Education

Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, 2002

Academic & Professional Interests

McCoy teaches public history with a specialization in historic preservation. He also teaches United States history with special interest in memory and the creation of historical narratives.

Publications

McCoy’s publications include Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf, and the Creation of Nez Perce History in the Pacific Northwest (Routledge Press, 2004) and Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakima, 1888-1964 (Scarecrow Press, 2009).

Education

Ph.D., University of New Mexico, 2005
M.A., History, Boston University, 1998
B.A., History, University of Washington, 1996
B.A., Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington, 1996
A.A., Seattle Central College, 1994

Research and Teaching Interests

Environment, cities, and the Pacific Northwest.

My teaching and research focuses on the relationship between place, politics, and culture in the twentieth-century United States. I teach Pacific Northwest History, Environmental History, and research seminars. In my classes I emphasize original research projects that draw on rich local primary source collections and oral histories available at WSU, helping students reckon with the layered historical landscapes and people of this region.

Publications

Books

Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia  (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

McClellan Park: The Life and Death of an Urban Green Space (Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum Press, 2004).

Journal Articles and Refereed Chapters in Edited Collections

“Assaying Risk: Project Sunshine and the Half-lives of Strontium 90” in Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure, Eds. Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Linda Marie Richard, Corvallis, Oregon State University Press (book proposal under review).

“Saving Trees, Land and Boys”: Juveniles, Environment, and the “Unfinished City,” Journal of Urban History (2021). 

“Dwelling with the Entwined Ecotopian and Techno-utopian Legacies of Cascadia” in Green Contradictions: Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice, eds., Nik Janos and Corina McKendry (University of Washington Press, 2021).

“From Bomb to Bone: Children and the Politics of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Social Change, eds. Char Miller and Jeff Crane, (University of Colorado Press, 2019).

“Animal Trouble and Urban Anxiety: Human-animal interactions in post-Earth Day Seattle,” Environmental History 16:2 (April 2011): 226-261.

“Building an ‘Urban Homestead’: Survival Self-Sufficiency, and Nature in Seattle, 1970-1980” in Greening the City (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

“Public Art, Memory, and Mobility in 1920s New Mexico” in City Dreams and Country Schemes: Utopian Visions of the Twentieth-Century American West, eds., Kathleen Brosnan and Amy Scott (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2011).

“The Battle for Fort Lawton: Competing Environmental Claims in Postwar Seattle,” Pacific Historical Review 77:2 (May 2008): 203-235.

Honors & Awards

US-UK Fulbright Awards Programme, Fulbright-Cardiff University, United Kingdom, 2022.

Arts and Humanities Fellowship, College of Arts and Sciences (WSU), 2021-2022.

Co-PI, Palouse Matters, National Endowment for the Humanities, Connections Planning Grant, 2019-2021.

Simon Visiting Professor Fellowship, University of Manchester, United Kingdom, June 2019.

University Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Washington State University, 2017-.

Berry Family CAS Faculty Excellence Fellows, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University, 2015.

Charles Redd Center Visiting Scholars Program, Brigham Young University, fall, 2014.

“Atomic West/Atomic World: Landmarks of American History and Culture: Workshops for School Teachers,” NEH Landmarks of American History, July, 2014.

Wallis Annenberg Research Grant, Special Collections Library, University of Southern California, 2014.

Berry Family CLA Faculty Excellence Fellows, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University, 2009.

Institute for Pacific Northwest History Dissertation Prize, University of Idaho, 2006.

Education

Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2004
M.Litt., Reformation Studies Institute, University of St. Andrews, 1999
B.A., Reed College, 1996

Research and Teaching Interests

Spohnholz’s research focuses on social practices of toleration in Reformation-era Germany and the Netherlands, experiences of religious refugees during Europe’s Age of Religious Wars, and historical memory of the Reformation. His first book, The Tactics of Toleration (2011), explores the daily tactics of peaceful coexistence along the Dutch/German border during Europe’s Age of Religious Wars. His second book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (2017), solves a 450-year-old mystery and examines historical memory of the Reformation in the Netherlands and northwest Germany from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first century. His third book, Ruptured Lives: Refugee Crises in Historical Perspective (2020), examines the causes and effects of refugee movements in world history. In 2021, he completed a seven-year project funded by the Dutch Research Council with Mirjam van Veen, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, that explores the experiences of sixteenth-century Dutch religious exiles living in the German-speaking lands. Their book that emerged from that project is Dutch Reformed Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1550–1620: A Reformation of Refugees (2024). He is also Director of the History for the 21^st Century project of the World History Association that offers free, student-centered and inquiry-driven curricula to faculty and students.

