Department of History: From the Chairperson

Right now on Rorotoko: Lewis Siegelbaum on his book, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile,” published by Cornell University Press.

“THE SOVIET AUTOMOBILE ADAPTED TO SOVIET CIRCUMSTANCES AS MUCH AS IT PROVOKED ADAPTATION

I argue that Soviet socialism exchanged the possibility of an alternative modernity for one much more entangled with the material culture of the western world. This process was difficult to predict.

“For much of its existence, the Soviet Union was defined by its leaders as a more rationally organized and socially just polity than any in the capitalist world. The preponderance of trucks and the rare privately owned car was consistent with such difference. But eventually the comrades and other middle-echelon personnel wanted to enhance their personal mobility, flexibility, and status… Read on at http://www.rorotoko.com

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History of Science at Michigan State University

History of science is growing at Michigan State with its launching of a specialization in the history of science and the adoption of the Women in Science Digital Collection.

The Department of History at Michigan State University has long been known for its premier African History program. In the past few years the department has also made a serious commitment to the history of science. Michigan State University now has five historians of the life sciences and boasts courses, conferences, and an online digital collection in the history of science.

Our faculty includes:

• Mark Largent, a historian of American biology and medicine who teaches history of science and public policy courses in James Madison College. Mark is the book review editor for the Journal of the History of Biology and editor of the Rutgers Series Studies in Modern Science, Technology and the Environment. His current project explores the ongoing debates over compulsory vaccinations.
• John Waller, a historian of science and medicine who teaches the history of disease, health care, and psychiatry. He has written on the development of the British eugenics movement, the conditions of child laborers in early industrial England, outbreaks of collective hysteria, and is currently writing a study of hereditarian concepts in western history.
• Rich Bellon, a historian of science who divides his attention between the Victorian world of natural history and the modern age of molecular biology. His current research project explores the impact of Darwin’s botany on the debate over evolution in the 1860s. Most of his undergraduate teaching, on the other hand, is driven by an interest in contemporary biomedical and biotechnology policy.
• Georgina Montgomery, a historian of science who teaches the history of animal behavior studies, primatology, and gender and science. Georgina is currently working on her manuscript “Seeing Primates Scientifically,” which explores the development of places and practices for the study of natural primate behavior. She is also working on a new project about the lives of individual gorillas used for science and spectacle in the early to mid-twentieth century.
• Helen Veit, a historian of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries whose first book-length project, Victory over Ourselves: American Food in the Era of the Great War, explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era, and their relationship to ideas about individual self-discipline, scientific rationalization, social and racial progress, and international power. Helen is also the general editor for a book series on food and history with Michigan State University Press.

  Many of you will already be familiar with Michigan State because of H-Net and MATRIX. The Department of History’s relationship with MATRIX has enabled Michigan State to adopt the Women in Science Digital Collection from Judith Zinsser (Miami University). Under the guidance of Georgina Montgomery, the collection is being expanded to include archival documents for a number of women in science with accompanying introductions and articles. Georgina welcomes e-mails about how to get your archival documents and research integrated into the site. The Web site will be a wonderful tool in research and undergraduate education, and represents part of the Department of History’s commitment to expanding its focus on the history of science.
  The curriculum already includes courses such as ‘Evolution and Society,’ ‘Science and Social Policy,’ ‘Gender, Sex, and Science in Popular Culture,’ ‘Animal Histories,’ ‘Food and Power in American History,’ ‘A History of Nutrition,’ ‘A Brave New World? Biology, Biotechnology, and Human Identity,’ ‘The Human Genome Project,’ ‘Minds and Madness’ and ‘Medicine in Society’. In the future, survey courses and team-taught classes will be added to the undergraduate and graduate curricula.

