The Summersell Center of the Study of the South and The University of Alabama Department of History will host Professor Jason Morgan Ward of Mississippi State University on Thursday, October 12, 2017, at 5 o’clock in room 30 ten Hoor Hall. Ward is the author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century (2016) and Defending White Democracy: The Making of the Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (2011). Ward’s talk is entitled, “Lifting the Veil: […]
Category: News
UA Students enrolled in a Southern memory course tell the stories of Tuscaloosa County lynching victims.
This article appeared originally on The University of Alabama’s Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility’s website. by Erin Mosley and Jamon Smith Dr. John Giggie describes the eras most Americans refer to as Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties as periods of racial terror for a significant portion of the country’s population. “At a time when the United States was in fact growing and prospering, many African-Americans feared for their lives,” says Giggie, associate professor of history and […]
Professor Matthew Karp Discusses Slaveholders and Foreign Policy
On September 20th, Dr. Matthew Karp of Princeton University delivered a lecture in ten Hoor Hall, entitled “Slave Power: How Southern Slaveholders Mastered U.S. Foreign Policy.” In addition to providing an overview of his book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, Karp discussed how slaveholders in the Antebellum South viewed themselves and their domestic and foreign policy interests. Karp highlighted the anachronisms that frequently color our understanding of the South and Southerners leading up […]
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Howard Jones’s My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness Explores Infamous Vietnam Massacre
This June, Professor Emeritus Howard Jones published My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, a look into one of the most infamous incidents in the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, a group of American troops entered a South Vietnamese hamlet referred to as My Lai, the name of one of the hamlets. Within three hours, they had killed over five hundred unarmed civilians. Though the army attempted to suppress coverage of the event, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson […]
Department Holds Annual Welcome Back Party
On September 17, the History Department hosted its annual Welcome Back Party at the Tuscaloosa Sailing Club. New faculty members Drs. Lucy Kaufman and Matt Lockwood were welcomed to the department and the faculty, staff, and graduate students celebrated the beginning of the school year. Additionally, Dr. Rothman thanked our instructors for their contributions to the department. Thank you to everyone who came, and may the 2017-2018 school year be a good one!
Power & Struggle Conference Begins Friday, September 22
Registration for the 2017 Power & Struggle Conference will begin on Friday, September 22, at 5:00 pm, in Smith Hall. A reception will follow from 5:30-6, supper from 6-7:00, and the keynote address from Dr. Kate Brown, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, will begin at 7:00 pm. Saturday’s events begin at 8:00 am and are detailed in the conference program. For more information, please contact Sarah Craddock (sacraddock@crimson.ua.edu).
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Department Hosts Panel on the American Civil War Online and in the Public Sphere
On September 14, 2017, the Department of History was proud to host “The American Civil War Online and in the Public Sphere,” a panel with Susannah J. Ural of the University of Southern Mississippi, Judith Giesberg of Villanova University, and Anne Rubin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Each presenter spoke about their respective backgrounds in Civil War digital humanities projects. Dr. Ural documented her work with the Beauvoir Soldiers’ Home, a former Confederate veterans’ home in Biloxi, MS, on […]
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Symposium on “Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South,” to be held Friday, October 6, 2017
Register today and plan to attend the one-day symposium, “Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South,” to be held Friday, October 6, 2017 at the Ferguson Center Great Hall on The University of Alabama’s campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Dixie’s Great War symposium, hosted by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, “is considered to be the largest conference in the country on World War I and the South,” says John Giggie, Associate Professor and Director […]
Professor Joshua Rothman Part of Team that Receives $300,000 NEH Grant
This story was published originally in The University of Alabama College of Arts & Sciences’ Desktop News. Can you imagine opening a newspaper and seeing an advertisement for a runaway slave? In today’s world, it’s hard to fathom what it must have been like to live in a time when slavery was accepted. Dr. Joshua Rothman, a professor of history and chair of the Department of History, is on a mission to make understanding that world—and the many things we […]
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Department Hosts Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman for talk on Children in Early North American Colonies
On 31 August 2017, Dr. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, delivered a talk to the History Department entitled, “Double Agents in Early Jamestown: Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole.” Kupperman’s scholarship focuses on the 16th and 17th century Atlantic World, and her presentation focused on the role that children played in the earliest European settlements in the Americas. These children were seen as cross-cultural agents, the fluid identities of youth enabling […]
The American Civil War Online and in the Public Sphere: A Panel Discussion to be held September 14
Three prominent Civil War Historians are coming to the UA campus to discuss their experiences with using digital projects in the classroom and in their research. They will also address the ways in which the Civil War has gained relevance in today’s current political climate. The panel discussion will be held in room 30, ten Hoor Hall, from 5 – 6:30 pm, on Thursday, September 14. Susannah J. Ural is co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War […]
Princeton University Prof Matthew Karp to Speak on “Slave Power: How Southern Slaveholders Mastered U.S. Foreign Policy” and Sign Books, Sept 20
Princeton University Assistant Professor Matthew Karp will present a talk entitled “Slave Power: How Southern Slaveholders Mastered U.S. Foreign Policy” on Wednesday, September 20, 2017, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm, in 30 ten Hoor Hall. Karp is the author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, which was published by Harvard University Press and received the 2017 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize for the best initial book in the field of U.S. foreign relations from the Society […]
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, to speak on “Double Agents in Early Jamestown: Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole,” August 31.
Thousands of people found themselves living in new and strange circumstances as the Atlantic Ocean was transformed from a barrier to a pathway in the sixteenth century. Jamestown, England’s precarious early seventeenth-century colony, was filled with people whose “true” identity was unclear, including Pocahontas, and three English boys, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole. The boys, like Iberian, French, and English boys before them, were left with Pocahontas’s people to learn their language and culture. Pocahontas, like other American […]
Noted Civil War Historian William C. Harris’s Career Began in the Department of History at The University of Alabama
Alumnus William C. Harris, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University, began his fifty-year career as a Civil War historian here in Tuscaloosa, earning both his undergraduate and graduate history degrees from The University of Alabama Department of History. Harris, a native of Mount Meigs, Alabama, earned his BA from Alabama in 1954 and, after serving four years in the United States Air Force, returned to the Capstone for graduate school. Initially drawn to Latin American history, Harris switched to […]
Professor Joshua Rothman’s Washington Post Piece Explores the Historical Background of Attacks on the Press.
The following article by Dr. Joshua Rothman appears in the August 1, 2017 edition of the Washington Post. “The constant churn among President Trump’s communications staff — including the abrupt ouster of Anthony Scaramucci, who days ago promised to bring “an era of a new good feeling” to press relations in his role as communications director — has not obscured the underlying principle driving their media efforts: unremitting hostility toward a free and objective press. “Even newly appointed Chief of […]