Dear American University History Alums,

The study of history at American University has never been better. Enrollment in history courses is the highest it has been in more than a decade, with over 1400 students taking classes in the department in Fall 2007. With over 190 majors, history has also become one of the ten largest and most popular departments in the university. In the spring of 2008, almost 70 graduating seniors will present their senior theses (the product of two semester’s work) at History Day, the department’s annual all-day conference. Graduate applications and enrollment have doubled over the past seven years as well, thanks in no small part to the department’s dynamic Public History Program. (See “Special Events and Programs,” page 6.)

History faculty continue to win recognition for outstanding scholarship and teaching. Professor Emeritus Robert Beisner won the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations and the Arthur Ross Book Award (Silver Medal) of the Council on Foreign Relations for his biography, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (2006). Newly appointed professor Max Paul Friedman added the 2007 Bernath Lecture Prize to his already impressive list of awards. Andrew Lewis received AU’s 2006-2007 Award for Outstanding Teaching in General Education. Kimberly Sims was named the Lloyd George Sealy Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, as well as a Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies Fellow for 2007-2008. And Pamela Nadell, the department’s Patrick Clendenen Professor of Women’s and Gender History, was named AU Scholar-Teacher of the Year, the most prestigious distinction the university bestows upon its faculty. She is the third history department faculty member to be so recognized.

AU history faculty also continue to publish important scholarly works. April Shelford published Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720 (University of Rochester Press, 2007); Richard Breitman was the lead editor for Advocate for the Doomed: the Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935 (Indiana University Press, 2007); Alan M. Kraut, together with Deborah Kraut, published Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (Rutgers University Press, 2007); and Eric Lohr published The Papers of Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi (an edited volume published online by Stanford University, The Hoover Institution, 2006). For the many other publications by AU history faculty, see “Faculty News and Notes” on page 4.

Please enjoy this newsletter and let us hear from you. For more information and news, visit the department’s website at www.american.edu/history.

Robert GriffithProfessor and ChairDepartment of History

Making Historyin the Nation’s Capital

In This Issue

p. 2 Feature Storiesp. 3 Faculty News and Notesp. 5 New Facultyp. 6 Special Events and Programs

American UniversityDepartment of History

137 Battelle-Tompkins4400 Massachusetts Ave., NWWashington, D.C. 20016-8038

(202) 885-2401(202) 885-6166 (FAX)

E-mail: history@american.eduwww.american.edu/history

HistoryCOLLEGE of ARTS & SCIENCES

American University Department of History Newsletter2

On November 8, 2007, distinguished AU alum Lonnie G. Bunch delivered the Department of History’s annual David J. Brandenburg Lecture. In July, 2005, Bunch, who earned his B.A. and M.A. in history at American University, was named founding director of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The museum, the 19th to open as part of the Smithsonian Institution, is scheduled to open in 2014 on the National Mall, adjacent to the Washington Monument. From 2001 to 2005, Bunch served as president of the Chicago Historical Society, one of the nation’s oldest historical museums. He had previously worked at the California Afro-American Museum and at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he was associate director for curatorial affairs. Bunch received the univcrsity’s Alumni Achievement Award for 2005 and in 2006 delivered the College of Arts and Sciences’ Bishop CC. McCabe Lecture.

AU Alum Lonnie Bunch’s Big Challenge

American University’s Department of History wants to hear

what is happening in the professional lives of its alumni.

To share your recent accomplishments, please email the

department at history@american.edu, or send a letter to:

Department of History137 Battelle-TompkinsAmerican University

4400 Massachusetts Ave., NWWashington, D.C. 20016-8038

www.american.edu/history

Scholar-Teacher of the Year Pamela Nadell Gives Key Address at Opening Convocation

Breitman Probes U.S. Role in Franks’ Deaths

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Pamela Nadell, Patrick Clendenen Professor of History and director of the Jewish Studies Program, gives the key address at the 2007 Opening Convocation.

By tradition, AU’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year gives the key address at Opening Con-vocation each fall. Using the framework of storytelling, Pamela Nadell, 2007 Scholar-Teacher, noted that new arrivals on campus come not only with suitcases, but with “bags of cultural capital that bind us to other communities.” She urged students to unpack their personal stories—those their parents told them and those they keep inside about themselves—and share them with others, because stories tell about our past, divulge our differences, and reveal our commonalities. “These stories have not only informed your lives, they constitute part of your cultural capital,” Nadell said. Sharing our stories, she said, enriches our communities, provides us with a sense of community and belonging, and ultimately enables us to change our communities for the better. Nadell ended with an invitation to new students: “I especially look forward to hearing the stories of your past, which will shape our future together.”