  Such courses within the Department of History are complemented by a range of opportunities at different colleges on the Michigan State campus. The Science, Technology, Environment and Public Policy Specialization [STEPPS] in James Madison College, for example, requires all students to take two science studies courses, and over a third of the specialization’s faculty are historians of science. Similarly, all students in the residential Lyman Briggs College take courses in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPS), which encourage them to explore the connections between science and the wider world. Briggs is a national leader in science pedagogy; its historians actively collaborate in educational innovation, which is generously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and other agencies. HPS courses, by highlighting the intellectual, social and cultural connections between scientific disciplines, serve as a linchpin in Briggs’s core mission to break down conceptual and educational barriers among physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. History of science at MSU is thus indispensable to one of the nation’s most dynamic and grant-winning efforts to reform the education of aspiring scientists and medical professionals.

  The interdisciplinarity that characterizes many of the colleges, departments, and programs at Michigan State was exemplified by the “Animals: Past, Present, and Future” conference organized by Georgina Montgomery in April 2009. This interdisciplinary and international conference on human-animal relationships attracted 70 people representing more than seven disciplines and eight countries. Many of the 53 talks were histories of science, including presentations by Erika L. Milam (University of Maryland), Tania Munz (Max Planck), and Ruthanna Dyer (York University). The conference marked the emergence of Michigan State as a leader in Animal Studies, with a graduate specialization in animal studies already established within the Department of Sociology. Georgina is an affiliated faculty with the Animal Studies specialization and will teach one of the core graduate seminars in 2010-2011.

  Looking ahead, Michigan State plans to build on these strengths by adding additional graduate and undergraduate history of science courses to the Department of History curriculum, building up the Women in Science Digital Collection, and expanding our faculty. In the fall, for example, we will be searching for a historian of science and a philosopher of science to fill positions at Lyman Briggs College with joint appointments with the Department of History and the Department of Philosophy respectively. To find out more about how Michigan State is integrating history of science into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, visit the links below.

Useful Links
Department of History: http://www.history.msu.edu/
James Madison College: http://www.jmc.msu.edu/
Lyman Briggs College: http://www.lymanbriggs.msu.edu/
Animal Studies Graduate Specialization: http://www.animalstudies.msu.edu/

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Professor John Waller’s latest book, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die. The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (Thriplow, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008) , has been shortlisted by the British Society for the History of Science for the 2009 Dingle Prize for the best book in the history of science, technology, and medicine, published in English which is accessible to a wide audience of non-specialists. For more information on the prize see http://www.bshs.org.uk/prizes/dingle-prize.

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Episode 28 of Africa Past and Present — the podcast about history,culture, and politics in Africa — is now available at: http://afripod.aodl.org[1]

In this episode, historians Stephanie Beswick (Ball State University) and Jay Spaulding (Kean University) on ethnicity, slavery, and trade in Sudan. The focus is on pre-colonial times, with an emphasis on how power relationships and economic factors influenced identity formation and political conflict. The interview was conducted at the Sudan Studies Association meeting held recently in East Lansing.

Please note that we are on summer schedule. Next episode: July 15.

****** Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb. It is produced by MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online: http://matrix.msu.edu

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Benjamin Smith’s book, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca has been published by the University of Nebraska Press.

About the Book: The postrevolutionary reconstruction of the Mexican government did not easily or immediately reach all corners of the country. At every level, political intermediaries negotiated, resisted, appropriated, or ignored the dictates of the central government. National policy reverberated through Mexico’s local and political networks in countless different ways and resulted in a myriad of regional arrangements. It is this process of diffusion, politicking, and conflict that Benjamin T. Smith examines in Pistoleros and Popular Movements. Oaxaca’s urban social movements and the tension between federal, state, and local governments illuminate the multivalent contradictions, fragmentations, and crises of the state-building effort at the regional level. A better understanding of these local transformations yields a more realistic overall view of the national project of state building. Smith places Oaxaca within this larger framework of postrevolutionary Mexico by comparing the region to other states and linking local politics to state and national developments. Drawing on an impressive range of regional case studies, this volume is a comprehensive and engaging study of postrevolutionary Oaxaca’s role in the formation of modern Mexico.

