The Department of History came out for Get on Board Day, talking to prospective new majors, recruiting for our relaunched History Club, and playing our popular historical trivia game. We had a wonderful time meeting new and returning students, and we hope to see you all at our Welcome Back Party on September 4, from 4-6pm, in 252 ten Hoor!
Category: News
Dr. John David Smith to Speak Sept. 17
Join us to hear Dr. John David Smith’s lecture “The Making and Meaning of Dear Delia: The Civil War Letters of Captain Henry F. Young, Seventh Wisconsin Infantry.” Henry Young, an officer in the famed Iron Brigade, wrote 155 letters home during the Civil War, offering insights and details of military service that enable readers to witness the war through his eyes. The correspondence highlights the candid perspective of a young officer from America’s western heartland who was fiercely determined […]
UA Faculty and Students Present at University of Montevallo’s Civic Institute
Last week our faculty and students participated in the annual David Mathews Center for Civic Life‘s Civic Institute in Montevallo. The panel, organized by Dr. John Giggie and titled “Geographical Imaginations: The Role of Recuperative Storytelling in Southern History and Memory,” explored the transformative potential in little-known, marginalized, and difficult pasts. Panel participants included two UA History majors: Margaret Lawson, who discussed her work on “History of Us,” a course that trains Central High School students to become producers of history as they […]
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Department Alum Marcus Witcher Featured on WaPo’s “Made By History.”
UA Department of History Alum Marcus Witcher, currently a scholar in residence with the department of history and the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics at the University of Central Arkansas, was featured recently in the Washington Post‘s “Made By History” series. His piece, entitled “Why Joe Biden had to work with segregationists,” explores the extent of political power held by segregationist senators into the early 1980s, forcing even the most left-leaning Democratic politicians to work with them. From Witcher’s […]
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Doctoral Candidate Wins Graduate Council Writing Fellowship
Doctoral Candidate Melissa Young has won a special Graduate Council Writing Fellowship for the summer and fall terms. Funded by UA’s Graduate School, the competitive award is designed to allow top doctoral students to devote themselves full-time to completing their dissertations and includes release time, a summer stipend, and an enhanced fall stipend (along with a full tuition scholarship and health insurance). Young is completing her dissertation on the emergence of the Jewish community in Birmingham after the Civil War. […]
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Alum Lawrence Kreiser Publishes “Marketing the Blue and Gray.”
Lawrence Kreiser, Jr., a doctoral alum of The University of Alabama Department of History and Associate Professor of History/Chair of Social Sciences at Stillman College, recently published his fourth book, Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War. From the publisher: “Marketing the Blue and Gray analyzes newspaper advertising during the American Civil War. Newspapers circulated widely between 1861 and 1865, and merchants took full advantage of this readership. They marketed everything from war bonds to […]
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UA Doctoral Alum Highlights “Peanuts” Role in D-Day Remembrance
Department doctoral alum Blake Scott Ball, currently an assistant professor of history at Huntingdon College, recently published an opinion piece in the Washington Post. Ball recounts the role that Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip played in shaping the popular remembrance of the D-Day Invasion. From the June 6, 2019 edition of the Washington Post. “How Snoopy helped us remember D-Day” “Snoopy, who first appeared in the “Peanuts” comic strip in 1950, has been everywhere at this point: summer camp, college, […]
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Summersell Center Receives Grant to Develop Queer History Website
Dr. John Giggie and the Summersell Center were recently chosen to receive a 2019 Teaching Grant from The University of Alabama College of Arts & Sciences to develop Queer Alabama, the digital humanities website that came out of the course “Invisible Histories,” that was taught this spring. It will fund the work of student Isabella Garrison as she refines and expands the website this summer. The site showcases the research done by students documenting the queer community at The University […]
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Summersell Students Launch Queer Alabama Site
Students in Director of the Summersell Center Dr. John Giggie’s Spring 2019 course Invisible Histories: Queer History South have unveiled the website for their research, Queer Alabama. The website features each of the students’ research projects, all of which analyze the queer community’s impact on The University of Alabama campus and its broader Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Southeastern contexts. Individual projects include the Cartography of Southern Queerness, which looks at maps created by the group to see how their use of coded language changed […]
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Dan Vivian Talks Public History with Students
Dr. Dan Vivian, Director of Historic Preservation at the University of Kentucky, visited campus this spring to deliver a talk, “The Future of Public History,” and host a lunch-and-learn event. In these talks, he discussed the results of a multi-year study on public history employment from the Joint Task Force on Public History Education and Employment. Vivian also spoke with our students about the growing world of Public History, a field that seeks to create historical narratives that are accessible […]
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Department Hosts Documentary Crew to Discuss Public History and the Media
Earlier this semester, Drs. John Giggie and Julia Brock hosted the documentary crew Phil Bertelsen and Rachel Dretzin for a free lunch and discussion on their recent film, Hope and Fury: MLK, the Movement and the Media. Students discussed the project and Bertelsen’s and Dretzin’s respective career paths, as well as how they too could join the film and media world as historians. Documentary film work is another facet of the growing world of public history, a field which we in […]
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Associate Dean Lisa Lindquist-Dorr Celebrates New Book
Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences Dr. Lisa Lindquist-Dorr celebrated the publication of her latest book, A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South during Prohibition. Dorr analyzes the complex smuggling network connecting Great Britain and Europe to Cuba via the United States between 1920 through the end of Prohibition, a tangled web that transported both distilled spirits and human cargo — undocumented immigrants. The Department recognized the publication with a special […]
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Dr. Tera Hunter Visits Campus for Summersell Book Prize
This past semester, Dr. Tera Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, visited campus to receive the Fourth Biennial Deep South Book Prize from the Summersell Center for the Study of the South for her book Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). Hunter presented a talk on her book and spoke with students at a luncheon. In her book, […]
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Summersell Center and Civil Rights History Task Force Publish Civil Rights Trail Book
Director of the Frances J. Summersell Center for the Study of the South , Dr. John Giggie, working with students from his class on Religion and Civil Rights at The University of Alabama and members of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History Task Force, recently published a 37-page Civil Rights History Trail guide for the city of Tuscaloosa. Based partly on student research, the pamphlet chronicles the history of key events, institutions, and individuals associated with the local history of the movement. In […]
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History Students Excel at URSCA
The College of Arts and Sciences held its 16th annual A&S Summit for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (URSCA). Five of our students submitted research projects in History, and an additional two of our students worked in the related field of Classics. In the Humanities and Fine Arts Oral Presentations session, Molly Buffington, triple major in History, German, and Latin, presented A War of Words: The Lutheran-Calvinist Debate on Acts 3:21 and the Eucharist. Her work, a project she […]