Department publishes February 2012 edition of the newsletter History Happenings

[17 February 2012] The Department of History published the February 2012 edition of its newsletter, History Happenings, today. It is available as a PDF document.

The issue contains articles about:

• the recent acquisition of digital collections from Adam Matthew Digital
• Jim Blythe’s photography
• the publication of the pictorial history University of Memphis by Drs Bond and Sherman and Frances Wright Breland
• the lecture by Dr Timothy Snyder based on his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Pictorial history University of Memphis released by Arcadia Publishing

[15 February 2012] Along with the university-sponsored book Dreamers, Thinkers, Doers: A Centennial History of the University of Memphis, which was published in August 2011 (read our article about that publication), Dr Beverly Bond and Dr Janann Sherman agreed with Arcadia Publishing to produce a pictorial history of The University of Memphis in Arcadia’s Campus History Series. The 128-page book containing 200 captioned photographs covering the school’s one-hundred-year history was released this week (read the announcement from Arcadia) and will be available in local bookstores, drugstores like Walgreens, online through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and by direct order from Arcadia Publishing.

Frances Wright Breland, who assisted in the production of Dreamers, Thinkers, Doers, also assisted with the production of University of Memphis.

ADDENDUM, 17 February 2012: The February 2012 issue of the departmental newsletter has an article about the book.

National History Day to receive National Humanities Medal at White House ceremony

[11 February 2012] The Department of History has supported National History Day since the early 1980s. We have always hosted West Tennessee Day competition and until state-wide competition became too extensive several years ago for our resources we also hosted it (it is now hosted by the Tennessee Historical Society in Nashville).

In a ceremony to be held in the East Room of the White House on Monday, 13 February 2012, President Obama, among other awards, will award National History Day a 2011 National Humanities Medal. The following citation will be read:

National History Day, a program that inspires in American students a passion for history. Each year more than half a million children from across the country compete in this event, conducting research and producing websites, papers, performances, and documentaries to tell the human story.

The ceremony will be streamed live at http://www.whitehouse.gov/Live, beginning at 1:45 Eastern Time (12:45 Central Time).

West Tennessee History Day will be held on 24 March 2012 in the University Center. Dr Susan O’Donovan is the coordinator for West Tennessee Day, assisted by Caroline Mitchell. For more information, telephone 901.678.4512 or e-mail odonovan@memphis.edu or ctmtchl1@memphis.edu.

Dr Dennis Laumann speaks at Phi Alpha Theta pizza lunch

[10 February 2012] In the first of the series of pizza lunches by Phi Alpha Theta for the Spring 2012 semester, Dr Dennis Laumann, associate professor, spoke on “The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale and the Liberation of Africa,” an important battle in the Angolan civil war.

The next pizza lunch is scheduled for 16 March 2012.

Six Adam Matthew digital archives available through University Libraries

[8 February 2012] The department recently acquired six digital archives from Adam Matthew that are now available to the entire campus through University Libraries. Each archive is accessible by a search of its name from the Database List as well as by searching for Adam Matthew. The individual resource pages are:

• Empire Online
• Everyday Life & Women in America : c.1820-1900
• Medieval family life: the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor and Armburgh Papers
• Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest : Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
• Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice
• The First World War: Personal Experiences

The archives will be very valuable for students in history. Doctoral student Brian McClure wrote enthusiastically about his experience with one of them:

I took a moment to browse through the Adam Matthews digital collections, and was blown away by the materials on the site! Within ten minutes, I stumbled across pictures, newspapers, reports all on Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington. Most importantly, I found the entire papers of Anson and Carol Phelps Stokes! They were the philanthropists that helped get Liberian students to the school, so I am excited to go through those, and it will save me a trip to New York.

The collection is going to help us graduate students more than I think you all realized! And the search I did was ONLY in Education/ Slavery and Abolition section. Files from O. O. Howard, AMA records, School records... I am so excited!

ADDENDUM, 17 February 2012: The February 2012 issue of the departmental newsletter has an article about the collections.

Arcadia Publishing releases Rita Hall’s book on Millington

[7 February 2012] Arcadia Publishing has just released Images of America: Millington, the town’s first photographic history, by Rita Hall. The images for the book were generously contributed by Millington families and businesses and by Shelby County libraries and archives.