Selected Honors & Awards

2024-26 National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities Grant (with Brenna Miller as co-PI)

2024    Faculty Peer Mentoring Award. College of Arts and Sciences. Washington State University.

2022    Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction, Washington State University

2018    Albert C. Outler Prize, awarded by the American Society of Church, for best ecumenical church history monograph, biography, critical edition or bibliography published in the two previous years

2018    DAAD/GSA Book Prize, awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Studies Association for the best book in German history published in the previous two years

2017    University Distinguished Teaching Fellowship. Washington State University

2017    William F. Mullen Memorial Teaching Award. College of Arts and Sciences. Washington State University

2014    Research Grant (Free Competition) from the Dutch Research Council (€750,000), with Mirjam van Veen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

2013–2014 Scholar in Residence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

2012 Gerald Strauss Book Prize in Reformation History, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society

2011 Thesis Advisor of the Year, Honors College, Washington State University

2011 Eric W. Bell Learning Communities Excellence in Teaching Award, University College, Washington State University

2009 Harold J. Grimm Prize for the best journal article in Reformation studies, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society

2005 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, awarded by the German Historical Institute

Publications

Books

	Dutch Reformed Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1550–1620: A Reformation of Refugees (With Mirjam van Veen, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2024).
	Ruptured Lives: Refugee Crises in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
	The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Listen to a podcast interview about this book here
	With Carina Johnson, David M. Luebke, and Marjorie E. Plummer, Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2107 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
	The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011).
	With Gary K. Waite, Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).

Articles

“Constitutional Dynamism and Demographic Diversity in Early Modern Confessional Coexistence: Dutch Reformed Refugees in the Holy Roman Empire, 1554–1596.” In Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches, edited by Benjamin J. Kaplan and Jaap Geraerts, 133–52. London: Routledge, 2024.

With Brenna Miller, “Backward Design and Forward Thinking in the Introductory World History Course: Recentering World War I as an African and African Diasporic Experience.” World History Bulletin 89, no. 2 (2023): 27–34.

With Brenna Miller. “Collaboratively Reforming General Education History Education: A Roadmap for the 21st Century.” The Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference, 1 (2023): 77–87.

“Refugees in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Peer-reviewed teaching module for the History of the 21^st Century project (www.history21.com), 2023.

“A Response to Philip Benedict’s ‘Of Church Orders and Postmodernism.’” As a part of a Discussiedossier dedicated to The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition. BMGN-The Low Countries History Yearbook 136, no. 1 (2021): 78–90.

“Reformed Exiles and the Calvinist International in Reformation-Era Europe: A Reappraisal.” Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism, edited by Bruce Gordon and Carl Trueman, 237–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“The Polyphonies of Microhistories: Yair Mintzker and The Many Questions of Historical Perspective.” Central European History, 53, no. 1 (2020): 221–27.

“Refugees.” In John Calvin in Context, edited by R. Ward Holder, 143–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

“Exile Experiences and the Transformations of Religious Cultures in the Sixteenth Century: Kleve, England, East Friesland, and the Palatinate.” Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 6, no. 1 (2019): 43–67.

“Social Fiction and Diversity in Post-Reformation Germany.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 61 (Fall 2017): 1–17.

With Mirjam G. K. van Veen, “The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism: Religious Refugees in the Historiography of the Dutch Reformation.” Church History 86, no. 2 (2017): 1–29.

“Invented Memories: The ‘Convent of Wesel’ and the Origins of German and Dutch Calvinism.” In Archeologies of Confession: Writing Histories of Religion in Germany, 1517–2017, edited by Carina Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz, 284–303. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

“Archiving and Narration in Post-Reformation Germany and the Netherlands.” Past and Present 230, suppl. 11 (2016), 330–48.

