Winter 2019 – Archives
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Department News |
ViewHistory Department Leads the Way in “Race and Reckoning” ProgramThis fall, UNC-Chapel Hill launched a new initiative entitled “Reckoning: Race, Memory and Reimagining the Public University.” Conceived as a response to recent campus events concerning the politics, justice, and legacy of monuments, donors, and policies in UNC’s history, this program builds on previously offered courses and has led to the creation of new ones. All of the courses involve interdisciplinary or new methodological approaches, and three History Department professors are helping lead the way. Jim Leloudis’s course, “Slavery and the University,” takes students directly into the archives for every class. This undergraduate research seminar immerses students, who had to apply to Leloudis for entrance into the course and come from a range of majors, in University archives to break new ground. During its first century of existence, UNC had to fund its operations through the acquisition and sale of escheated property—property left behind by North Carolinians whom the state declared had no rightful heir (often including antebellum-era slaves). Yet historians have not systematically combed the archives to locate slavery’s role in building and maintaining the University. Until now. Leloudis and Graduate Teaching Assistant Laurie Medford—who offer this class largely thanks to the generous funds provided by alumnus Gordon Golding—work with two five-student teams to read nineteenth-century script and encounter emotionally charged stories. Leloudis recalls one such instance, in which a slave died after purchasing his own freedom but failing to emancipate his own daughter. The UNC lawyer who requested clarification on how to proceed with this “escheated property” was told pointedly to “take possession and sell.” Leloudis lauds his students, whom he calls “remarkable detectives,” who will present their findings in case write-ups and posters that will eventually be made accessible to the public. William Sturkey’s “Race and Memory at UNC” course also brings academic discussion and student engagement directly into the public eye. In Sturkey’s class, more than 100 students consider race and memory at UNC from the era before white colonizers arrived in the Chapel Hill area until the 1980s, with many references to the more recent past. Sturkey collaborated with Professor and Executive Vice Provost Ron Strauss, instructor of the wildly popular “AIDS Course,” to infuse his class with new pedagogical methods suited to the topic. The result is a series of weekly lectures delivered by speakers from across the Research Triangle, including scholars at other university campuses and UNC graduate students doing research for the Historical Task Force. Students’ final projects, a collection of commemorative and documentary materials, may even be donated to Wilson Library to “inspire future students” about how to commemorate campus history. Sturkey has also noted that while the generous funding identified by the department and University made the course feasible this fall, its availability in the future hinges largely on more consistent sources of income to fund the speakers and digital components that make the course so innovative and effective. Malinda Lowery is offering a course she has taught before, “Introduction to the Cultures and Histories of Native North America,” but to a newly engaged audience of students. Lowery, an interdisciplinary and innovative scholar who has a longstanding commitment to public engagement, incorporates archaeology, anthropology, art, film, and fiction into her course to “consider questions ranging from the evolution of ideas about race, nation, and sovereignty, the nature and results of cross-cultural contacts to the concept of history itself.” Her students have found that Native American histories are indeed “essential to understanding the society we live in, and essential to our cultural competency as residents of the United States.” As these three scholars look toward the future of the “Race and Reckoning” program at UNC, their common concern is funding. At the moment, efforts are underway to pursue grants supported from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. However, making the research and teaching associated with the program sustainable requires consistent, long-term contributions and lasting sources of funds. However they are able to secure those financial resources, Leloudis, Sturkey, and Lowery are optimistic that their pedagogy and research will continue to break ground in deepening the connections between research and teaching at UNC and the university’s mission to engage in public engagement and outreach. – Luke Jeske |
Faculty Spotlight |
