Dr. Tracey Hanshew’s article “‘Here she comes wearin’ them britches!’ Saddles, Riding Skirts, and Social Reform in the Turn-of-the-Century Rural West” is now published in Montana The Magazine of Western History (Winter 2020). Learn more by clicking here!
The Department of History is honored to receive praise from the Office of Assessment of Teaching and Learning for not only the success of the general history courses being offered, but also for the success of the Roots of Contemporary Issues UCORE program. History as a whole department was recognized for its high quality learning and assessment practices while RCI was recognized for its exemplary student learning assessment system for a UCORE program in partnership with WSU Libraries.
As we settle into this new academic year we want to take a moment to look back and appreciate some achievements that were not previously recognized over the last few months as we transitioned through staff changes!
Marina Tolmacheva traveled to two international meetings this summer. In August, she attended the 25th International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tolmacheva presented a paper in the symposium on the “History of Isla…mic Science: Global and Local,” and also gave the academic year’s Inaugural Lecture in the Geography Program at the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (Foz do Iguaçu, Parana). In July, she attended the regional conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. The conference was hosted by the American University of Central Asia. In addition to presenting a paper, Tolmacheva was invited to speak at two other local universities: the International Relations Faculty at Balasagyn National University and in the Department of Foreign Languages at the International University of Kyrgyzstan.
Review the conferences and their content at the links below!
Jesse Spohnholz’s article, co-written with his Dutch colleague Mirjam van Veen, titled “The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism: Religious Refugees in the Historiography of the Dutch Reformation” appeared in the most recent issue of Church History.
Professor Sue Peabody has published a new book: Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies.
Madeleine’s Children is rare narrative in world history of an enslaved person challenging his status in court and winning his freedom. It is the first full length biography tracing slavery in the Indian Ocean world and contains a detailed family saga of love, betrayal, hope, and struggle set against the broader context of plantation slavery, Parisian society, and colonization.
The History Club’s goal is to help students, of any year and major, explore their historical interests and interact with lovers of history on campus.
This year the History Club has elected an entirely new panel of student leaders and is planning a year full of on campus events, trivia, debate, and internship opportunities.
From its crucial role in the Manhattan Project through the present-day focus on environmental cleanup and lingering health effects, the history of the Tri Cities is fundamental to major historical questions regarding national security, urban planning, the American West, science and technology, the environment, and other topics.
Through contract with the US Department of Energy and donations from community partners, the Hanford History Project is developing an archive and museum from major collections of never-before-seen documents and unique artifacts. Current priorities include digitizing our collection of oral histories and connecting them to relevant researchers. Student interns are hard are work cataloging the archival collections we have received from the Department of Energy, after which we will turn towards developing finding aids and making the collections accessible to scholars.
Eventually, we hope to establish a museum and archival reading room near (or at) the planned visitor center for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, of which Hanford represents one-third (along with Los Alamos and Oak Ridge). This will help in bringing local residents and tourists into these historical conversations.
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998
Robert Bauman is a Professor of History and Academic Director of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Bauman is an award-winning scholar whose research and teaching interests are in 20th Century U.S. social policy, religion, and race in the American West.
Bauman is the author of a number of articles and book chapters and two books, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East LA, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008, and Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul: America’s Ecumenical War on Poverty, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. He also is co-editor, with Robert Franklin, and co-author of Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland to 1943, published by WSU Press in 2018, and Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region, published by WSU Press in December 2020. His article, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950” won the Charles Gates Award for the best article published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005.
Professor Bauman has been invited to present his research on the War on Poverty at prestigious academic institutions, including Dartmouth College, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
His article on racial segregation in the Tri-Cities was given the Charles Gates Award for the best article to appear in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005.
He was given the WSU Tri-Cities Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Excellence Award in 2022.
Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2005
M.A., University of Michigan, 1991
B.A., Kenyon College, 1988
Dr. Brecher teaches courses on East Asia and specializes in early modern and modern Japanese social and cultural history. His past research projects have focused on Japanese thought, aesthetics, urban history, race, private spheres, autonomy, as well as contemporary environmental issues. Currently he is working on several projects pertaining to the history of Japanese animal care and hunting.
Animal Care in Japanese Tradition: A Short History (Association for Asian Studies, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2022)
Co-editor. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War (University of Hawaii Press, 2019).
Honored and Dishonored Guests: Westerners in Wartime Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017).
The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013).
2018 “Contested Utopias: Civilization and Leisure in the Meiji Era,” Asian Ethnology 77:1&2 (2018): 31-53.
2017 “Eurasians and Racial Capital in a ‘Race War’,” Asia Pacific Perspectives 14:2 (Spring 2017): 4-19.
2016 “A Miscellany of Eccentricities: Spirituality and Obsession in Hyakka kikōden,” Asian Ethnology 75:2 (2016): 303-2
2016 “Warugaki de aru koto: Edo jidai no kodomotachi no hankô no rinri,” in Edo no naka no Nihon, Nihon no naka no Edo, Peter Nosco, James E. Ketelaar, and Yasunori Kojima, eds. Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo
2015 “Being a Brat: The Ethics of Child Disobedience in the Edo Period,” in Values, Identity, and Equality in 18th– and 19th-Century Japan, Peter Nosco, James E. Ketelaar, and Yasunori Kojima, eds. Leiden, Boston, Tokyo: Brill, pp. 80-109.
2014 “Precarity, Kawaii, and their Impact on Environmental Discourse in Japan,” in Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature, Roman Rosenbaum and Kristina Iwata Weickgenannt, eds. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 43-63.
2013 “Sustainability as Community: Healing in a Japanese Ecovillage,” The Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 13:3 (2013), pp. 1-23.
2013 “Post-Disaster Japan’s Environmental Transition,” in Values in Sustainable Development, ed. Jack Appleton. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 172-181.
2012 “Useless Losers: Marginality and Modernization in Early Meiji Japan,” The European Legacy 17:6 (2012): pp. 803-817.
2010 “In Appreciation of Buffoonery, Egotism, and the Shômon School: Koikawa Harumachi’s Kachô kakurenbô.” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18 (2010): pp. 88-102.
2010 “Eccentricity as Ideology: Biographies of Meiji Kijin.” Japanese Language and Literature, 44:2 (October 2010): pp. 213-237.
2010 “Kôetsumura: Of Rhythms and Reminiscence in Hon’ami Kôetsu’s Commune.” Japan Review, 22: pp. 27-53.
2010 “Brewing Spirits, Brewing Songs: Saké, Haikai, and the Aestheticization of Suburban Space in Edo Period Itami.” Japan Studies Review, XIV: pp. 17-44.
2009 “Down and Out in Negishi: Reclusion and Struggle in an Edo Suburb,” Journal of Japanese Studies 35:1 (Winter 2009): pp. 1-35.
2006 “Bungei ni okeru ‘ki’: rekishi wo kaeru gendôryoku ka? Sore to mo senryakuteki junnô ka?” Nichibunken 35: 27-34.
2005 “To Romp in Heaven: A Translation of the Hôsa Kyôshaden.” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13 (Spring 2005): pp. 11-27.
1999 “Shizen to bunka no hikaku shakaigaku,” in Chiiki to Bunka, Yasui Koji, ed. Nagano, Japan: Kyôdô Press, pp. 233-59.
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1983
Hoch’s research focuses on modern Russian history, European agrarian history, and historical demography.
Hoch’s publications include the prize-winning Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov, a translation from French into Russian of Louis Henri’s Metodika analiza v istoricheskoi demografii, and numerous articles and essays on Russian social and economic history.
Japan’s Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930