The Department of History and American Studies is pleased to announce the upcoming lecture by Dr. Roger Connor, “Counternarratives in Public History: Aviation and Criminality.” Dr. Connor is a curator and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. His lecture will take place on zoom on Tuesday, February 16, 4pm-5:30pm. For access to the zoom link, please contact Dr. Harris at sharris@umw.edu.
Department of History and American Studies
University of Mary Washington
Fall 2020 Symposium – Friday, December 4
The Department of History and American Studies will present its Fall 2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium on Zoom on Friday, December 4, 2020. For more information, please contact Dr. Susan Fernsebner (sfernseb@umw.edu).
9:00-9:50 AM
SESSION ONE. “The American Dream, Social Injustice, and Ideologies of Dissent: Selected Papers” – Moderator: Dr. Erin Devlin
Mariah Morton. “I Love Lucy: Family and Gender Roles in the 1950s”
Gianna Banish. “Exploring the Transformation of Malcolm X Ideology”
Cody Bowler. “Watts and Rodney King: More Than Riots”
SESSION TWO. “Historical Studies on World War I and II” – Moderator: Dr. Porter Blakemore
Sarah Pietrowski. “A Comparative Analysis of the Responses of the United Kingdom and the United States to the Jewish Refugee Crisis Prior to World War II”
Michael Mallery. ““The Experiences of Thomas Callaway in the Second World War”
Megan Mydlow. “Admiral Nimitz: His Strategic Mindset and Leadership Role in the Pacific Theater”
10:10-11:00 AM
SESSION THREE. “Dragon Myths, Medieval Literacy, and the Role of the Tournament: Selected Papers in European History” – Moderator: Dr. Bruce O’Brien
Kassie Phillips. “The Conceptual Evolution of the Dragon: The Convergence of Greek, Germanic , Celtic, and Christian Mythologies and the Modern Dragon”
Matthew Abbot. “Early Medieval European Literacy: Francia and England”
Daniel Noel. “The Role and Effects of the Tournament in Medieval Western Europe”
SESSION FOUR. “Of Bound Feet and Flying Witches: Topics in East Asian Studies” – Moderator: Dr. Susan Fernsebner
Katie Molina. “Western Influences in the Anti-Footbinding Movement, 1860-1912”
Alison Poisson. “Gender & Miyazaki’s World: Witches, Feminists, and Other Scary Things”
11:20 AM – 12:10 PM
SESSION FIVE. “Gender, Race, and the Environment: Themes in U.S. History” – Moderator: Dr. Jason Sellers
Christina M. Cowart. “Breaking Through the Barriers: Women in Early Jazz”
Thomas Bascom. “Race, Citizenship, The Frontier, and American Identity in 20th Century Scouting Movements”
Justin L. Binns. “Undamming America: A Regional Case Study”
SESSION SIX. “Selected Papers in United States History” – Moderator: Dr. Allyson Poska
Jordan Petty. “Glass Nast: How Nineteenth-Century Cartoonist Thomas Nast Is a Window into Postbellum America”
Paul Hogue. “Tulsa Race Riot: Accessing Economic Envy and Fear of Interracial Sex in Jim Crow Era Oklahoma”
Kimberly Eastridge. “The Patriarchy Discussed Through I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and Leave It to Beaver.”
SESSION SEVEN. “New Military Histories: Local and Global” – Moderator: Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti
Lauren Frye. “Culpepper, VA: Caught in the Crossroads”
Maddie Shiflett. “‘On the Verge of Liberty’: The Impact of Advocacy and Federal Policy at the Point Lookout Contraband Camp”
Dennis Gill. “NATO’s Long, Bloody Road to the Kosovo War”
12:30-1:20 PM
SESSION EIGHT. “The Inscribed Canvas of History: Sweethearts, Notorious Dictators, and Prison Tattoos” – Moderator: Dr. Steven Harris
Shannon Payne. “London’s Sweethearts or Most Notorious Criminals: The Kray Twins”
Tara Scroggins. “Converging Lives: A Comparative History of Hitler and Stalin”
Cathryn Kinde. “Sex, Stars, and Stalin: An Examination of Russian Prison Tattoos in the Soviet Era”
SESSION NINE. “Topics in 19th and 20th Century History” – Moderator: Dr. Claudine Ferrell
Amanda Huber. “Dr. Charles West and the New World of Pediatric Medicine”
Anne-Marie Guelcher. “‘Something Beautiful’ – The Horses, Heroes, and History of Operation Cowboy and Race to Save Austria’s White Gold”
Corey Harrison. “American ‘Devil Dogs’: Newspapers and Perceptions of the Marine Corps in World War I”
The Library of Congress offers a paid Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program for 2021 (via telework). As their official description notes:
“The Library of Congress Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program enables undergraduate and graduate students to experience the integrated analog and digital collections and services of the world’s largest library. Working under the direction of Library curators and specialists, fellows increase access to and engagement with collection materials. United States citizens currently enrolled in undergraduate or graduate school are invited to apply for consideration as a Junior Fellow.”
Open & Closing dates for application: 11/05/2020-11/30/2020
Paid internship / student stipend provided.
