The University of Virginia Press has published Dr. Lawrence Hatter’s book Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. Dr. Hatter’s book received the 2016 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for ‘an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies.’
See more here.
Lawrence Hatter: “Stop dismissing Standing Rock Sioux as dupes” was published in Grand Forks Herald December 30. Hatter states: “Sinister forces are at work in North Dakota. At least that was the claim of the state’s former lieutenant governor, whose paranoid fears were right out of the eighteenth century. Taking a leaf from a political playbook as old as the American Republic, then-Lt. Gov. Drew Wrigley dismissed the Standing Rock Sioux opposition to the planned oil pipeline in that state as the work of ominous powers. ‘The Native Americans are being used, absolutely being used,’ Wrigley told reporters December 8, ‘by these outside agitators.'” Read more in the online Grand Forks Herald.
“Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon” has been published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. Read more here.
David Shier, Associate Dean of the Honors College at Washington State University congratulated Claire Thornton and her advisor, Dr. Lydia Gerber, for the high quality of Claire’s Honors thesis.
Dr. Shier writes: “Your overall thesis performance (including both the written thesis and the presentation) was noted by the faculty reviewer and by your thesis advisor, both of whom agreed that your thesis was worthy of nomination for a “Pass with Distinction.” This nomination is a significant recognition of the quality of your academic commitment and performance.
“The Honors Council met on December 2, 2016, to review all theses nominated for “Pass with Distinction.” Congratulations! After careful review, they awarded your thesis this recognition. You should be aware that this is a real honor, and that this is something to record on your resumé or curriculum vitae. We at the Honors College celebrate your award and wish you every success in all your future endeavors! We are confident that many other honors will come your way.”
The Honors College often posts copies of theses that receive “Pass with Distinction” on their website as examples for future students. Copies are also sent to the Washington State Libraries Research Exchange. Posting on the website and in the Research Exchange will make Claire’s thesis, “The GI Bill at WSC (Washington State College),” publicly available as part of the digital repository of research-related documents.
Dr. Kawamura, of the Department of History, WSU, will give an invited talk at the last session of the DIJ History and Humanities Study Group in 2016: Thursday, December 8 in Tokyo, Japan.
Emperor Hirohito from the Pacific War to the Cold War.
Emperor Showa, better known in the English-speaking world as Emperor Hirohito, has been one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Pacific War. He was both sovereign of the state and commander in chief of the Japanese imperial forces; but above all, he was the manifestation of divinity and a symbol of the national and cultural identity of Japan. Yet under the Allied occupation the emperor was spared from the Tokyo war crimes trial and continued to reign in postwar Japan until his death in 1989 as “the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people” under the new democratic constitution written by the U.S. occupiers.
This talk will examine the extraordinary transformation of Emperor Hirohito from a divine monarch during the Pacific War to a humanized symbolic monarch supposedly with no political power during the occupation years (1945-1952). The talk will focus on the paradoxical role Emperor Hirohito played at home and abroad as tension between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated into the Cold War in East Asia.
Kawamura suggests that underneath the stereotypical portrayal of Emperor Hirohito as a passive but shrewd survivor/collaborator of the U.S. occupiers, he acted as a major player in U.S.-Japanese diplomatic negotiations behind closed doors and participated in the shaping of Japan’s domestic and national security policies. The talk will explore possible reasons behind the emperor’s actions.
Dr. Matthew Sutton will speak at Princeton University on December 8 at the American Political History Seminar. He will discuss his book “(Un)Holy Spies: Religion and American Espionage in World War II.” Dr. Sutton is an Edward R. Mayer Distinguished Professor of History.
The College of Arts and Sciences at WSU awarded David Bolingbroke a 2016 Boeing Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies. This fellowship provides him with $1,000 dollars research travel funding towards his dissertation. Congratulations, David!
Bordering the Tri-Cities, Washington, Hanford is the largest nuclear cleanup site in the world. It once produced the United States’ plutonium stockpile during World War II and the Cold War. Now, workers are tasked with cleaning up the contaminants left behind and restoring the Columbia River and Plateau environment. My dissertation project—tentatively titled, “Atomic Restoration: An Environmental History of the Hanford Nuclear Site”—will tell the story of how ecologists, local residents, and on-site workers responded to the release of radioactive particles into the region’s natural environment. In particular, it will focus on the role of animals and how they help us to understand the new scientific knowledge system and place that Hanford created. The Boeing Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies provides me with the funding to travel to Washington D.C. and conduct research in the Atomic Energy Commission Archives. This research will be vital in building my chapters on Cold War Era ecologists and their study of radioactivity’s effect on living things.
Ryan Booth’s book review has been published in Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History. “Hang Them All – George Wright and the Plateau Indian War” was written by Donald L. Cutler and examines the often forgotten chapter of the U.S. Army and Native American interactions in the antebellum American West. This article and book are well worth the time to read. It mentions Colonel Edwin Steptoe and his defeat at Pine Creek outside the town of Rosalia in Whitman County.
Ryan Booth is a member of the Humanities Washington Board of Trustees. He earned his MA in history from Central Washington University and his PhD is from southern Methodist University and Washington State University.
Associate Professor Raymond Sun writes Pearl Harbor article that was published in the Spokesman Review. Dr. Sun states: “The passage of the World War II generation is certainly cause for reflection – sorrow mixed with appreciation for its remarkable accomplishments. At the same time, the loss of our living connection to the attack on Pearl Harbor provides an opportunity to revisit the lessons and legacies we draw from this defining event in United States, and indeed world, history. By doing so, we might become more aware of the selective remembrance and forgetfulness that have characterized our common memory of Pearl Harbor, and fashion a more complex, but also more honest and helpful, historical legacy to root and guide us in facing our challenging 21st Century world.”
Jennifer Binczewski has been awarded the 2016 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award from the American Catholic Historical Association. Her dissertation is titled “Solitary Sparrows: Widowhood and the Catholic Community in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1620.”
Dr. Madga Teter, Chair of the American Catholic Historical Association’s Ellis Dissertation Award Committee writes:
“On behalf of the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award Committee, I would like to congratulate you on being selected as the recipient of the 2016 Ellis prize. The Committee was impressed with your research project and the unique approach you have taken to explain the preservation of the Catholic faith following Sixteenth-century Elizabethan reforms. Your innovative methodology, paying attention to gender and space and the role widows played in preserving English Catholicism, provides new insight to the survival tactics employed by Catholics after the Church was formally banned in 1559. Fascinating!
We wish you well as you complete your dissertation, and we look forward to the day when we can call you Dr. Binczewski. If you would, please send us your mailing address as there is a $1500 stipend that comes with winning the Ellis prize. “