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Washington State University
History | Humanities

Public History Faculty


Public History Track Faculty MemberE-mail
Robert Bauman (Tri-Cities Campus)
American history and public history		rbauman@tricity.wsu.edu
Marlene Gaynair
Modern US, US Race and Ethnicity, Atlantic World, and Caribbean History		marlene.gaynair@wsu.edu
Robert McCoy
Public history		rmccoy@wsu.edu
Laurie Mercier (Vancouver Campus)
United States, the American West, the Pacific Northwest, immigration and migration, and American labor		lmercier@vancouver.wsu.edu
Sue Peabody (Vancouver Campus)
Early modern Europe, Atlantic and Indian Ocean, world slavery and race, History in Media and Popular Culture		speabody@wsu.edu

FAQ: Public History


What is public history?

Modern historians recognize that their discipline can play a vital role outside the classroom. Public history draws on the basic skills and methods of history and applies them to a wider audience. Their skills are used in the interpretation, preservation, and management of historical resources. In addition, public historians are engaged in such diverse activities as museum and archival administration, historic preservation, and research for government or corporate clients.

How long has WSU had a public history program?

In the fall of 1979, the Department of History first offered M.A. and Ph.D. tracks in public history. Since then approximately 75 students have completed the program. Several found professional employment with a variety of local and state historical societies, state historical agencies, public and private archives and libraries, and numerous federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. Others have found work with private research firms, which undertake contracted research and historical report preparation.

What makes public history at WSU unique?

Specific graduate courses offer introductory background and training in public history. In addition, the program stresses “real-world” application and practical connections in private sector and institutional agencies that utilize historical techniques and methodologies. Internships, additional course work (including workshops, seminars, and short courses), and the thesis/dissertation offer further training. Areas of specialization include archives, business and corporate history, cultural resource management, historic preservation, litigation support, museum studies, and public policy.

Are internships important?

A supervised internship is an integral part of the public history track. It affords students the opportunity to work as temporary employees, and it provides them with firsthand experience (in some cases compensated) in settings such as archives, museums, or historical societies. Internships provide students with practical insights into historical employment. Private sector or institutional supervisors provide mentoring relationships, and they introduce students to the professional networks common to the public historian’s work environment.

Where is Washington State University?

The main campus is in Pullman, a town of 24,000 residents located in the Palouse country of southeastern Washington. Together with the University of Idaho, 8 miles to the east in Moscow, the Pullman area provides an increasingly diverse population with a center of cultural and intellectual life, and thus combines many of the advantages of an urban community with the character and amenities of a small town. Hiking, camping, fishing, skiing, boating, and other outdoor recreational activities are easily accessible at the Snake River parks and at the mountain and lake regions of Washington and northern Idaho.

Visit the WSU map

Does a degree in public history preclude me from working in the academy?

No. Several of WSU’s graduate students have gone on to teach history in the academy.

Does WSU meet the technological needs of the 21st-century graduate student?

Washington State University is well known for its friendly learning environment and extensive use of educational technology. According to Yahoo Internet Life’s annual report on “America’s Top 100 Wired Colleges 2000,” Washington State University ranked #9 in the nation, and #1 in both the West and the Pac-10. Forbes magazine lists WSU as one of the top 20 cyber-universities in America for its use of technology in distance education. In all, WSU reaches students in 45 states and 16 countries around the globe. In the year 2000, WSU was one of 29 research institutions in the United States designated Internet2 members by President Clinton. Finally, WSU ranks in the top 100 colleges for its research library system and for the computer access and Internet connections, among some 2,000 colleges and universities nationwide.

Theresa Jordan


 

 

 

 

 

 

Clinical Associate Professor

Wilson-Short Hall 341
509-335-4030
tjordan@wsu.edu

Education

Secondary Education Teaching Certificate, Washington State University, 2009
M.A. University of Washington, 1991

Academic & Professional Interests

Theresa received an M.A. in history from the University of Washington in 1991. She taught at Idaho State University from 1992 through 2001 and began teaching at WSU in 2001. Her primary interests include Secondary Teacher Education, World History, European Medieval History and Roman History.