For full details and application information, see:
Please join the Department of History and American Studies for a virtual Talking History conversation with Kyle Stetz, the Director of Education and Visitor Services at James Madison’s Montpelier. Our conversation will take place on Tuesday, November 17 from 3-4 PM on Zoom. Please email Will Mackintosh at wmackint@umw.edu for the Zoom link.
History Professor Allyson Poska has been awarded a Rapid Response Grant on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences for her project “Convincing the Masses: Global Public Health and Smallpox Vaccination in the Spanish Empire (1803-1810).”
Presented by the Social Science Research Council in partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation, this competitive grant is intended to “examine the wide-ranging impacts of Covid-19—including on education, the workplace, health care, and religious practices—from the perspectives of a range of disciplines, from anthropology to political science to psychology.”
Poska offers a rich project summary that describes both the history of the 1803 Spanish smallpox vaccine campaign and its current-day relevance, as she writes:
In 1803 Charles IV of Spain initiated a campaign against smallpox, opening vaccination rooms across the peninsula and sending the cowpox vaccine around the globe with the Royal Philanthropic Expedition. This global examination of Spain’s smallpox vaccination campaign analyzes the dynamic between the purveyors of the vaccine and the potential recipients. On both the peninsula and around the globe, the vaccination campaign engaged the diverse populations of the Spanish empire: men and women, rich and poor, Africans (both free and enslaved), Indigenous Americans, Filipinos, mixed-race peoples, and whites (both Spanish and American born). The campaign challenged deeply rooted race and gender hierarchies and asserted new claims to governmental authority.
I intend to examine how each of these groups asserted their own expectations about bodily authority and governmental control as they accepted or rejected the vaccine… This project relates directly to the current Covid-19 as public health authorities grapple with the challenge of encouraging hundreds of millions of people of all races, classes, and cultures to submit to a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
Professor Poska has also received grants for this book project from the American Philosophical Society, The Council of American Overseas Research Centers/NEH Senior Fellowship, and The American Council of Learned Societies. She recently presented work from the project to the Center for Disease Control’s Immunization Division.
Over the past two semesters, I have had the honor to intern at the James Monroe Museum as part of the Albert J. Bowley scholarship program. As I intend to enter the field of public history after graduation, interning a such reputable museum with such an incredible collection (the largest collection of Monroe artifacts in the world) has been an invaluable learning experience. During my time at the museum, I worked with staff on projects related to education, interpretation, exhibit preparation, research, collections management, archival work, and digital history. Thus, it would be impossible for me to relate all of my experiences on this website. However, here are brief overviews of two projects to highlight my experience.
This semester, the James Monroe Museum worked with historian Joann Freeman to produce a short internet documentary film about the troubled relationship between Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe, who almost dueled each other in 1797 over a dispute involving the infamous Hamilton-Reynolds Affair. In preparation for shooting the film, I documented provenience on several Hamilton family documents in the museum’s collection and helped to write interview questions for Dr. Freeman. Later on, I appeared in the film itself, which you can view here.
I also had the opportunity to work on an upcoming exhibit focusing on the hundreds of enslaved laborers owned by James and Elizabeth Monroe during their lifetime. For the most part, I conducted research to find any possible information on the lives of these individuals. While information was scarce, I did uncover the stories of several people. For instance, Thena Hemmings became one of James Monroe’s most trusted enslaved servants before tragically passing away at an early age, leaving behind several children. Discovering and bringing to light the stories of individuals like Hemmings proved to be challenging and saddening, but ultimately rewarding.
History Professor Steven E. Harris received a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to complete research on his book project, “Flying Aeroflot: A History of the Soviet Union in the Jet Age.” He will conduct this research in summer 2021.
Like many faculty here at UMW, Professor Harris draws upon his scholarly research to develop innovative courses—in this case, the upper-level seminar, “Empires of the Air: Histories of Aviation and Space in the Modern World.” To be taught again in spring 2021, this course examines the history of flight from ballooning in the 18th century to the privatization of space exploration in the 21st. Along the way, students explore the impact of aeronautics and astronautics on global politics and warfare; gender, class, and race relations; imperial and national identities; and popular culture, travel, and commerce.
Professor Harris’s ‘Flying Aeroflot’ project uses commercial aviation to rethink how Soviet state and society evolved from the end of World War II to the communist system’s collapse in 1991. Aeroflot’s dramatic growth from an undeveloped sector under Stalin to the ‘world’s largest airline’ under Brezhnev tells the broader but still little understood story of the Soviet Union’s postwar transformation from an inward-looking terror state focused on industrial production to a superpower that wagered its legitimacy on fulfilling consumer needs at home and establishing a formidable global presence abroad.
By examining Aeroflot as a microcosm of the Soviet system, Harris’s project explains the country’s broader, sustained growth in the postwar era as the result of the state’s successful attempts to create a consumer-oriented, but not consumer-driven economy, propelled by technological development, global expansion, and the legitimizing discourse of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Image: “Time is What I Gain: A Day by Train or an Hour by Plane” (Aeroflot poster, 1961) Source: Gleb Kotov, ed., Istoriia v plakatakh Aeroflota: K 85-letiiu grazhdanskoi aviatsii Rossii—dniu Aeroflota (Moscow: Aeroflot, 2008), 87.
