Congratulations to Ryan Booth and Professor Katy Fry for being selected to attend the two-week Institute, “The Native American West: A Case Study of the Columbia Plateau” at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington this summer.
See this link for more information about the NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers!
Dr. Ray Sun has been announced as a recipient of the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction! Dr. Sun specializes in modern German and modern European history, teaching upper-level courses on Nazi Germany and comparative genocide. He won the CAS Mullen Award for Teaching Excellence and is a charter member of the WSU President’s Teaching Academy. He created two new classes based on his research of collective memory, war and society and Holocaust rescue. He actively engages in public education, speaking to senior Army ROTC cadets on the value of military officers. He published the book “Before the Enemy is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885-1912: A Social, Cultural and Political History.”
“Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley”
Prof. Kopp is an Environmental historian of the American West in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. His first book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (Berkeley, 2016) won the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Book Award in 2017.
Kopp is Associate Professor of History and Director of Public History at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
“Why are Abraham’s Children Fighting”
Wed, April 4, 4pm, Todd 216
Free & Open to the Public
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three primary religious traditions of the western world. All three trace their roots back to Abraham, so how can they be so different from each other? And why has there been such a history of animosity between followers of these religious traditions? This discussion begins with the story of Abraham himself, because the seeds of dissent and rivalry are sown there. After considering the historical perspective, we will then consider how a better understanding of religious narratives can empower us to be more thoughtful and responsible citizens of our contemporary world.
“Narrative and Counter – Narrative in Commemorative Performance: Native American Powwow Dancing and African American Stepping”
Tuesday, 27 March 2017
4:00 to 5:00 p.m., Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center
Historian and filmmaker Dee Garceau discusses and presents clips from her two documentaries “We Sing” and “Stepping: Beyond the Line,” exploring powwow dances and songs of Blackfeet and Salish people in Montana, an intertribal drum in Idaho Falls, and African-American stepping, a percussive dance invented in the twentieth century by black fraternities and sororities. Both African-American and Native American dances and songs commemorate historic identities in ways that differ from conventional historical narratives about each group. In the process, they broaden audience perceptions about their cultures in the American West. In discussing her work, Prof. Garceau also looks introspectively, commenting on the challenges of her role as a white filmmaker who examines cultures to which she is an outsider. The program is open to the university community and the general public.
In addition to the documentary films noted here, Dee Garceau, Professor of History, Emerita, Rhodes College, and formerly chair of the Women’s Studies Program at Rhodes, is author of Creating Family: Cohabitation in the Intermountain West, 1890-1959 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming) and The Important Things of Life: Women, Work and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). She has also co-edited Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001). By the way, Dr. Garceau earned her M.A. in history at WSU in 1981.
The department would like to share the great news that Ryan Booth won a Society for Military History “Russell F. Weigley Graduate Student Travel Grant,” which supports participation by promising graduate students in the society’s annual meeting. Congratulations Ryan! Visit their website here!
See this excellent article in the WSU Insider about our Ph.D. student Taylor Hermsen and his research on the environmental history of the wine industry here in Washington.
The department is happy to announce that three faculty members in the History Department and RCI Program – Karen Phoenix, Matthew Unangst, and Michelle Mann – have been selected as LIFT Faculty Fellows. The LIFT Program (L.earn I.nspire F.oster T.ransform) is aimed at supporting committed educators at WSU to promote transformative student learning. It is part of WSU’s Transformational Change Initiative. Fellows join a group of educators working to share and learn techniques of student engagement and learning through Spring and Fall 2018.
The History Graduation Student Association has announced the release of a new blog post! “The Daily Evergay,” is the second of a two-post series on WSU’s lesbian and gay history in the 1970s using articles from the student newspaper. GIESORC, the gay and lesbian center on campus, liked the articles and have some quotes on display in the library rotunda. Check out some there that didn’t make it into this post!
Please read here, comment, and share!
The American Historical Review published a review of Prof. Hatter’s book Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border in its February 2018 issue. The review concluded that “Citizens of Convenience is a most impressive first book by a talented historian.”
See the review here!