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Posts by John Ratliff

Department Continues Internship Program with White House Historical Association

The department is continuing its partnership with the White House Historical Association (WHHA) on an annual internship for UA history majors. The internship program was started by WHHA president and UA alumnus Stewart McLaurin (BA, 1981) as way of giving back to his alma mater. Though Malcolm Cammeron (MA, 2019) was the first WHHA intern from UA, Jessica Brodt holds the distinction of being the first official intern from the program. Most recently, doctoral student Kristofer Roberts was selected for […]

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Graduate History Association Modifies Power & Struggle Conference

The GHA looks forward to a second paper contest. Last year’s contest, held in lieu of a face-to-face event, received 25 submissions from the US and abroad. Winners were selected in four categories: Overall Paper, Paper in Southern History, Paper in Power & Struggle (conference theme), and Paper by a Phi Alpha Theta member. This year’s contest seeks to continue that success, keeping Power & Struggle on student radars. The GHA hopes that the international interest continues when they resume […]

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Blake Scott Ball (PhD, 2017) Publishes Charlie Brown’s America

Department of History PhD alumnus Blake Scott Ball has crafted an exceptional narrative of Cold War-era America through an unlikely subject: Charlie Brown. In Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts, Dr. Ball looks into the emotional journey taken by the Peanuts comic from the Cold War to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Ball finds that Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of […]

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Faculty Updates

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. John Beeler spent academic year 2020-21 working on two of several book projects currently in hand, chiefly a social and cultural study of the Scots professional and gentry classes in the nineteenth century focused on Euphemia (“Effie”) Milne and her husband Alexander. Julia Brock has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts […]

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Dr. Sharony Green Awarded Newberry Fellowship to Study Zora Neale Hurston

Complicated power exchanges have been a focal point of interest to Dr. Sharony Green for quite some time. After researching this topic with antebellum white and African Americans as well as people of African descent on the Florida peninsula since the colonial era in mind, Dr. Green has focused on Alabama native, author, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras. Recent headlines about the migrant crisis at the southern border prompted this move. Down on her luck in the late […]

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Faculty Publications

Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books, 2021) For the past seven years Dr. Joshua D. Rothman, chair of the Department of History, combed archives across the country, working to craft an illuminating narrative of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, three business partners who ran the largest slave-trading operation in US history. Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books, 2021) debunks the […]

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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 $2500 cash prize and be invited to give an address and meet with faculty and students at […]

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Dr. Jenny Shaw Wins William & Mary Quarterly’s Lester J. Cappon Award

Associate Professor Jenny Shaw has been named the winner of the 2020 Lester J. Cappon Award, which is given annually to the author of the best article published in the William & Mary Quarterly. Shaw’s award was in recognition of her April 2020 WMQ article, “‘In the Name of the Mother’: The Story of Susannah Mingo, A Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic.” The article explores the life and times of an enslaved laborer on the island of […]

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Dr. Julia Brock Awarded NEA Grant

Dr. Julia Brock seeks to tell stories of the past in a new way in order to bring history to a broader audience. Through a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Our Town Program,” Dr. Brock will explore Tuscaloosa history in new and exciting ways. The Our Town Program is a national creative placemaking grant program that supports projects combining art and culture to strengthen communities and advance social outcomes. The program functions to strengthen not only […]

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Dr. Teresa Cribelli Organizes “Dangerous Landscapes” Exhibit

In September 2021, the History Department’s Dr. Teresa Cribelli worked with Allison Grant from the Department of Art and Art History to present a new photographic exhibition, entitled “Dangerous Landscapes.” Dr. Cribelli’s contributions offer a meditation on modern industry and nature. The exhibit juxtaposed 19th century views of industrialization and progress with present-day industrial sites in West Alabama, where toxic pollution and climate change pose increasingly dangerous environmental threats. In this way viewers were invited to contemplate the history of […]

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Dr. Lawrence Cappello wins awards for teaching and advising

Congratulations to Dr. Lawrence Cappello, who garnered two major awards in 2021. He has won both the 2021 Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award and the 2021 John L. Blackburn Advisor of the Year Award. Dr. Cappello joined the faculty in 2018 as a specialist in legal history. His research focuses on the history of privacy and he teaches courses in American civilization, American legal history, constitutional law, and privacy law. He is also the director of the department’s Legal History […]

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Supporting the Department

The extent and quality of the activities sponsored by the Department of History depends in large measure on our available funds and the generous support of donors. Endowments or significant targeted donations will enable us to increase our national visibility, expand our production of nationally-recognized scholarship, and to grow History programming and events. Naming opportunities are possible in conjunction with such gifts. For more information about any of the opportunities to support The University of Alabama Department of History, please […]

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Thank You to Our Patrons and the Friends of History

Dr. Bianca L. AdairMr. and Mrs. Stephen R. AveraThe Honorable Quentin Q. Brown Jr.Mr. George B. ChildressDr. Angela J. CooleyDr. Lesley J. GordonDr. Jonathon W. HooksMs. Samaria JohnsonDr. Kari A. FredericksonDr. Michael J. MendleDr. Robert F. OlinMr. Kevin OwsleyMrs. Dawn OwsleyMr. and Mrs. George Swindle Mr. William Garnett (Bill) AndersonDr. Edwin C. BridgesMr. Paul W. Bryant,  Jr.Mr. Tranum FitzpatrickMr. Olin B. KingDr. F. David MathewsMr. Chris McIlwainDr. Donald R. NobleMr. John T. Oliver, Jr.Dr. Cathy RandallMr. Cleophus Thomas, Jr.Dr. Earl […]

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1521-2021: 500th Anniversary of the Fall of the Aztec Empire

Join us on November 17 at 5 PM in the Camellia Room, Gorgas Library as well commemorate the Quincentennial of the fall of the Aztec Empire. Special guests Dr. Bradley Benton, North Dakota State University and Dr. Frances Ramos, University of South Florida, Tampa will join our own Drs. Juan José Ponce Vázquez and Steven Bunker for analysis and discussion of this momentous event. For more information, please contact Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez or Dr. Steven Bunker.

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