U.S. national security fears helped keep Anne Frank from escaping the Nazis, revealed AU history professor Richard Breitman at a press conference covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other newspapers. Recently discovered letters between Anne Frank’s father, Otto, and friends abroad, said Breitman, show that in addi-tion to the effort to hide, detailed in The Diary of Anne Frank, the Frank family pursued doomed plans to escape to both America and Cuba. Drawing on newly-discovered letters from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Breitman shows that the failure of these efforts, despite the intervention of prominent U.S. fig-ures, reveals just how difficult it was for Jews to flee the Nazis. These discover-ies, he said, deepen our understanding of the obstacles Holocaust refugees faced. Even with his vast knowledge of the subject, Breitman admits that reading letters about the Franks’ unsuccessful efforts felt both tragic and surreal. “It’s strange,” he said. “I came away from reading through the whole set of docu-ments, and I said, [if things had gone a little differently] Anne Frank could today be a 77-year-old writer living in Bos-ton.”Excerpt from orginal story published in American-

Today, “AU’s Breitman probes unearthed documents detailing Anne Frank’s failed escape,” 2/20/2007 at american.edu/today.

Excerpt from orginal story published in AmericanToday, “Freshmen welcomed to AU at 2007 Convocation,” 8/28/2007 at american.edu/today.

Tell us your story...

Mustafa Aksakal. See “New Faculty,” page 5.

Richard Breitman was the lead editor for Advocate for the Doomed: the Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935, which was published by Indiana University Press in June, 2007. He is currently working on the second volume (1935-45) of this project, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also serves as editor of the scholarly journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Eileen Findlay’s article, “Portable Roots: Community Building and the Meanings of Return Migration in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1960-2000,” is forthcoming in Gender and History. She is completing a book, tentatively titled, Bregando the Beetfields, Dreaming of Domesticity: Post-War Puerto Rican Masculinity, International Labor Migration, and Colonial Populism. She chaired a session at the Fall 2007 American Studies Association.

Kathy Franz curated the widely- acclaimed exhibition, David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture, National Building Museum, Washington, DC (June 21, 2007-May 30, 2008) and published an interview with Macaulay in the Museum’s Blueprints Magazine (July 2007). She delivered three papers: “On Saving the Navarro House: Tejano Memory in San Antonio, 1960-1978,” (American Studies Association, October 2007); “The Peculiar Career of Ella Daggett: Preservation and Tejano Rights in San Antonio, Texas,” (National Council Public History, April 2007); and “David Macaulay: Drawing as Visual Archeology,” Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY (March 2007).

Max Paul Friedman. See “New Faculty,” page 5.

Mary Frances Giandrea published Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell and Brewer, Ltd., 2007). She is currently at work on a study of changing conceptions of holiness in post-Conquest England.

Robert Griffith, who continues to chair the department, published the third edition of his reader, Major Problems in

American History since 1945 (Houghton Mifflin, 2007, co-edited with Paula Baker).

Kate Haulman. See “New Faculty,” page 5.

Ira Klein published “Calcutta, Devel-opment, Society and Health, 1870-1950,” in the Journal of Indian History (December, 2006). His article, “Medical Discoveries and Public Health in British India,” will appear in the December, 2007, issue of the Journal of Indian History. He is also completing an article on “British Policies and Agrarian Change in India,” for the Historian.

Alan M. Kraut published a new book, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (co-authored with Deborah Kraut) in January,2007. A co-edited volume (with Hasia Diner and Elliott Barkan), From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the United States in a Global Era will be published this winter. In February, 2007 he delivered two lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, “Silent Strangers: Disease and Nativism in an Era of Migration” and “Defending the Faith: The Rise of the Jewish Hospital in the History of American Health Care.”

In September, 2007, he delivered a plenary address, “Immigrant Health Professionals in Times of Mass Migration” at a conference, “Stories Told and Untold: Health Workers on the Move,” sponsored by Project Hope.

Peter Kuznick, who is on sabbatical leave, continues his research on nuclear history and recently published two articles. “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb, and the Apocalyptic Narrative” appeared in the August 2007 issue of Japan Focus, and “Prophets of Doom or Voices of Sanity? The Evolving Discourse of Annihilation in the First Decade and a Half of the Nuclear Age” appeared in the September issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Allan J. Lichtman has two books forthcoming in 2008: The Keys to the White House 2008 Edition (Rowman & Littlefield) and White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (Grove/Atlantic). He published “The Keys to the White House: Forecast for 2008,” Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting (Fall 2007) and will be the keynote speaker at the International Forecasting Summit in February 2008. He has recently presented papers at the 27th

Architect and artist David Macaulay poses with Kathy Franz, AU history professor and curator of David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture,

currently on display at the National Building Museum.

