Department News
Our Faculty
[September 2009]Presidential Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been dubbed “America’s new past master,” recently published his 900-page The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009). Brinkley asked John Reiger to proofread the first nine chapters and thanked him on Brian Lamb’s Q&A in several airings of C-SPAN2, the first in April and the most recent in August. Brinkley noted on C-SPAN that “Professor John Reiger … is the [George Bird] Grinnell scholar at Ohio University-Chillicothe. He proofread my chapters on Grinnell.”
Now that the book has finally appeared, Brinkley refers to “Professor John Reiger of Ohio University-Chillicothe, the leading scholar on George Bird Grinnell,” as one of his “guardian angels,” who “carefully read chapters and offered their expertise” (pp. 898-899).
In addition to being cited in the credits of the first two episodes of Ken Burns' new television documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, John Reiger has had his two books, The Passing of the Great West and American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, listed in the short "Selected Bibliography" of the "companion volume" that only includes "the principal sources used in this book and film series."
Also, on September 27th, on PBS, the first two-hour segment will air of Ken Burns’ six-night documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” Reiger worked as a paid consultant on the project, providing both rare photographs and documentation that has been incorporated into the narrative.
[October 2008]New books by OU History Faculty in 2008:
Dantas, Mariana. Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth Century Americas, New York: Palgrave, 2008. Series: The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World.
Goda, Norman J.W. El oscuro mundo de Spandau: Los criminales nazis, los aliados, y la union sovietica. Madrid: Editorial Critica, 2008. Translation of Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (Cambridge 2007).
Jellison, Katherine. It's Our Day: America's Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Series: Culture America.
Mattson, Kevin. Rebels All: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Series: Ideas in Action.
[September 2008] Alonzo Hamby, Emeritus Professor of History, is the author Beyond the New Deal, listed as one of the best books about presidential administrations according to a story in the 5 September 2008 Wall Street Journal.
[May 2007] Benita Blessing, Assistant Professor of History, received a Distinguished Service Award from the Ohio University Office of Nationally Competitive Awards.
[November 2006] Nicholas Creary, Assistant Professor of History, received a Research Challenge Grant to conduct research in Belize for a project that compares four literary movements that occurred during the 1920s and 1930s including the Harlem Renaissance in the U.S., Claridade in Cape Verde, the New African Movement in South Africa, and the Afro-Creole Belizean Nationalist Movement in Belize.
[September 2006] John Brobst, Associate Professor of History, was invited to participate in a conference on "A Strained Partnership: European-American Relations and the Middle East from Suez to Iraq" in Zürich, Switzerland. The conference, which brought together academic specialists and policy practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic, was hosted by the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at Switzerland's distinguished Federal Institute of Technology.
[May 2006] Chester Pach has been named Ohio University Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member for 2005-2006. This prestigious honor is awarded competitively each year by the Graduate Student Senate. As part of the award, Professor Pach will give the commencement address at the 2006 Graduate Commencement.
Our Graduate Students
[November 2007] Jack Epstein [PhD student] has received two grants from presidential libraries to further his research. He received a research travel grant from the Gerald Ford Foundation to work on his doctoral dissertation. This highly competitive grant was award to only a few scholars, many of them already established historians. Epstein also received a Moss Grant from the Lyndon Johnson Library/Foundation to also help in his research.
[May 2007] Alex Ferrell [MA 2001] has been accepted into the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas, where he also received a James Michener Fellowship.
[May 2007] Thomas Bruscino [PhD 2005] is now Assistant Professor in the Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
[October 2006] Three Ohio University PhDs gave presentations at a US Department of State/George Washington University conference. These included Adam Cathcart, Qiang Zhai and Scott Kaufman. The topic of the conference was "Transforming the Cold War: The United States and China, 1969-1980".
[October 2006] Paul Chatsko [Ph.D 2002] has been named the Director of the International Relations program at the University of Calgary. He also appeared on Canadian Business Television to discuss at length the future of Alberta’s oil sands. The oil sands are the subject of Paul’s prize winning book, Developing Alberta's Oil Sands: From Karl Clark to Kyoto (University of Calgary press, 2004).
[August 2006] Philippe Girard [PhD 2002] has recently published his second book, Paradise Lost: Haiti's Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot. He teaches at McNeese State University.
[May 2006] Richard Garlitz has been named TA of the Year by the Graduate Student Senate. In addition to teaching World History, he also filled in for Professor Quinn during Winter Quarter.
[May 2006] Julie Mancine [MA 2006] has received a Hagley Fellowship from University of Delaware's "Hagley Program in History of Technology and Industrialization," affiliated with the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. More details.
[April 2006] Robert Davis has been announced as the winner of the John F. Cady Fellowship for 2006-07. He was ranked first among the five winners of this year's Graduate Fellowships awarded by the Graduate Council. This is the third year in a row that a history doctoral student was awarded one of these highly competitive fellowships. James Waite won the Cady Fellowship for 2004-05, and Arsen Djatej won it for 2005-06. John Cady was a faculty member in the History Department in the 1950s and 1960s.
Our Undergraduate Students
[October 2008] Katie Flynn ('08) has won the Nels Andrew Cleven Prize in the 2008 Phi Alpha Theta National Paper Competition. The winning paper, "Female Voices from the French Resistance: Women's Exploitation of Gender Stereotypes, 1940-1945," will be published in The Historian sometime in the near future.
[January 2008]Two Ohio University history majors presented papers in the Phi Alpha Theta National Convention, held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, earlier this January. Peter Locascio’s paper, "The Break: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson," examines political relationships during the early Republic through a study of the Adams-Jefferson friendship. Melissa Luthman's paper, "Gender and Gender Roles in Cherokee and Iroquois Society, 1600-1800," explores how Christian missionaries and American legal practices after the Revolution affected gender roles within those Native American communities. “Encouraging and helping students to present their research outside of OU not only allows them the opportunity to fully experience the historian's profession,” says history undergraduate director, Kevin Uhalde, “but also shows the talents and professionalism of our students to a broader audience."
[January 2008] Harrison Crumrine wrote a paper for his 301J class last year on "The Oxford Martyrs and the English Protestant Movement, 1553-1558." That paper has been awarded the Lynn Turner Prize by Phi Alpha Theta (for best undergraduate paper in the country). In addition to the $300 prize money, the paper has been accepted for publication in The Historian.
[September 2007] Janice Frisch ('07) has received the Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award--one of only fifty students to receive this new award from Phi Kappa Phi. She received $500, which she will use during her graduate studies at Indiana University.
