Jay Lockenour just published his essay "Black and White Memories of War: Victimization and Violence in West German War Films of the 1950s" in the Jan 2012 issue of The Journal of Military History.
David Waldstreicher's October 2011 essay "Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery" in the William & Mary Quarterly is discussed in a recent issue of The Wilson Quarterly.
Seth Bruggeman's new edited collection, Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory is coming out this summer with the U Mass Press.
Beth Bailey is enjoying working with US history colleagues in other countries. She’s serving on the International Committee of the Organization of American Historians and working, with Richard Immerman, on Bryant Simon’s initiative to internationalize the study of US history at Temple. This work offers the benefit of lots of travel (75,000 air-miles last year!); she recently gave a paper at the International Symposium on the 1960s in Tokyo and another in the US History Seminar at Clare College, Oxford. This spring brings a working-group meeting at the International Institution of Social History in Amsterdam and a few weeks as a visiting scholar at the University of Paris-Diderot. And in the fall, the Australian Chief of Army’s conference in Canberra and a visit to the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut. Her most recent book was America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard University Press, 2009), and recently published or forthcoming articles include “A Political History of the US Army” (The Forum), “Patsy Cline and the Problem of Respectability” (Sweet Dreams: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline), and “The Vexed History of Children and Sex” (The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World). She is currently working on an article about how the US Army tried to manage racial tensions during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Lila Corwin Berman is currently writing a book called “Jewish Urban Journeys Through an American City and Beyond.” The book traces Jews’ movement away from cities in the post-World War II era. An article based upon some of her research into Jewish urban politics will appear in the Journal of American History. As director of the Feinstein Center, Berman has organized a two-year series of programs on “Jews and the American City” and has collaborated on several events with the National Museum of American Jewish History and the Gershman Y, both in Philadelphia.
Seth C. Bruggeman, assistant professor and public history coordinator, delivered the keynote address at this year’s annual meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Association and spoke on global collaboration in American Studies at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association. He recently authored a report for the National Park Service on the state of history making at the Boston National Historical Park and directed a study of the process by which Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum has sought a new owner for its historic ship, the USS Olympia. Forthcoming publications include “The New Labor History Museum: A Status Report” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas; “Reforming the Carceral Past: Eastern State Penitentiary and the Challenge of 21st-Century Prison Museums” in Radical History Review; and an edited volume titled Born in the USA: Birth and Commemoration in American Public Memory due out in July 2012 from the University of Massachusetts Press’s Public History in Historical Perspective series. Bruggeman’s current book project, Ships in Bottles, examines the history of American maritime museums.
Bettye Collier-Thomas is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, where she is working on a new book project “ ‘In Politics to Stay’: A History of African American Women and Politics”. She received the 2011 Darlene Clark Hine Prize for Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (Knopf 2010). The award is given annually by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book in African American women's and gender history. Collier-Thomas was chosen by Cabrini College as the 2011 Jolyon Pitt Girard Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence. The Jolyon Pitt Girard Scholar-in-Residence was established in honor of Dr. Jolyon P. Girard, who taught history and political science at Cabrini College for over 30 years. The Scholar-in-Residence allows Cabrini to bring historians and scholars to campus who have earned recognition for outstanding scholarship, and who share Girard’s passion for teaching. She delivered the annual Girard Lecture on September 29 in the historic Woodcrest Mansion, which was filled with a wide array of individuals including faculty, students, alumni, photographers, Cabrini College President Marie Angelella George, and the board of trustees.
Travis Glasson's book, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World was published in October 2011 by Oxford University Press. It presents a new evaluation of the trans-Atlantic efforts of members of the Church of England to convert enslaved people in places including New York, South Carolina, Barbados, and Cape Coast in modern Ghana. It also reconsiders this missionary movement's long and complicated relationship to wider pro- and antislavery debates in the British Empire and America. Glasson has also recently become the national treasurer of the North American Conference on British Studies, a scholarly organization dedicated to facilitating and encouraging the study of Great Britain and its empire.
Peter Gran edited and helped translate from the Arabic a new book titled The large landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt 1837-1952) and in early 2012 he will travel to Egypt as the recipient of the Bayard Dodge Distinguished Scholar Award.
Richard Immerman most recent book, Empire for Liberty: A History of U.S. Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz, came out with Princeton in 2010. He his currently completing The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA, which is under contract with Wiley-Blackwell. In connection with this research, in 2011 he published “Transforming Analysis: The Intelligence Community’s Best Kept Secret, in Intelligence and National Security,” and “The Politics of Intelligence Reform,” a paper he presented in November 2011 at the Miller Center for Public Policy, will be one of the chapters in a forthcoming volume on the politics of major policy reform. Dr. Immerman also continues to study and teach grand strategy; last year he spoke on “Educating Grand Strategists” at the National Defense University’s Symposium, “Forging an American Grand Strategy: Securing a Path Through a Complex Future.” Finally, in spring 2012 The Oxford Handbook on the Cold War, which he co-edited with Petra Goedde, will go to press. Dr. Immerman remains the chair of the Historical Advisory Committee to the Department of State as well as Marvin Wachman Director of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy.