ViewThe Historian’s Craft: Learning to Expect the UnexpectedWhen historians discuss the travails of conducting research, most refer to the long hours of intellectual gymnastics required to complicate our understanding of the past. Others speak of the dreaded “writer’s block” that can plague its victim for hours or even days on end. Few historians, however, find themselves in non-air conditioned buildings in 110-degree heat shut out from the archival sources they obtained government permission to access. But that’s exactly where Eren Tasar was this summer. Tasar traveled to Uzbekistan to begin research for his next book, an investigation of Soviet family law and law courts in Central Asia. This new project builds upon his previous work on political and legal institutions in the region in Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia. Yet unforeseen twists in the research experience completely reoriented his project. Despite receiving approval from the Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Foreign Affairs to enter the country to conduct research, Tasar learned only days before his flight to Uzbekistan that he would be prohibited from accessing the archives. Stunned, but undeterred, he turned to the library system. First, he went to the Navoi library, a stone’s throw from the imposing former KGB building in Tashkent, in hopes of finding some useful material to salvage his research trip. Tasar found almost nothing on family law, but he discovered a trove on Soviet atheism listed in the card catalog. Unfortunately, only 1 of the 30 works on Soviet atheism in the publicly accessible library had been declassified. Having exhausted all his primary leads, Tasar turned to the only other collection he could hope had relevant materials: the Library of the Academy of Sciences. However, since the building had been built without air conditioning, fragile documents could not be preserved here. Even more curious, only one other person was there with him – an elderly gentleman reading the complete works of the nineteenth century Austrian playwright, Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), in Russian translation. Sweltering in the heat, Tasar nonetheless made a surprising discovery: no authorities had thought to classify the collection because even local researchers used it so sparingly. Having abandoned his original plan to study family law and courts, Tasar identified a set of dissertations written between 1964 and 1984 during the height of Soviet “scientific atheism” from all five Central Asian Republics, a source base that could shed light on several unexamined aspects of Soviet Central Asia. That historians have yet to analyze these sources should not come as a surprise given the many travails involved with garnering access to any historical documents in Uzbekistan. What drew Tasar’s attention was what they have to say about the history of contemporary Central Asia. The students who wrote these dissertations not only revealed much about the religious and political landscape of the region, but also lived through the end of Soviet Union’s officially atheistic regime and saw their career aspirations dashed in the economic turmoil that followed. Tasar hopes this project will illuminate more than just the traumatic experiences of a few atheist Soviet academics, no matter how much he may sympathize with them after a summer spent roasting in search of source material. At present, most historical work about Soviet atheism focuses on the Russian context and suggests that Soviet atheism was meant to be a counterweight to or replacement of religious life in its practices “lifestyle.” The Central Asian experience, though, suggests otherwise. In fact, Tasar has found that arguments about the “religious” nature of Soviet atheism are not confirmed in the historical record. Rather, he says that atheism was a “social sphere that intersects with rather than competes with religion.” Nor were Soviet efforts to establish atheism unsuccessful or completed through half-baked schemes. Instead, Tasar says, atheism was a “discursive sphere” that did not necessarily entail anti-religious policies or practices. Moreover, the dissertations that he located provide some of the only data about atheism and social life in the Central Asian countryside during the post-World War II period. In that sense, Tasar will be journeying into triply unexplored realms – Soviet atheism outside of Russia, never-before-used source materials, and the history of rural Soviet Central Asia. Finally, Tasar’s story itself shows how historical research can be fraught with unexpected hurdles, dead ends, and even physical danger in unsuitable conditions. Though few historians can record these challenges in their publications, they, and their work, are ultimately shaped by the doors that are opened or closed to them, the politics of secrecy, and, sometimes, the boiler rooms of Tashkent libraries. – Luke Jeske |
Alumni Spotlight |
ViewFirst woman to graduate from UNC became a prominent local historianWhen the first students enrolled in the University of North Carolina in 1795, no women were among them. In fact, the University explicitly forbid women until 1897. The following year, Sallie Walker Stockard became the first woman to receive a B.A. degree from UNC. She then completed her M.A. in 1900, writing a history of Alamance County that represented her first step toward becoming a prominent author of local histories. In her autobiography, which is housed in the North Carolina Collection at UNC, Stockard wrote that she first gained a passion for education from her mother. “She had told me of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. I was anxious to learn to read Greek and Latin, to be my mother’s equal intellectually.” Since her family could not afford to send her to college, Stockard earned money to further her schooling, including by sewing dresses for the young women who worked in the textile