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Faculty News and Notes, continued on page 4

American University Department of History Newsletter 3

Faculty News and Notes

Annual International Symposium on Forecasting and the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Andrew J. Lewis is near completion on his manuscript, “The Curious and Learned: Natural History in Early Republic America.” He received American University’s 2006-2007 Award for Outstanding Teaching in General Education. His other accomplishments include recent reviews in the Journal of the Early Republic, the Winterthur Portfolio, and the William and Mary Quarterly, all of which pale in significance to the birth of his second child, Phoebe Olivia.

Eric Lohr recently edited and wrote the introduction for The Papers of Grigorii Nikolaevich Trubetskoi (published online) and wrote the concluding chapter in The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume II Imperial Russia, 1689-1917. He chaired the program committee for the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and continues to chair the Washington Russian History Workshop, a monthly seminar he initiated at Georgetown University three years ago. His numerous recent public lectures and seminar presentations include three lectures in Germany in 2007 and three in Paris in 2006. He will participate in a workshop in Kiev on the teaching of nationalism in East Europe in December 2007.

Pamela Nadell was named American University’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year for 2007. As Patrick Clendenen Professor of History, she is organizing the inaugural Patrick Clendenen Conference on Women’s and Gender History, scheduled for March 25-26, 2008 (see “Making History in the Nation’s Capital: Special Events and Programs,” page 6). Recent and forthcoming articles and book chapters include: “Engendering Dissent: Women and American Judaism,” in The Religious History of American Women, edited by Catherine Brekus (University of North Carolina Press, April 2007); “A Bright New Constellation: Feminism and American Judaism,” The Columbia History of the Jewish People in America, Columbia University Press); “Encountering Jewish Feminism, ” in Why is America Different,” (New York University Press) and “Bridges to ‘a Judaism Transformed by Women’s Wisdom’,” Women Remaking American Judaism (Wayne State University Press). Anna Nelson was awarded a Public Policy Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center (Summer 2007). Her article, “ The National Security State: Ubiquitous and Endless,” appeared in The Long War, edited by Andrew Bacevich (Columbia University Press, 2007). She participated in a panel discussion on civil liberties vs. national security published in Focus, a newsletter of the American Bar Association (Summer 2007) and delivered public lectures at Gettysburg College and the Smithsonian Institution.

April Shelford’s Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720, was published by

the University of Rochester Press as part of its series, Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe. Now at work on new research interests, Shelford presented a paper, “The Slave in the Garden: Slave Presences in Natural History Writings on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” at Sciences et savoirs dans le monde atlantique francophone (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) last April in Montréal and at the Association of Caribbean Historians annual convention last May in Jamaica. In July, she completed a month-long library fellowship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, researching a project on the history of reading in the Caribbean.

Kimberly Sims is currently on leave, completing a book on “Blacks, Italians and the Politics of New York City Crime, 1900-1951.” She is the Lloyd George Sealy Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, as well as a Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies Fellow for 2007-2008.

EMERITI/AE FACULTY

Professor Emeritus Robert Beisner won the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations’ Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award (Silver Medal) for his biography, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (2006).

Professor Emerita Valerie French is enjoying retirement and having time to devote to grandmotherly activities. She and Bob Beisner are planning several leisurely travels to both familiar and new places. Her hand is still in ancient history; she serves on the AHA’s Breasted Prize Committee for the best book about history prior to 1000 CE and reviews the occasional article for ancient history journals.

Distinguished Professor Emerita Bernice Johnson Reagon collaborated with renowned opera director Robert Wilson to create The Temptation of St. Anthony, which opened the 2007 Melbourne International Art Festival with full houses and great reviews. The founder and artistic director of Sweet Honey and the Rock, Professor Reagon served as a consultant on the expansion of the Albany Georgia Civil Rights Museum and Institute, scheduled to reopen August, 2008. She also serves on the Scholar Advisory Group of the new Smithsonian Museum for African American Culture and History, directed by AU alum Lonnie Bunch (see “AU Alum Lonnie Bunch’s Big Challenge,” page 2). She is currently at work on a sacred music audio/book project featuring songs and stories about the meaning of songs from the period of slavery.

