Department Alum & WHHA President Stewart McLaurin to Speak March 1

Stewart McLaurin, a 1981 graduate of The University of Alabama Department of History and current president of the White House Historical Association (WHHA), will return to campus on March 1 to speak as part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute‘s (OLLI) lifelong learning lecture series. McLaurin will be in town to discuss the WHHA’s history, current projects, and role in preserving the presidential mansion for future generations. His presentation is entitled, “The White House Historical Association and Five Chapters of […]

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“Early Modern Intersections in the American South” Symposium to be Held February 16

ATTENTION — The University of Alabama will suspend operations at 12:30 PM CST today as a result of impending severe weather. Dr. Ethridge’s plenary address will be rescheduled. Please join us for the opening session of “Early Modern Intersections in the American South,” a symposium hosted by A&S in conjunction with the Folger Institute, on February 16, in the Camellia Room in Gorgas Library. Dr. Robbie Ethridge, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi, will give the plenary address, […]

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Dr. David Thomson to Discuss How Treasury Officials Financed the Union War Effort

ATTENTION — The University of Alabama will suspend operations at 12:30 PM CST today as a result of impending severe weather. Dr. Thomson’s address will be moved to Friday, February 17, at Noon, in the Summersell Room. Dr. David Thomson, associate professor of history and chair of the department of history at Sacred Heart University, will present a talk based on his book, Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union, on Thursday, February […]

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Summersell Center Now Accepting Short-Term Research Fellowship Applications

To support the study of southern history and promote the use of the manuscript collections housed at The University of Alabama, the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South will offer a total of eight research fellowships in the amount of $750 each for the 2023-2024 academic year. Eligible researchers will have projects that entail work to be conducted in southern history or southern studies at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, the A.S. Williams III Americana […]

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Summersell Center Accepting Deep South Book Prize Nominations

The Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South and the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama are pleased to announce that they are receiving nominations for the 2024 Summersell Deep South Book Prize for the best book on the history of the American South. The author of the prizewinning book will be awarded a cash prize and be invited to give an address and meet with faculty and students at The […]

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Summersell Center Pushes Forward with Numerous Groundbreaking Initiatives

The Frances J. Summersell Center for the Study of the South’s (SCSS) fall 2022 semester marked new developments in its southern queer history project. Dr. John Giggie and Vivian Malone Fellow and doctoral student Isabella Garrison co-instructed the Southern Queer History course, the only course of its kind in the SEC dedicated to southern queer history research. Thirty undergraduates in the course worked with the Summersell Scholars, all returning undergraduate and graduate students, as they met with community leaders to […]

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Undergraduate Historical Society Hosts Conference

On April 2, 2022, the Undergraduate Historical Society hosted its third annual Capstone Research Symposium. The conference, organized and led exclusively by our department’s undergraduate researchers and leaders, featured a full day of research presentations–two panels, with nine papers in all. Topics ranged from slavery and Sherman’s “march to the sea” to the travels of Marco Polo, Westernization in Japan, and criminality in early modern London. Dr. Lucy Kaufman, one of the faculty mentors for the conference, described it as […]

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Alumna Returns to Discuss Book That Began as Undergraduate Research Seminar Project

Dr. Isabela Morales (UA Class of 2012) returned to campus September 29-30 to talk about her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (OUP, 2022). Speaking to a group of fifty undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, Dr. Morales explained how her research began in Dr. Jenny Shaw’s American Slavery Research Seminar (now HY497) during the Fall 2011 semester. The subject of that seminar was “Slavery in the Americas” and following a visit to the W.S. […]

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Department Host Inaugural Session of Southern Conversations

Last April, students and faculty gathered for the inaugural session of Southern Conversations, a series of informal discussions about southern history and historical methodology that is guided by student questions and interests. The first Conversation’s theme, “Gender Matters,” covered the past, present, and future of gender analysis in southern historical scholarship. Drs. Lesley Gordon, John Giggie, and Julia Brock each gave a short introduction of how gender analysis and their own gendered experiences in academia have shaped their academic careers […]

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Recent Graduate Placements, Awards, Service, & Publications

Fellowships & Service   Andrew Deaton – Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in the Czech Republic and is living in Prague now doing dissertation research. David Ferrara – Awarded a fellowship to work with the department’s Dr. Julia Brock, in partnership with the National Park Service, researching the history of national park lands on the Gulf Coast. Daniel Leon – Represents the department’s graduate students in the university’s Graduate Student Association. Recent Graduate Job Placements   Ashley Tickle Odebiyi, PhD (2022) […]

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Graduate Students Visit Pickensville Rosenwald School Museum

Dr. Julia Brock and graduate students rounded out the Spring 2022 semester with a trip to the Pickensville Rosenwald School Museum, in Pickens County, Alabama. The Rosenwald School program began in the early 1900s as a partnership between the Tuskegee Institute’s Booker T. Washington and Samuel Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, to provide schools for rural African Americans. Museum Board members, who are also alumni from Pickens County Rosenwald schools, gave a presentation on their work restoring […]

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Research Faculty Activity

Associate Professor Margaret Abruzzo is writing a book about changing conceptions of sin and wrongdoing—and what it meant to be a “good person”—in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American moral thought. Professor John Beeler devoted his spring sabbatical semester to working on a book manuscript examining the lives of Effie and Alexander Milne, two members of the Scottish gentry during the Victorian era. Over the summer he spent two months in Great Britain conducting research for another book project, this one on […]

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Recent Publications

Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900 –1945 (Brill, 2022). Assistant Professor Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China. Based on untapped archives and diaries, Dr. Luo uncovers people’s strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the impact of daily experiences on […]

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Dr. Kari Frederickson’s Deep South Dynasty Wins Michael V.R. Thomason Award

Dr. Kari Frederickson’s recent publication, Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 2022), was named the winner of the 2022 Michael V. R. Thomason Award for the Best Book in the History of the Gulf South by the Gulf South Historical Association. The award committee praised the book as “a gripping study of the New South that deftly weaves the political, economic, and cultural story of the region with the personal triumphs and travails of its […]

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Department Sponsors Symposium on Alabama Politics

On October 3, 2022, the Department sponsored “Rethinking Alabama Politics from the Civil War to the Present.” Over 100 students, faculty, and community members attended the day-long symposium that brought together today’s leading historians on Alabama history for a reappraisal of post-Civil-War era Alabama history through the lenses of diverse elements such as interracial relationships, immigration, Lost Cause mythology, and organized protest. Participants included Auburn University’s Dr. Jennifer Brooks and Dr. Steven Brown; Auburn University at Montgomery’s Dr. Ben Severance; […]

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