mills in Graham, North Carolina, where she grew up. “The sewing machine seldom stopped before midnight,” Stockard recalled in her autobiography. “A doctor friend who visited us said to work such long hours was unwise; it could injure my health. But I did not stop. I kept busy with the sewing to earn enough to go to college.” In 1897, Stockard was allowed to enroll in UNC only because she had already completed a B.A. at Guilford College in Greensboro. Although Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, the president of the University, successfully convinced the Board of Trustees to admit women in 1897, the new policy only included women who had already earned a degree at another institution. In 1940, UNC changed the rule, but only for women whose families lived locally. Indeed, women students like Stockard would not receive full access to UNC until Title IX passed in 1972. (During that time, black women were fully excluded from the University; in 1951, Gwendolyn Harrison sued UNC after administrators cancelled her enrollment in a graduate program upon realizing that she was black.) Because UNC had no dormitory for women in these early years, Stockard and other early women students were accepted on the condition that they could find housing. Upon arriving in Chapel Hill, Stockard stayed with President Alderman’s sister-in-law until she arranged more permanent accommodations, living in the home of a local family in exchange for taking care of their daughter. Not until the 1920s did the University build a dormitory for women. As more women began to enroll in UNC–from fewer than ten per class in the first few years to 57 in 1920 and more than 500 in 1939–administrators placed more formal limitations on women students. For example, Stockard posed with fellow graduates in her class photo in 1898, while later women students were excluded from theirs. Soon, women who enrolled in the University received a booklet of rules that applied only to female students. Increasingly, women students also faced resistance from their male peers. Stockard’s autobiography suggests that she built positive relationships with at least some male students. In 1923, however, the Daily Tar Heel took a strong stance against co-education. Protesting the proposed dormitory for women students, the paper’s editorial board expressed fear that “the University would become overrun with girl students” and declared that “the men students at this University have no desire for them here, and never will have any desire for them here.” After finishing her M.A. in 1900, Stockard published The History of Alamance, the first of three local histories. Two years later, she released The History of Guilford County, North Carolina. After moving to Arkansas, she published The History of Lawrence, Jackson, Independence and Stone Counties of the Third Judicial District of Arkansas in 1904. As Stockard later wrote in her autobiography, “I was something of a pioneer in the writing of local Southern history.” To readers today, Stockard’s histories reflect an era of historical scholarship that treated white settlers as drivers of historical progress. In The History of Alamance, she confined the area’s indigenous inhabitants to stereotyped roles, and rather than engage with the local history of slavery and the Civil War, Stockard mostly avoided the topics. In her telling, the relative lack of immigration to the state by people from Eastern and Southern Europe, who by 1900 represented the majority of immigrants to the United States, meant that “the purest race on earth live in North Carolina.” Stockard’s other projects reflected her commitment to an interdisciplinary education. She studied psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1902. In 1903, she delved into fiction-writing with The Lily of the Valleys, a dramatization of the Song of Solomon. After separating from her husband, whom she met and married in Arkansas, she took her two children to Texas and then to Oklahoma, where she was a schoolteacher. In the 1920s, when she was in her mid-40s, Stockard completed a second M.A. at Columbia University Teacher’s College in New York. She later founded a local newspaper in New York before retiring to Florida. Stockard moved frequently, in part because she saw travel as another form of education. In her autobiography, she wrote that “I have attempted to supplement the training I have received in colleges and universities with knowledge and wisdom gained thru experience. The value of experience and travel can never be overestimated. With the passing of every mile, a new bit of knowledge is found.” – Aubrey Lauersdorf |
History in Our World |