Ms Hall entered our doctoral program last Fall after completing her M.A. in Liberal Studies through the University College and is serving as president of the Graduate History Association. Her interest in the history of Millington stems, in part, from her deep roots in the area; her ancestors settled in the 1830s near what would become Millington.

Information about the book may be found in the announcement from Arcadia Publishing.

Graduate History Association to launch new discussion series (00:10 at 10:00) on 21 February

[7 February 2012] The Graduate History Association will sponsor a monthly free coffee hour and 10-minute presentation on a professional development issue, beginning on 21 February at 9:30 am, when GHA vice-president Wendy Clark will speak on “The Job Market: Advice from the American Historical Association.”

At each session, free coffee will be served from 9:30 to 10:30 and the presentation will begin at 10 am.

Future sessions are scheduled for 20 March 2012 and 17 April 2012. The Graduate History Association is a dues-free organization for all graduate students in History. For more information about the series contact Wendy Clark at wjclark@memphis.edu.

Dr Andrei Znamenski has discussion and book signing for Red Shambala at Rubin Museum of Art

[6 February 2012] Dr Andrei Znamenski, associate professor, spoke on 25 January at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York about the subject of his book Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia and had a book signing afterward. The Rubin Museum of Art is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution dedicated to the art of the Himalayas.

Red Shambala is the story of the attempt by Bolshevik commissar Gleb Bokii and renowned occult writer Alexander Barchenko to use Tibetan Buddhist wisdom to conjure a divine era of Communism by tapping into a power of mysterious Shambhala, a prophecy about a land of pure mystical bliss where inhabitants enjoyed god-like capabilities. For fuller information about the book, read the interview of Dr Znamenski by Dr Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas in the History Happenings newsletter for October 2011.

Department hosts reception in memory of Dr Abraham Kriegel

[2 February 2012] The Department of History hosted a reception this afternoon in the lobby of Mitchell Hall in memory of Dr Abraham Kriegel, who died suddenly on 18 January. The reception was attended by Dr Kriegel’s colleagues, Department of History staff members, present and retired members of the administration, former students, and friends.

Dr Janann Sherman, chair of the department, began by reading tributes from persons who were not able to attend: Dr Shirley Raines, president of the university; Dr Steven Patterson, assistant professor of history and political science at Mississippi College; and Dr F. Jack Hurley, professor emeritus and two-time chair of the department. Following them, there were reminiscences of various aspects of Dr Kriegel’s life and career by Dr Walter R. “Bob” Brown, Dr Robert Frankle, Dr Maurice Crouse, Dr Major L. Wilson, Dr Barbara Frankle, and Dr Kriegel’s wife, Reva.

Below are some photographs taken at the reception.

Micki Kaleta named to editorial board of Southern Historian

[31 January 2012] Micki Kaleta has been named as an assistant editor of Southern Historian. The journal is published each spring at The University of Alabama under the direction of the Department of History and the Media Planning Board. A non-profit journal that highlights the best new articles in southern history and culture, it includes reviews of the latest books in all fields of American history. Each issue is written, refereed, and edited entirely by graduate students.

Ms Kaleta is also serving as the 2012 president of the Graduate Association for African-American history.

Dr Timothy Snyder delivers Memphis Sesquicentennial Lecture for 2011-2012, speaking on “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”

[26 January 2012] During the years 1933 to 1945, there were 14,000,000 persons killed in the lands that lay between Germany and the Soviet Union. Dr Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, delivered the Memphis Sesquicentennial Lecture this evening on the killings, based on his prize-winning book on the subject. The lecture was also sponsored by the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.

The 14,000,000 represented the greatest scale of killings in modern Europe and do not include soldiers (if soldiers were included, the number would reach 28,000,000). Included in the 14,000,000 were 5,500,000 of the 6,000,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Why, Dr Snyder asked, isn’t this common knowledge? He thinks the reason is chiefly that we tend to partition history into subjects like the Soviet Terror and the Holocaust, seeing them as separate rather than related events. Another reason is that history is usually written about nations and told from the point of view of their governments. He maintains that affairs are not determined by national issues, that national histories can only ask questions, not answer them. He rejects dialectics, maintaining that Germany and the Soviet Union were not opposites, despite their great differences, and did not cancel each other out. In many ways they strongly resembled each other.