Susan E. Klepp's book, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Award for the best book in women's or gender history by the American Historical Association in 2011. Her article, "Benjamin Franklin and Women," was published in A Companion to Benjamin Franklin, ed. David Waldstreicher (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 237-251. She was elected chair of the Executive Committee of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and continues as editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, now housed at Temple University. She has given invited lectures at Ohio State University, Colonial Williamsburg, New Sweden Conference, Pennsylvania Hospital and Society of Early Americanists in 2011.
Ken Kusmer recently co-edited a 550-page collection of original essays, African American Urban History since World War II (University of Chicago Press) that sets out a research agenda for the next generation of scholars working on this subject. Since the publication of this volume he has returned to work on media, culture and politics in America since 1965. He has completed a large article for submission to a journal, “Hollywood Liberalism: Exploring a Historical Myth.” An earlier version of this essay was presented as a lecture at the University of Genoa, Italy.
He was interviewed for two-hours about his book Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History by Norwegian documentary filmmaker Roger Kvarsvik, for use in a forthcoming documentary on homelessness in the U.S., past and present. In Spring, 2012 he expects again to lecture in Genoa and have been invited to take part in the media studies program at the University of Florence.
Jay Lockenour has two forthcoming publications: Black and White Memories of War: Victimization and Violence in West German War Films of the 1950s,” which will appear in the Journal of Military History in January 2012 and "The Demilitarization of Germany, 1945-2010," for an anthology being assembled by Peter Stearns called Demilitarization in Contemporary World History, (University of Illinois Press). Lockenour and Temple Ph.D. Bobby Wintermute (Queen’s College) recently founded New Books in Military History, a podcast that is part of the New Books Network. The service is intended to guide readers to new and interesting books and features interviews with top scholars in the field.
In November 2011 Sophie Quinn-Judge was an invited participant in a workshop on “Vietnamese Revolutions,” organized by the History Department at Berkeley, University of California. In early 2012 she will be visiting Hanoi for a working visit on behalf of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society. She has also been invited to give a lecture to students and professors of the Faculty of Political Science at Vietnam National University on Ho Chi Minh Thought. Finally, she has published in Southeast Asia Research (a SOAS journal) an article titled, “Ideological Influences on the Revolutionary High Tide: The Comintern, Class War and Peasants.”
Francis Ryan recently presented two conference papers, one on "Municipal Workers and Philadelphia's Urban Reform Movement, 1947-1952" at the Pennsylvania Historical Association conference in Johnstown, Pa., and "Philadelphia Will Do: W.C. Fields and the Denigration of Philadelphia in the Popular Imagination" at the 2011 Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Association meeting in Philadelphia. His first book, AFSCME's Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century was released in paperback from Temple University Press in November 2011.
Bryant Simon has published three articles: “Learning about America and about Buying from Starbucks,” Social Education 74 (May/June 2011), 144-47; “’A Down Brother’: Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, the Legacy of Black Capitalism, and the Quest for Retail Justice in Post-Riot Los Angeles,” Boom: A Journal of California (Summer 2011), 43-58; and “Race Doesn’t Matter, Race Matters: Starbucks, Consumption, and the Appeal of the Performance of Colorblindness,” Du Bois Review (September 2010), 1-22. In addition, he presented a conference paper at the American Studies Association conference, chaired two conference sessions, and gave more than a dozen invited talks on Starbucks, Atlantic City, and the enduring appeal of Tom Joad to university and community audiences around the US and the world. His research was also featured in a number of publications including the New Yorker, Philadelphia Magazine, and the Washington Post, and he was quoted in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and on WHYY and numerous other local and regional media outlets. Finally, he appeared in a documentary on HBO about Atlantic City and the show Boardwalk Empire. In June, 2012, Dr. Simon will serve as the inaugural Organization of American Historians professor in residence at the University of Tubingen in Germany.