ViewHistorians get their Feet Wet: Ancient Maritime HistoryWhen classes are not in session, many historians can be found in the archives, pouring over documents for their next research project. Doctoral candidate and ancient historian Mark Porlides pursued a much less traditional research opportunity this summer. Porlides was among two hundred volunteer rowers on an inaugural trip of the Olympius, a 121-foot replica of an ancient Greek trireme ship. Rowing a trireme ship was only one part of the three-week “Greek By Sea” seminar that Porlides participated in. The program was hosted by the American School for Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA), one of the oldest foreign research institutions in the world. Along with scholars, students, and teachers from across the United States, Porlides traveled Greece by sailboat, visiting historical sites and museums. The seminar’s maritime focus was perfect for Porlides, an expert in Hellenic navies. “My dissertation project examines naval personnel in Greek fleets from about 525 BC to 31 BC– so that marks the rise of the classical navies and particularly the introduction of a new type of ship called the trireme. It required massive numbers of people to operate it, quadruple the next biggest ship before it,” said Porlides, who is co-advised by Richard Talbert and Fred Naiden. “I’m interested in how city states–we’re not talking about nations or countries–mobilized forces of 30,000 or 40,000 men in a fleet and then sent them across the ocean in what amounts to a floating city.” Rowing the trireme gave Porlides a new perspective on the experiences of these ancient Greek oarsmen. “There were several things that I immediately realized about the situation that I never would have known had I not gone there. For example, all the oarsmen faced the back of the ship– none of them could see where they’re going. I just had to trust that the guy who was commanding us knew what he was doing and that the guy beside me was going to row as hard as I was,” Porlides said. The triremes had three decks, which were often unfenced and open to the elements. Porlides quickly realized the dangers this design posed to the oarsmen. “On the one hand, it meant the sunlight comes in, which made it hot. But it also means there was a sea breeze. In a battle, you would be vulnerable to getting shot by arrows or javelins,” he explained. These insights will play an important role in Porlides’s dissertation project. While previous scholars have focused on developments in naval technology, tactics and strategy, and the connections between naval fleets and political systems, Porlides takes a more social history approach. “I look at naval personnel all the way from top to bottom, with an emphasis on common people– the sailors, the rowers, the people below deck,” he said. In particular, he wants to better understand the roles that enslaved people played in Hellenic navies, a long-running debate among ancient historians. While in Greece, Porlides studied a number of other sources that will help him answer these questions. At museums, he viewed pottery with maritime motifs, which are especially important for understanding naval history before Greeks adopted written language. He also did research at the ASCSA’s Blegen Library, where he looked at ancient epigraphs, which often are inscriptions made in public places for public consumption. Uncovered at Greek archaeological sites, these inscriptions range from formal dedications carved into stone temples to misspelled names scratched into pottery. Because any literate or semi-literate Athenian could write an inscription, these are the foundational sources for Porlides’s study of common people. In fact, he’s already found some important evidence that challenges longstanding conceptions of how Hellenic navies functioned. Right now, he is working with a partial inscription that records the crews of six trireme ships and differentiates between free and enslaved sailors. “I’m super interested in that because there’s been a long-running argument over the last hundred years about whether slaves ever took part in military affairs and whether they were ever impressed in large numbers into service or labor, especially by a state rather than by an individual,” Porlides explained. “In the 1960s, an historian named Lionel Casson basically argued that there were never slaves on ships, and on the rare occasion that there was a slave, that person was a servant of one of the soldiers on deck, and wasn’t rowing. I disagree with some of these ideas.” – Aubrey Lauersdorf |
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Graduate Student News |
ViewUpdate from Sarah Shields, Director of Graduate StudiesWe were delighted to welcome 17 new graduate students to the History Department in August. They represent four countries (the US, the Czech Republic, Chile, and Thailand) and will be studying such wide-ranging topics as environmental history in Chile, the fate of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, the struggles of US food workers during the depression, and the global politics of Shi’i movements based in Lebanon. Current students are researching projects across the globe on a variety of grants and fellowships. I’ve been trying to update the graduate web page with your accomplishments, publications, podcasts, and other items of interest. Please do send updates to sshields@email.unc.edu. Two Department Graduate Students win the Sallie Markham Michie AwardThis year, graduate students Daniel Velásquez and Emma Rothberg received the annual Sallie Markham Michie Award from Orange County chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Magna Carta (DAR) Society. In the words of Professor Kathleen DuVal, this prestigious award “supports the work of history graduate students conducting research on the era of the American Revolution and the founding of the U.S. Republic (circa 1750-1790) and/or the tradition of rights and liberties that was established by the Magna Carta.” In recognition of the generous support – up to $8000 – provided by their