With Mirjam G. K. van Veen. “Calvinists vs. Libertines: A New Look at Religious Exile and the Origins of ‘Dutch’ Tolerance.” In Calvinism and the Making of the European Mind, edited by Gijsbert van den Brink and Harro M. Höpfl (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

“Instability and Insecurity: Dutch Women Religious Refugees in Germany and England, 1550‒1600.” In Exile and Religious Identity, 1500‒1800, edited by Jesse Spohnholz and Gary Waite (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).

“Toleration.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

“Calvinism and Religious Exile during the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568–1609).” Immigrants and Minorities (2013): 1‒27.

“Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, edited by Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2011).

“Turning Dutch? Conversion in Early Modern Wesel,” in Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel Ryan, and David Warren Sabean (Providence: Berghahn Books, 2011).

“Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 3 (2008).

“Olympias and Chrysostom: The Debate over Wesel’s Reformed Deaconesses, 1568–1609,” Archive for Reformation History/Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 98 (2007).

“Strangers and Neighbors: The Tactics of Toleration in the Dutch Exile Community of Wesel, 1550–1590,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 38 (2006).

“Overlevend non-conformisme: Anabaptistische tradities en hun regulering in laat zestiende-eeuws Wezel.” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 29 (2003).

Education

Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1992
MA., The Johns Hopkins University 1986
MA., University College Cork (Republic of Ireland) 1983
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1982

Research and Teaching Interests

Holocaust and Genocide Studies; Rescue and Resistance in the Holocaust; History of the World Wars; History of Nazi Germany; War, Memory, and Society.

Publications

Book

Before the Enemy Is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912: A Social, Cultural and Political History (Boston: Humanities Press, Inc., a subsidiary of Brill Academic Publishers, 1999).

Articles

“Hiding in Plain Sight:  Gender, Faith, and the Conflicted Legacies of a Dutch Rescuer,” in Judy Baumel-Schwartz, ed., Their Brothers’ Keeper: Jews Saving Jews During the Holocaust (Peter Lang Publishing, Bern, Switzerland), forthcoming 2021.

“Teaching During the Pandemic:  Agency, Empathy, and Humility,” in Creating Under Corona, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, ed.  Digital book in English and Hebrew (The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, 2020), pp. 139-40. 

“’Remembering is Not an Innocent Act’:  Reflections on Postwar German War Memory and Peace Studies,” in Noriko Kawamura, Yoichiro Murakami, and Shin Chiba, eds., Building New Pathway to Peace  (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011)

“Finding Light in the Darkness? The Historical Treatment of Genocide as a Template for the Field of Hate Studies,” Journal of Hate Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (2003–04): 167–75.

“‘Hammer Blow”: Work, the Workplace, and the Culture of Masculinity among Catholic Workers in the Weimar Republic,” in Central European History 37, No. 2 (Summer 2004): 245–71.

“Catholic–Marxist Competition in the Working-Class Parishes of Cologne during the Weimar Republic,” in Catholic Historical Review 83, No. 1 (January 1997): 20–43.

Media and Public Outreach

Fallen Cougars, a digital exhibit of +225 war dead from Washington State College during the Second World War, 2017 to the present.  Opened December 2021.  Fallen Cougars (wsu.edu)

Honors & Awards

2020-2021 WSU Center for Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship

2018 WSU Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction

2007 Elected to the WSU President’s Teaching Academy

1999–2000 William F. Mullen Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005

Research and Teaching Interests

Sutton teaches courses in 20th century United States history, cultural history, and religious history.