Howard Spodek has published two books this year, including the translation from Gujarati to English of the Autobiography of Indulal Yagnik (New Delhi: Manohar Books, 2011), (with Devavrat Pathak and John Wood). Yagnik tells his story of a rebel with many causes. Yagnik is important partly because the people he rebelled against were some of the most important political and cultural leaders in modern India, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and Morarji Desai. Yagnik knew all of them well, so his struggles shed very significant light on each of them, as well as revealing his own troubled, but fascinating, character. In addition, Dr. Spodek has published Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). The work reveals the significance of India's seventh largest city as the home of Mahatma Gandhi (1915-30); the incubator of modern industries and Westernizing cultural and educational institutions (especially in the 1960s); and the unfortunate killing-fields of some of India's worst-ever riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially in 2002, when about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims) were killed in the city. Dr. Spodek also received a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 2011-12 and is currently in Ahmedabad studying processes of city planning there.
While continuing to work on her forthcoming book on the Attica Uprising of 1971 and its legacy for Pantheon Books, Heather Ann Thompson recently published the following articles: "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in Postwar American History" (Journal of American History, December 2010); "Downsizing the Carceral State: The Policy Implications of Prisoner Guard Unions" (Criminology and Public Policy, August, 2011); "Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards (Labor: Working Class Studies of the Americas, Fall, 2011); and "Criminalizing Kids: The Overlooked Reason for Failing Schools." (Dissent, October, 2011). In September 2011, Thompson also published an oped entitled “The Lingering Injustice of Attica” in the New York Times and she spent the fall working award-winning filmmaker Chris Christopher’s forthcoming documentary on Attica due out this summer. This December the series that Thompson edits at UNC Press with Rhonda Y. Williams, Justice, Power, and Politics, is launching a new web site, the series that Thompson edits at Routledge, American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century, is publishing its first three books, and this
Spring/Summer Thompson will be speaking at a number of symposia, conferences, and institutions including at Queens University in Belfast, University of Sussex in Brighton, UK., Columbia University, CUNY, the New School, and at the International Institute of Social History/International Institute voor Sociale Gescheidenis (IISG ), Amsterdam. Thompson has also been invited to be a Havens Center Visiting Scholar at University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 2012-2013 academic year.
Teshale Tibebu has signed a book contract with the University of Rochester Press to publish my completed book manuscript entitled, Black Modernity: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Africa, and the Racial Nationalist Imagination. The title of the book as it appears on the contract is, Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination. It is my fourth book. In January 2011 my book, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History was published by Syracuse University Press.
During the past year, Gregory J. W. Urwin, professor of history, published his ninth book, Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity in 1941-1945, with Naval Institute Press. He is now researching a new book tentatively titled “When Freedom Wore a Red Coat: A Social History of Cornwallis’ 1781 Virginia Campaign.” He made significant progress on that project during his sabbatical in the fall 2011 semester as the first Earhart Foundation Fellow on American History at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, and as the Tyree-Lamb Fellow at the Society of the Cincinnati Library in Anderson House, Washington, D.C. In recent months, Urwin delivered lectures at the U.S. Military Academy, National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Fort Ticonderoga, Michigan War Studies Group, William L. Clements Library, Monroe County History Museum (Monroe, MI), Anderson House, Custer Memorial Association (New Rumley, OH), Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, and the 2011 International Conference on World War II. Urwin also assumed the duties of vice president of the Society for Military History – with 2,600 members the world’s largest professional organization devoted to the study of military history – last April. He currently has essays in press on Abraham Lincoln as a war leader and the Continental light dragoons during the American War of Independence for anthologies due out soon from Fordham University Press and Westholme Publishing, respectively.
In addition to beginning a term as co-book review editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, David Waldstreicher edited A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Blackwell) and published articles on early antislavery in Pennsylvania and on Phillis Wheatley, the subject of his new book project. An essay he co-wrote with Staughton Lynd, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward An Economic Interpretation of American Independence," was the subject of a forum in the William and Mary Quarterly in October. David was also elected to the Nominating Board of the Organization of American Historians.
In recent months, David Watt has delivered papers at the American Academy of Religion and the American Historical Association. Along with Tracy Fessenden and Laura Levitt, he has launched a book series at the NYU Press: North American Religions. Together with Simon Wood, Watt has been awarded a contract for a book called Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History. Watt has also completed the second draft of a book called Antifundamentalism and published articles on fundamentalism, post-secularism, and Islam in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, Religion and Literature, and Religion and Society.
Along with running the Friday teach-ins each week Ralph Young was panelist with Ken Burns, Richard Beeman, Alan Brinkley, and others for a national forum on “Can We Talk?: A Conversation about Civility and Democracy in America” at the National Constitution Center. In addition Dr. Young writes a blog for the Constitution Center and offered a presentation for a National Endowment for the Humanities "Landmarks of American History and Culture" workshop. Finally Dr. Young has been interviewed more than a dozen times about the “Occupy Wall Street Movement” by such media outlets as The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CBS TV, KYW News Radio, the Associated Press, and the Comcast Network.