will be titled War in the Amazon: Brazil, the United States and the Struggle over the Rainforest from World War II to Global Warming. Garfield said of Dr. Hard-wick’s work as IHS Director, “We are forever grateful for your endeavors which have so en-riched the intellectual life of this department and university. I feel privileged and honored to succeed you as the IHS director.”

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Josiah Daniel, III (J.D., UT Law, 1978; M.A., UT His-tory, 1986), received the 2013 Texas Bar Foundation’s “Out-standing Law Review Article” award for “LBJ vs. Coke Ste-

venson: Case Changed History and Defined ‘Lawyering’” published in The Texas Lawbook on July 26, 2012. Daniel, a partner in the in-ternational law firm Vinson & Elkins, L.L.P., is the chair of the Department of History’s Visiting Committee. In 2011, he was elected to membership in the prestigious and exclu-sive American Law Institute. See http://texas lawbooknet/?s=Josiah+Daniel&x=8&y=7

Michael L. Gillette (BA, UT, 1965; Ph.D. , UT, History, 1984) is executive director of Humanties Texas, and former Director of the LBJ Presidential Library’s oral history program. In Novem-ber 2012, Oxford University Press pub-lished Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, based on 47 interviews that Gillette and LBJ Library colleagues conducted between 1977 and 1996. This first book to use Mrs.

Johnson’s newly-released oral history inter-views was enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times (Dwight Garner, 1/8/2013). Gillette also authored Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Bette W. Oliver (Ph.D., UT History, 1997) published her latest book: Surviving the French Revolution: A Bridge Across Time (Lexington Books, 2013). “The unleashing of the French Revolution in 1789 resulted in the acceleration of time coupled with the inability to predict what might happen next. As unprecedented events outpaced the days, those caught up in the whirlwind had little time to make judicious decisions about which course to follow.” Lexington Books, https://rowmn.com/ISBN9780739174418.

Marc-William Palen (Ph.D., UT History, 2011), who studies the history of the British Empire, U.S. foreign policy, and globaliza-tion, is a Lecturer of Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter (U.K.). On June 5, 2013, the New York Times series on the American Civil War (“Disunion”) featured an article by Dr. Palen, “The Great Civil War Lie.” British opinion about se-cession, and whether to support the Con-federacy, was divided because of slavery but, also, because free trade proponents in England mistakenly believed that se-cession was a southern protest of the 1861 Morrill Tariff Act. In fact, seven southern states had seceded and formed the Confed-eracy before the Morrill Tariff Act passed. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com /2013/06/05/the-great-civil-war-lie/?_r=0

Alumni News

Our department is proud to announce Pro-fessor Wm. Roger Louis’s receipt of the 2013 Benson Medal by the Royal Soci-ety of Literature. Dr Louis is the Kerr Chair in Eng-lish History and Culture

and a Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is also Co-Director of the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Royal Society of Literature, founded by George IV in 1820, celebrates and nur-tures all that is best in British literature, past

Royal Society of Literature Awards Benson Medal to Professor Wm. Roger Louis

and present. The Benson Medal was found-ed in 1916 by A.C. Benson, scholar, author, and fellow of the society, “in respect of meri-torious work in poetry, fiction, history, and belles lettres.” The medal honors the recipi-ent’s whole career rather than a single work.

Dr. Louis joins an ensemble of literary celebrities who have previously received the award. Among them are E.M. Foster, English novelist, essayist, and short story writer; An-thony Burgess, English writer and author of A Clockwork Orange; and Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer, activist, and a recipi-ent of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dr Louis was appointed to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress in 2010 and selected as UT’s Professor of the Year in 2009. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Ox-ford History of the British Empire, former President of the American Historical Asso-ciation (AHA), and current Director of the AHA’s National History Center. In 2012 Dr. Louis was appointed as Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has also served as Chairman of the Historical Advisory Committee at the U.S. Department of State.


Bsumek also received a Course Devel-opment Award from the UT Austin Office of Sustainability and the UT Austin Center for the Core Curriculum2 for a new class that she will teach in Spring 2014: “Building America: Engineering Society and Culture from 1867-1980.” The course description ex-plains “this course will look at roughly 100 years of building in American society.... It will focus on the ways in which politicians, architects, engineers, urban planners, construction workers, naturalists, environ-mentalists, novelists, filmmakers, and the American populous approached the rela-tionship between large-scale infrastructure projects and social development.”

Sure to be a popular course for history majors, Bsumek’s class will also be of spe-cial interest to students in Engineering. Through a truly interdisciplinary approach, Dr. Bsumek provides a sterling example of how our faculty use their research to enrich the classes they teach.1 Jessica Sinn, “Erika Bsumek discusses her current

research on the American West with Life and Letters, Life and Letters. See http://lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2013/04/making-sense-of-the-world-through-humanities-research/.

2 Read about the Center for the Core Curriculum and the Office of Sustainability: http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/ccc and http://www.utexas.edu/operations/sustainability/.

Dr. Erika Bsumek asks, “Is history set in stone.... or concrete?” continued from page 17

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We hope that you will consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Department of History. Your check should be payable to the University of Texas at Austin with Department of History noted in the “memo” section of the check. For more information about giving opportunities, you may contact

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Donations may be mailed to Dr. Aronson at the above address. Please include the form below with your gift. You may want to use the secure online donation form: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/giving/how-to-give.php

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Gifts to the History Department

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dear friends of history: a - ut liberal arts · sumit guha. professor chatterjee joins us, after...

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