Steven D. Kale


Steven Kale

Professor of History

kale@wsu.edu

 

Education

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1987

Research and Teaching Interests

Professor Kale teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th-century Europe, modern France, and postwar Europe. His research focuses on modern French history, where much of his work addresses the various strains of conservative ideology along with the intellectual, social, and politics life of 19th-century elites.

Publications

Professor Kale is the author of Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852–1883 (Louisiana State University Press, 1992) and French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). He has published articles in such journals as French Historical Studies, French History, the Journal of Women’s History, Historical Reflections, and Modern Intellectual History. He is currently working on a book entitled Elusive Traditions: French Pan-European Encounters and the History of Ideas (1800-1900), which explores how nineteenth-century liberal and conservative social thought in France developed partly through transnational encounters.

Robert Bauman


Professor of History

WSU Tri-Cities
509-372-7249
rbauman@wsu.edu

CV

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998

Research and Teaching Interests

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.

Publications

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.

Honors & Awards

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.

Peter Boag


Professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West

VMMC 102M
360-546-9719
boag@wsu.edu

Visit the American West & Pacific Northwest website

Education

Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1988

Research and Teaching Interests

Professor Boag’s teaching and research interests focus on society and culture in the U.S. (1850-1950), the Pacific Northwest, and the American West.

Publications

Professor Boag is currently working on two projects—a biography of the early Pacific Northwest landscape painter, William Samuel Parrott (1844-1915), and a study of his own ancestors’ story in the context of world history. He is the author of four books, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon (University of California Press, 1992), Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (University of California Press, 2003), Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (University of California Press, 2011), and Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (University of Washington Press, 2022). He has also written articles, essays, and book chapters on the history of gender, sexuality, the environment, and culture in the American West and the Pacific Northwest.

           

Honors & Awards

Honorary Lifetime Membership Award, Western History Association, 2022

Leadership in History Award, American Association of State and Local History, for “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West,” Washington State History Museum exhibition, 2022

Queer Heroes Northwest, 2018

Ray Allen Billington Prize, Best Book in American Frontier History, Organization of American Historians, 2013

Over the Rainbow Books Commendation, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table, American Library Association, 2013

Fulbright German Distinguished Chair, 2012-2013

Lambda Literary Award, Finalist, Transgender Nonfiction, 2012

Armitage-Jameson Book Prize, Coalition for Western Women’s History, honorable mention, 2012

Audre Lorde Prize, Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, honorable mention, 2006

Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize, Coalition for Western Women’s History, honorable mention, 2006

Joel Palmer Award, Best article, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 2001, 2005

Oscar O. Winter Prize, Best article in the Western Historical Quarterly, 2006

W. Puck Brecher


Professor of History

Wilson-Short 309
509-335-3267
wbrecher@wsu.edu

CV

Education

Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2005
M.A., University of Michigan, 1991
B.A., Kenyon College, 1988

Research and Teaching Interests

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.

Publications

Books












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).








 


 


 


 


 


 





 






 








































Articles & Chapters


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.















		

	
	




		
			


	

		

					

				Lawrence B. A. Hatter
			

				

		

			
			
							
		


			


			

			








 


 


 


 


 


 


Associate Professor of History

Graduate Studies Director

Wilson-Short Hall 323

509-335-7298

lawrence.hatter@wsu.edu


 






Education


Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2011.


Academic & Professional Interests


Dr. Hatter is a diplomatic and legal historian of the early United States and Canada.


Research Interests


Dr. Hatter’s research speaks to questions of nationality, sovereignty, and Indigenous rights on the Canada-US border from 1783 to the present.