benefactors, Velásquez and Rothberg will deliver the final findings of their research to the DAR Society next year. Given Velásquez and Rothberg’s projects, the DAR Society’s interest in supporting their work is not surprising. Velásquez’s project focuses on the Gulf Coast, where, particularly after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), boundaries and borders carved out on maps and in legal codes looked quite different on the ground. When Spain gained control of Louisiana, the port of New Orleans became the access point for British traders to move their goods to Mexico. Since the Spanish metropole could not adequately supply its subjects in Mexico with all the goods they demanded, a rich market for traders developed in the region. As Velásquez explains, Spanish law restricted such trade, so Irish smugglers from British islands in the Caribbean covertly brought their goods – boots and tea trays, for example, that would cost three times more if made by artisans rather than factory machinery – to New Orleans to enter the Mexican market. He seeks to demonstrate that the center of gravity in trans-imperial trade rested in Mexico, rather than Spain. Having discovered, to his surprise, that the cost of conducting research in New Orleans exceeds comparable expenses in London, Velásquez is particularly appreciative of the DAR Society’s support. Rothberg’s research also examines “on the ground” events that shaped and constrained high-level political agendas. She studies apolitical parades put on by booster societies, suffrage groups, labor activists, and ethnic or racial movements at the turn of the twentieth century. Each of these parades provide examples of how city dwellers in New York, Denver, and Baltimore developed a “usable past” to represent American democracy. She is interested in the meanings and definitions of American democracy in the growing urban spaces of a largely agrarian country. The Sallie Markham Michie Award will fund Rothberg’s travel to Denver and Maryland. Though the research process looks different for every graduate student, Velásquez and Rothberg have adeptly responded to the challenges they faced and hope to move one step closer to completing their dissertation projects with the financial support of the Sallie Markham Michie Award. Stay tuned to hear more about the fruits of their research! – Luke Jeske |
Undergrad News |
ViewUpdate from Brett Whalen, Director of Undergraduate StudiesThis fall, faculty in the History department began the process of reviewing, preparing, and submitting key courses for approval as part of the new IDEAs curriculum. While the professors carried out this crucial administrative task, our undergraduate majors were thankfully doing their own important work of research. Drawing upon various resources, including departmental Cazel funds and the Abbey funds provided to the department by the Abbey Fellows Program, History was pleased to offer financial support to students including Claude Wilson, for his senior honors thesis “Labor Organizing in 1980s: Gastonia at the Firestone Fibers and Textiles Mill” (adviser, Ben Waterhouse); to Linda Cheng for her senior thesis, “Imperial Posturing and ‘Yellowbirds’: the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests” (Michelle King); and to Joseph Loughran, for his thesis examining the relationship between race, economics, and sports in the city of Atlanta between 1966-2016 (Matt Andrews). The department also gave Boyatt awards (provided by Michael L. Boyatt) to two of our majors to defray the cost of studying abroad in the spring 2020: Whitney Sprinkle, who will be studying at IES Rome; and Baekhanna Lee, for study at UNC Florence. Last but not least, History offered additional financial support to students attending professional conferences, including Phoebe Flaherty, who attended the “North American Conference on British Studies” in Vancouver, Canada, and to Alexa Augone, who will attend the 2020 Phi Alpha Theta Biennial Convention in San Antonio, TX, to present her paper “Hell Hath No Fury: Antebellum Plantation Mistresses’ Treatment of Bondswomen Sexually Abused by their Husbands.” As always, the department remains immensely proud of our majors and their accomplishments. The students, though, weren’t having all the fun. In November, Michelle King became the first History professor to participate in a new lecture series during University Research Week that allows faculty to share their current research projects with undergraduate students. Professor King spoke on her new book, Chop-Fry-Learn: How Fu Pei-mei Reinvented Chinese Cooking for the Television Generation. Undergraduates apply history to politics with Summer Internship AwardsUpon entering the workforce, Carolina history majors quickly realize that the skills they developed in their history classes can transfer to a variety of fields. This summer, the Department’s Undergraduate Summer Internship Awards gave five undergraduate students the opportunity to explore the benefits of their coursework firsthand by funding their internships at NGOs, historic sites, and government offices. These competitive awards provide $1,000 to $3,000 to undergraduate students who want to pursue any unpaid internship that broadly relates to their study of history or helps them develop skills relevant to the major. This year, Sarah Cheeley interned with the US District Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. Kimberly Oliver pursued an internship at the Stagville State Historic Site in Durham, which includes the remnants of one of the largest plantation labor camps in North Carolina. Aaron Sugerman travelled to London to work at the Transatlantic Forum for Education and Diplomacy, a non-governmental organization focused on promoting global dialogue and understanding through the humanities. Catherine Blake-Harris, a double major in history and PWAD, spent twelve weeks as a public diplomacy intern at the US Embassy in Madid. She immediately identified the Department of History as a possible source of financial support. “Spanish history and our relationship with the different [Spanish] governments inform what the US Embassy has to do now,” Blake-Harris explained. “I actually ended up working with a lot of history in my role as an intern, and I ended up learning a lot of history that I didn’t know about twentieth-century Spain. It all tied in really well together.”In this position, Blake-Harris wrote daily press reports, took notes in embassy meetings, supported fundraising efforts, and managed the Embassy’s social media pages. She also helped plan public events, including a Fourth of July party and a collaborative event between NASA and Spanish King Felipe’s administration to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. Upon arriving in Madrid, Blake-Harris realized that she would play an even more essential role at the Embassy than she had initially expected. “The US Embassy was chronically understaffed, so all the interns basically got to work as foreign service officers and act as representatives for the Embassy at events in Spain. I actually got to meet the foreign minister for the EU,” she said. Blake-Harris, who plans to take the Foreign Service Officer exam this winter, saw direct connections between the skills she developed as a history major and those she used in her internship. “I had to write talking points about the United States’ foreign policy direction to reassure Spain as a NATO member and also as a key ally. It was basically what I had to do for my History 398 research paper: find all these sources, cite the NATO Secretary General, cite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and build a cohesive talking point for the Counselor for Public Diplomacy and for the Ambassador to speak on,” she said. Mercer Brady, a History and Contemporary European Studies major who worked in the Washington, D.C. office of Congressman Ted Budd (R, NC-13), also saw clear connections between her internship and her history education. “I definitely think my history major was helpful, especially with Congressional tours,” she said. “I loved giving tours in the Capitol. I loved being up in the rotunda.”Brady also relied on the writing and analysis skills she honed in her history classes at Carolina. She wrote mass mailings to constituents, explaining how Congressional acts would affect the district. Brady covered topics as diverse as infrastructure-building and the legalization of hemp, but her favorite focused on the bipartisan African American Burial Grounds Network Act, which provides federal support to preserve neglected sacred sites. The internship helped Brady better understand the issues facing her home district, and it also helped her learn to collaborate with people who hold different political views. “I definitely felt that I was able to grow as a young professional and someone who wants to work on bipartisan issues,” she said. Brady encouraged other students to consider interning for a representative from their home district, even if they must cross party lines to do so. “If you’re interested in a Congressional internship, you should look at the political reality of the office you’ll be working in. Then, weigh the pros and cons of how that will affect you and whether you think you can separate yourself from the politics and take the skills, because it’s something you can gain a lot of experience from.” – Aubrey Lauersdorf |
Gifts to the History Department
The History Department is a lively center for historical education and research. Although we are deeply committed to our mission as a public institution, our “margin of excellence” depends on generous private donations. At the present time, the department is particularly eager to improve the funding and fellowships for graduate students.
Your donations are used to send graduate students to professional conferences, support innovative student research, bring visiting speakers to campus, and expand other activities that enhance the department’s intellectual community.
To make a secure gift online, please click “Give Now” above.
The Department also receives tax-deductible donations through the Arts and Sciences Foundation at UNC-Chapel Hill. Please note in the “memo” section of your check that your gift is intended for the History Department. Donations should be sent to the following address:
UNC-Arts & Sciences Foundation
Buchan House
523 E. Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Attention: Ronda Manuel
For more information about creating scholarships, fellowships, and professorships in the Department through a gift, pledge, or planned gift please contact Ronda Manuel, Associate Director of Development at the Arts and Sciences Foundation: ronda.manuel@unc.edu or (919) 962-7266.