Publications

Sutton is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, which will be published by Basic Books. His book will explain why Christianity has been so central to American history, and why Americans have been so tied to the Christian tradition in terms of their politics, culture, economics, and foreign policy. Sutton’s latest book entitled Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War is the never-before-told story of the missionaries, priests, rabbis, and other religious activists who went to work as spies for the United States government during World War II. Sutton draws on newly de-classified government documents and the private papers of some of the nation’s most colorful and intriguing clandestine agents to tell this long-buried story of the godly spooks who fought to balance their religious convictions with their commitment to making war on their nation’s, and their God’s, enemies. Through faith and doubt, frustration and perseverance, they struggled to make sense of the unique and dangerous path that they believed God had set before them. The unheralded holy spies at the heart of this book helped American leaders in the 1940s understand the complex ways in which the religious identities of peoples and nations impacted global conflict. Without necessarily anticipating the long-term consequences of their actions, they crafted new and important relationships for the United States with Muslims, Catholics, and Jews and they ran covert operations at the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine. Missionary recruits played an outsized role in leading the US to victory and, once the war was won, two of them helped launch the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their work inspired American leaders to draw up a new playbook for using religion to craft and meet foreign policy objectives, which then shaped everything from the US’s cold war crusade against “godless” communism to the “war on terror.”

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) is the first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation. It was named a Choice (American Library Association) “Outstanding Academic Title of 2015.” He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of American Religion and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), which uses history to explore how religion is shaping the modern world. He has written a textbook, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents, as part of the popular Bedford “History and Culture” series (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). His first book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS’s American Experience series.

Sutton has published articles in the Journal of American History, Religion & American Culture, Church History, the Journal of Policy History, and the Public Historian as well as in numerous edited collections. His article, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Anti-liberalism in a Global Age,” won the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award for the best article published in the Journal of American History in 2012. Sutton has also written for the New York Times on the Obama presidential campaign and on the origins of Christian fundamentalism, in the New Republic on the Christian Right and the Capitol insurrection, the Washington Post on Putin and the end times, Trump and evangelicalism, and sex scandals in the religious right, the Guardian on the legacy of Billy Graham and on abortion rights, and the Seattle Times (here, here, and here).

Sutton was named a 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. He spent the 2012-2013 academic year in Ireland as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin (on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant) and the 2014-2015 academic year in Germany as the Marsilius Kolleg Visiting Professor and Scholar-in-Residence at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University. He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Sutton has been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and MSNBC’s The Last Word, among many other news shows. He has lectured on religion, politics, and American culture across the U.S. and in universities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2007

Academic & Professional Interests

Professor Thigpen is a Nineteenth Century U.S. historian whose work focuses on women and gender, the U.S West, and Colonialism.

Awards and Fellowships

Center for Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Washington State University (2020)
James H. Bradley Fellowship, Montana Historical Society (2020)
Western History Association’s Jensen-Miller Award for best  article in the field of women and gender in the North American West (2011)
Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize Finalist (2008)
Chancellor’s Club Dissertation Fellowship(2006)
Mayers Fellowship, The Huntington Library (2005)

Publications

H-Diplo Roundtable on Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World (Spring, 2016).

“Converting Hawai‘i: Race, Gender, and the Hawaiian Islands Mission.” In Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.  

Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World. University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture Series (2014).

“Desperately Seeking Mary: Materializing Mary Richardson Walker, Missionary,” The Public Historian Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 68-81.

“‘You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today’: The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange” Pacific Historical Review (2010).

” ‘Something Wonderful is About to Happen’: Americans and the Open Frontier” ABC-CLIO’s Analyze Project (August 2008).

“Looking ‘West’–Perspectives on a Changing Nation, HOT Themes in American History Humanities Out There, UCI California History-Social Science Project and the Santa Ana Partnership (2007).

Education

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2008.

Academic & Professional Interests

Wright’s research focuses on the British empire in South and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book analyzes opium policy in colonial Burma, and she is currently working on a project about marginal women in the British empire, funded by an NEH Summer Stipend fellowship. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of empires, modern Britain, and World history.

Book

Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Articles

“Gender, Violence and Justice in Colonial Assam: the Webb case, c. 1884” Journal of Social History (2020), 1-18.

“Not just a ‘place for the smoking of opium’: the Indian opium den and imperial anxieties in the 1890s.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 18, 2 (2017)

“Maintaining the bar: regulating European barmaids in colonial Calcutta and Rangoon”  Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45,1 (2017), 22-45.

“Opium in British Burma, 1826-1881.”  Contemporary Drug Problems 35,4 (2008), 611-646.