Professor Emeritus Roger Brown continues to teach courses on the history of the American Revolution and Early Republic. His generous gifts to the department have supported five graduate students working on the final stages of their dissertations.

photos courtesy of AU University Publications

Mustafa Aksakal, Assistant Professor (PhD, Princeton University), joins the faculty at American University after teach-ing at Monmouth University. His research fields include the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and world history. His teaching includes a focus on the history of Islamic societies with particular attention to the treatment of minorities, the political uses of religious and ethnic symbols, and the history of imperialism and nationalism in the modern age. In 2003, he won the Bayard and Cleveland E. Dodge Memorial Prize at Princeton for Best Dissertation in Near Eastern Studies. In 2004–05, he was a Mellon Fellow in International Studies at the Library of Congress. He is the author of “‘Not by those old books of international law, but only by war’: Ottoman Intellectuals on the Eve of the Great War,” Diplomacy and Statecraft (September 2004) and “Enver Pasha’s Fait Accompli, or Necessity? The Ottoman Decision for War in 1914,” Toplumsal Tarih (September 2006). He is currently completing a book on the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the First World War, tentatively titled, Uncertain Warriors: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914.

Max Paul Friedman, Associate Professor (PhD, University of California, Berkeley), joins the faculty at American University after teaching at Florida State University. A diplomatic historian, his research interests include twentieth century U.S. foreign relations, broadly defined. His book Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge 2003) won both the Herbert Hoover Book Prize in U.S. History and the A.B. Thomas Book Prize in Latin American Studies. He co-edited Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), and his article, “There Goes the Neighborhood: Blacklisting Germans and the Evanescence of the Good Neighbor Policy,” Diplomatic History (September 2003), won the Bernath Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2007, he was awarded SHAFR’s Bernath Lecture Prize. He is currently working on a history of anti-Americanism and foreign perceptions of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.

Kate Haulman, Assistant Professor (PhD, Cornell University), joins the faculty at American University after teaching at the University of Alabama and Ohio State University. Focusing on the history of Early America, her teaching and research interests include cultural history, women’s/gender studies, and material and visual culture. She is the author of “Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2005); “Room in Back: Before and Beyond the Nation in Women’s and Gender History,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 2003); and “Defining American Women’s History,” the introductory essay to the fourth edition of Major Problems in American Women’s History (Houghton Mifflin 2006). She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Political Modes: Fashion and Power in 18th-Century America and was recently a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Winterthur Museum and Library.

The Department of History Welcomes Three New Faculty Members

American University Department of History Newsletter 5

photo by Jeff Watts photo by Jessica Tabakphoto by Jeff Watts

The Patrick Clendenen Conference on Women’s and Gender History. Beginning in 1894, before the first cornerstone had been laid at AU and long before the university graduated its first class, Mary Eliza Graydon made a series of gifts intended to support “the education of women” and to endow a professorship in history. She named the gifts in honor of her grandfather, Patrick Clendenen, from whom she had inherited a small fortune. For more than a century, the endowment grew, largely unnoticed by university leaders. Beginning in 2006, however, the Department of History began drawing on funds from the endowment to name Pamela Nadell its first Patrick Clendenen Professor of History. On March, 25, 2008, Professor Nadell will convene the department’s inaugural Patrick Clendenen Conference on Women’s and Gender History. Kathy Peiss, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, will keynote the conference with an address entitled, “Beyond the Gender Turn.” A series of panel discussions will follow, featuring AU alums, faculty, and graduate students. The conference will conclude with a presentation by independent filmmaker Aviva Kempner, “Yoo-hoo Mrs. Goldberg: Narrating Women’s History through Documentary Film.”

Public History at American University. Under the direction of Kathy Franz, the department’s burgeoning Public History Program now enrolls nearly thirty students. Historians regularly engage the public in multiple ways, but public historians dedicate their careers to serving the public in one four broad fields: museums, historic preservation and cultural resource management, libraries and archives, and digital and documentary media. In all of these areas, the mission of public historians is to document and interpret the past in collaboration with various publics. At AU, graduate students combine rigorous academic coursework with professional training in the field to hone their public history skills. The program seeks to nurture the professional development of its students through a practicum, service projects, and a required internship, so that graduates combine education with service to a wider community.

The Nuclear Studies Institute. Founded in 1995 and led by Peter Kuznick, the department’s Nuclear Studies Institute is dedicated to educating the public about crucial aspects of nuclear history. To that end, the institute offers a summer program consisting of two classes at American University plus a third class—a study abroad trip to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kyoto.

The Civil War Institute. Led by Alan Kraut and Ed Smith, the department’s Civil War Institute introduces participants to the key causes and consequences of the Civil War by exploring its remnants and remembrances in the Washington, D.C., area. The intensive program includes visits to sites such as Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, Arlington National Cemetery, the Sherman and Grant Memorials, Howard University, Fort Stevens, the Frederick Douglass Home, and Ford’s Theater.

Making History American University Department of History Newsletter6

in the Nation’s Capital:

Special Events and Programs

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