Most of the writing about deaths during the period centers around the Germany concentration camps and the Soviet gulags. In fact, Dr Snyder said, most Holocaust victims never saw a camp — they were shot very close to where they lived, and many of the deaths in the gulags occurred because the German invasion cut off Soviet logistics to the gulags. But the camps and the gulags left many records, while most of those killed in the bloodlands left few or no records.

Dr Snyder does not find it helpful to invoke ideologies as the root of the killings. Ideologies change over time. Marxism was not originally concerned with killings but became so in the Soviet system. He believes that economics played a very important role. Both systems looked to the middle lands as a way of strengthening themselves, the Soviet Union seeking to modernize its economy and Germany seeking to find agricultural lands to support its population. Both wanted to get rid of Poland as simply being in the way, but they could not agree on what should happen to Ukraine.

The book Bloodlands divides into three segments: 1933-1938, when most of the killing was by the Soviet Union; 1939-1941, when the two nations were allied and killings were about equal between the two powers; and 1941-1945, when Germany took the lead. The early Soviet killings were directed mostly against Ukrainians, whom Stalin blamed for the failure of his policy of collectivization. The middle period was crucial, Dr Snyder believes. The primary damage was that entire states were destroyed, and he believes that states were very important for the protection of minority rights. With states destroyed and the rule of law at an end, minorities were perilously at risk at the hands of collaborators. Dr Snyder cited figures that indicated that minorities had a 1 in 2 chance of surviving in states that were allied with Germany. While not good, this was in startling contrast to the 1 in 20 chance where states had been destroyed. Germany turned against its former ally and went to war with the Soviet Union in 1941. The expectation was that there would be an easy victory and that the Jews could be driven eastward. But the Soviet Union did not fall, and Germany blamed the Jews for the failure of the invasion, leading to the third phase of the killings in which most were done by Germany.

Overall, Dr Snyder emphasized, his book is not about comparisons between German and Soviet killings. Comparisons involve separation, and his book is more about interaction between the two systems.

Recognizing that it is impossible to do so completely, Dr Snyder urged his readers to think in human terms, not of 14,000,000 killings but rather of one killing done 14,000,000 times. At the beginning of his lecture Dr Snyder had told how three persons in the bloodlands anticipated and prepared for what seemed inevitable death in different ways. He ended his lecture by identifying each of them by name.

Dr Snyder was recently named the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale. Bloodlands has been widely acclaimed. It was named a Best Book of 2010 by The Economist, The New Republic, Guardian, Reason, and The Forward, and has been translated into 20 languages.

ADDENDUM, 17 February 2012: The February 2012 issue of the departmental newsletter has an additional article about the lecture.

Jody Callahan writes feature article about Dr Abraham Kriegel for the Commercial Appeal

[26 January 2012] Based largely on information supplied in an interview with Dr Walter R. Brown, Jody Callahan wrote a feature article on Dr Abraham Kriegel that was published in today’s issue of the Commercial Appeal. A photograph used in the article is online at the newspaper’s site but the article itself has not yet appeared online.

Dr Suzanne Onstine interviewed by Daily Helmsman about the Egyptian revolution

[25 January 2012] Dr Suzanne Onstine, assistant professor, and Ahmed Elnahas, an Egyptian doctoral student in finance, were interviewed by Elizabeth Cooper in an article that appeared in today’s issue of the Daily Helmsman about the revolution that occurred in Egypt in early 2011. The article is available online. Dr Onstine contributed one of the photographs used in the printed article, but it was omitted (along with another photograph) in the online version.

Dr Onstine was working in Egypt when the revolution began to unfold in Cairo, in distant Luxor excavating a Theban tomb. After a brief period of indecision, she and the research party determined it safe to continue the work until the season ended.

Mr Elnahas pictured the youth of Egypt as being distracted by technology and fashion, yet knowing nothing about life, but Dr Onstine noted that it was precisely that same generation that brought down a government just by having a voice collectively. She added that she has noticed a rise in the awareness of the strength of activism in her clases following the events of the Arab Spring. Assessing the current state of affairs in Egypt, she said that the chief concern for the majority of Egyptians is that the sacrifices they made are not going to bring about a real democracy: “They feel like they have traded one bad master for another.”