His book, Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border (Charlottesville & London, 2017), won the 2016 Walker Cowan Memorial Prize for an “outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies” and was named a 2017 Choice “outstanding academic title” by the American Library Association.


His current research project, in consultation with the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, is a history of the legal case Mitchell v. M.N.R. He uses this twenty-year legal battle between the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and the Canadian government to interrogate the role that history and historians play in Indigenous rights on the Canada-US border.


Selected Publications


Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2017.


“Taking Exception to Exceptionalism: Geopolitics and the Founding of an American Empire.” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2014): 653-60.


“The Jay Charter: Rethinking the American National State in the West, 1796-1819.” Diplomatic History, 37 (September 2013): 693-726.


“The Narcissism of Petty Differences? Thomas Jefferson, John Graves Simcoe and the Reformation of Empire in the early United States and British-Canada.” American Review of Canadian Studies, 42 (June 2012): 130-41.


Editorials & Public Engagement


Dr. Hatter has written editorials for The Washington Post, The Oregonian, The Spokesman Review, and The Grand Forks Herald.


He is also a regular columnist for The Inlander, a free weekly newspaper published in Spokane and circulated throughout the inland northwest.


Selected Media Interviews


“George Washington (didn’t) sleep here: Quoting the founders in the 21st century”


https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/regional-news/2022-08-10/george-washington-didnt-sleep-here-quoting-the-founders-in-the-21st-century


“Becoming Citizens of Convenience on the U.S.-Canadian Border with Lawrence B. A. Hatter”










Conversations at the Washington Library.











		

	
	




		
			


	

		

					

				Steven Hoch
			

				

		

			
			
							
		


			


			

			






Steven Hoch


Professor of History


WSU Tri-Cities

509-372-7145

steven-hoch@wsu.edu






Education


Ph.D., Princeton University, 1983


Academic & Professional Interests


Hoch’s research focuses on modern Russian history, European agrarian history, and historical demography.


Publications


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.





		

	
	




		
			


	

		

					

				Noriko Kawamura
			

				

		

			
			
							
		


			


			

			






Noriko Kawamura


Professor of History

Arnold M. and Atsuko Craft Professor


Wilson-Short Hall 350

509-335-5428

 nkawamura@wsu.edu


CV






Education


Ph.D., University of Washington, 1989

B.A., Keio University, Tokyo, Japan 1978


Research and Teaching Interests


Kawamura’s research focuses on the history of war, peace, and diplomacy in the Pacific World. She teaches the history of the United States and the World, U.S. military history, World War II in the Pacific, and the Cold War.


Publications


Kawamura is the author of Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War (University of Washington Press, 2015), and Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese–U.S. Relations during World War I (Praeger, 2000). She also coedited Building New Pathways to Peace (University of Washington Press, 2011) and Toward a Peaceable Future: Redefining Peace, Security and Kyosei from a Multidisciplinary Perspective (The Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service, Washington State University Press, 2005).


She has contributed several journal articles and book chapters, including “To Transnationalize War Memory for Peace and Kyosei” in Building New Pathways to Peace; “Emperor Hirohito and Japan’s Decision to Go to War with the United States,” Diplomatic History (January 2007); and “Wilsonian Idealism and Japanese Claims at the Paris Peace Conference,” Pacific Historical Review (November 1997), which is reprinted in Arthur P. Dudden, ed., American Empire in the Pacific: From Trade to Strategic Balance, 1700-1922 (Ashgate, 2004).


Kawamura is currently working on a new book project on Emperor Hirohito’s Cold War under contract with the University of Washington Press.


Emperor Hirohito book cover        Building Peach book cover


Honors & Awards


Her recent awards include Arnold M. and Atsuko Craft Professorship (College of Arts and Sciences, WSU, 2018-2021), Outstanding Achievement in International Activities (College of Arts and Sciences, WSU, 2016), and Edward R. Meyer Project Grant (College of Arts and Sciences, WSU, 2016).