Welcome! The Department of History at Michigan State University is a large, vibrant intellectual community. The faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, alumni and friends of the Department of History are actively engaged in an enormous range of activities involving research, publishing, teaching, learning, and public outreach. It is my honor to share these with you.
Professor Charles Keith’s book, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, was recently published by University of California Press. Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. By demonstrating how French colonial rule allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures, Keith discovers the ways race defined ecclesiastical and cultural prestige and control of resources and institutional authority.
Phi Alpha Theta Initiation Ceremony
Initiation for the Alpha Phi Chapter was held on October 2, 2012 at 3:00pm. The new initiates were Karl R. Brink, Lucca Daniel Green, Morry Hutton, Rachel Manela, Cole Nedervelt, Jeffry Olenick, James Schwaderer, Nathan Story, and Christen Yoo. Those in attendance introduced themselves, giving a brief description of their areas of expertise as well as their historical aspirations. The members of the faculty that were present included Dr. Vieth, Alpha Phi Chapter Advisor; Dr. Hawthorne, Department Chair; Dr. Dagbovie, Graduate Director; Dr. Tabuteau, Undergraduate Advisor; Dr. Bailey, US History Professor; and the Alpha Phi Chapter President, Aubrey Catrone
The Chapter President served as presiding officer, while new members heard from history’s six Ages: The Prehistoric Age, The Ancient Age, The Medieval Age, The Early Modern Age, The Present Age, and The Future Age. Each Age urged new initiates to further their study of the past (history), exploring what has transpired, what is happening, and what will occur, all before it falls into oblivion.
Immediately following the ceremony, the president cut and distributed a Phi Alpha Theta themed cake and the group posed for pictures.
The afternoon culminated with Dr. Bailey’s engaging speech about the importance of history. Bailey’s talk embodied the true significance of history, in that nothing is as it appears. “What can truly be said about a numbered year?” he asked. Calendars lacked uniformity. Holidays were celebrated differently and on different dates. Wars started and ended. Historians attempt to explain patterns, events, and dates. But, it is all a matter of perception, based on research and evidence. Dr. Bailey argued that students of history never cease to study and learn, but rather continue to interpret and perceive narratives of the past, which is the mission of Phi Alpha Theta.
Pictures: http://history.msu.edu/files/2012/10/PA010089.jpg
http://history.msu.edu/files/2012/10/PA010092.jpg
http://history.msu.edu/files/2012/10/PA010094.jpg
“Health, Wealth, and Knowledge in Buganda, East Africa”
The keynote speaker for the 2012 Africanist Graduate Student Conference will be historian Neil Kodesh from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda, received the 2011 Melville Herskovits award for outstanding Africanist scholarship. Kodesh will deliver his address on the third floor of the International Center at 6:30 pm, on Friday, October 19, 2012. Prior to the address, Kodesh will sit down for an informal discussion with students at 3:00 pm (also on the third floor of the International Center).
MSU alum C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s book, “The Crooked Path to Allotment”, has been published.
http://uncpressblog.com/2012/10/02/interview-c-joseph-genetin-pilawa-on-crooked-paths-to-allotment/
Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive, a Collaborative Project, Receives NEH Funding
The Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive, a new project by Michigan State University in collaboration with Texas Tech University, recently received $264,998 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize 100,000 pages of materials related to the U.S. government’s early efforts to build a stable, non-communist regime in South Vietnam.
From 1955-1962 Michigan State University led the “Vietnam Project,” an experimental and controversial nation-building program in South Vietnam. With the financial support of the U.S. government, MSU faculty carried out a range of programs in administrative organization, rural economic development, and police training intended to strengthen South Vietnam. The MSU Vietnam Group Archive project will digitize and make publicly available a range of documents, reports, personal papers, and images from the MSU Archives & Historical Collections’ extensive but underused collections on the “Vietnam Project.”
This NEH project is highly collaborative both in its design and intended outcomes. Michigan State University and Texas Tech University (Texas Tech) are partnering to create the online repository that will meet the needs of scholars and archivists alike. Texas Tech will share insights and best practices it used to develop the Virtual Vietnam Archive which houses over 3.2 million pages of materials related to all aspects of American involvement in Southeast Asia. Michigan State University, in turn, will provide Texas Tech with copies of digitized “Vietnam Project” resources to augment its Virtual Vietnam Archive. MSU materials fill a gap in the Texas Tech archive, covering a time period predating the majority of its collection, which focuses on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam from 1960s-70s.
This MSU/Texas Tech data exchange will result in one of the most comprehensive repositories of archival material about Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The digital archive will provide worldwide access to materials critical for the study of Vietnam, American foreign relations and nation building, and the study of global transitions from colonial empires to nation-states. The merits of digitizing such materials for historical and humanities research are clear. Shawn McHale, Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History at George Washington University, notes that “The MSU [Vietnam] Project forms part of a long American engagement with nation-building, one that we can see, for example, in Afghanistan today. Scholars and practitioners need to study such cases in order to come to practical conclusions about what practices work and which ones do not.”
Three units at Michigan State University will spearhead the project — the MSU Department of History, MSU Archives & Historical Collections, and MATRIX, the digital humanities research center at MSU. MSU is partnering with Texas Tech’s Vietnam Center and Archive, the base of operations for the Virtual Vietnam Archive. For more information about this project, visit the MSU Vietnam Group Archive planning site.
Karrin Hanshew’s book on West German terrorism, “Terror and Democracy in West Germany”, appeared out this August with Cambridge University Press. The book examines West Germans’ struggle to negotiate the relationship between security and civil liberties in the 1970s, when “urban guerrillas” and the shadow of Nazi dictatorship terrorized the population and resurrected long-standing doubts regarding democracy’s ability to defend itself.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6807080/?site_locale=en_US
Meredith Roman who received her Ph.D. from our department in 2005, has just published Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937 with the University of Nebraska Press. Meredith was part of what she refers to in her preface as the “vibrant Comparative Black History program,” and was supervised by Lewis Siegelbaum. She is now Associate Professor of History at SUNY-Brockport.
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Opposing-Jim-Crow,674990.aspx.
Samuel J. Thomas, “Revenge of the “Clodhoppers”: Portraits of a Political Insurgency”: [A Review Essay on] Worth Robert Miller. Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third Party Movement in the 1890s. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2011. 208 pp. [in] Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 11, July 2012, pp. 454-457.
Book Contract: Fordham University Press, an edited volume of essays tentatively titled: Rediscovering the Community of Faith: The Transformation of American Catholic Lay Identity in the 20th Century. My contribution will be a chapter entitled: “Empowering the People of God: John Cardinal Dearden’s Church of Tomorrow.”
Lisa M. Fine just published in the August 2012 issue of Labor History “Workers and the land in US history: Pointe Mouillée and the downriver Detroit working class in the twentieth century.” This article is part of a special issue of Labor History entitled “Working Space: An Interdisciplinary Conversation about Geographical Consciousness in Labor and Working-Class Scholarship.” Fine co-edited this special issue with Andrew Herod, Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia and it includes works by geographers, labor relations scholars, working-class studies scholars and historians. Fine and Herod also co-wrote an Introduction to the special issue.
View Summer 2012 Online Courses Register for online summer courses Online courses offer students at MSU and elsewhere the opportunity to study important subjects and work toward graduation while off campus in the summer. Our internationally known faculty offer 22 online summer courses.
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