Praise for the Book: “Benjamin Smith’s exhaustive research and expansive view allow him to place modern Oaxaca within the larger context of Mexican and world history, which is precisely what the very best regional histories do. Elegantly written, Pistoleros and Popular Movements is a veritable model of well-conceived regional history, and a truly invaluable contribution to the field.”—Timothy J. Henderson, author ofA Glorious Defeat: Mexico and its War with the United States

“Benjamin Smith’s elegant and meticulously researched history of post-revolutionary Oaxaca sheds new light on the tortuous dialectic of Mexican state formation. Eschewing pluralist, statist, and neo-Gramscian models, Smith evokes ‘the perpetual rumble of popular revolt and counter-hegemonic discourse,’ the echoes of which still resonate in Oaxaca today.”—Adrian Bantjes, author of As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution

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Dr. Peter Alegi has been appointed a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, in South Africa for the calendar year 2010. Dr. Alegi’s project is to explore “Sport and Leisure: Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations.” As part of his project,” Alegi will teach two newly developed history courses:

 1.    “Global Soccerscapes: Business, Power, and Culture:” This course explores how and why the global history of soccer influenced, and was influenced by, various factors, including cultural values, economic interests, and power relationships.  Case studies from Brazil, South Africa, the Netherlands, and England bring out regional differences and invite comparisons across time and space.  The course helps understand how race, gender, media, and economics made the world of football we see today.

 2.    “Sport in South Africa, Past and Present: Race, Class, Gender, and Nation:” This course uses sport as a prism through which to study South African history since the late nineteenth century.  It explores how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010.  Through studies of rugby, cricket, and soccer, as well as other sports, the course connects South Africans? intense passion for sport to broader experiences with industrialization, urbanization, racism and segregation, the quest for liberation, nationhood, and the impact of globalization.

These courses illustrate how African men and women cannot be written out of history.  Studies of sport and leisure humanize the lives of ordinary (and not so ordinary!) people in evocative and powerful ways.  They cast new light on the emotional dimensions of history and broaden our understanding of how oppressed people jostled for power and pursued pleasure under the punitive and unforgiving conditions of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid.

Alegi’s courses are aimed at undergraduates and graduate students seeking to inform themselves ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa.  As a Fulbright scholar, Alegi will assist with the internationalization of the curriculum at UKZN and develop new ways for local students to interact with online media, as well as integrate digital resources into their own projects.  During his year in South Africa (January-December), Alegi intends to work on joint projects with local faculty and strengthen MSU’s strategic parternship with UKZN.

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The Alpha Phi chapter of Phi Alpha Theta at Michigan State University was pleased to host the 2009 regional conference of the national history honorary for its members from Michigan and Wisconsin. It was held on March 28 at the Kellogg Center. In addition to students from MSU, students from Oakland University, Alma College and Western Michigan University also participated in the day long conference by presenting their papers. The topics ranged from the catholic reforms of Henry VIII, to American policy with Israel, to rock and roll as a reflection of teenage protest in the 1960s. Faculty members of MSU served as session judges and included Professors William Schoenl, Denise Demetrious, Emily Tabuteau, Edward Jocque, Michael Stamm and Matthew Pauly. Members of the Alpha Phi chapter chaired the sessions. They were Ryan Etzcorn, Jeffrey Richards, Sam Warren, Justin Benson and Elisabeth Slocum. Two students from MSU, Eric Baldwin and Aaron Myers were among those winning awards for outstanding papers.

 The plenary speaker for the conference was Dr. Thomas Summerhill, the Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs and the Director for Integrative Studies in Social Science at Michigan State University. He spoke on The Historical Journey of Discovery: Learning, Researching, and Teaching History. His talk was well received by the audience. 

At the luncheon, the chapter advisor, Professor Jane Vieth, introduced the newly elected members of the society and presented them with their certificates of membership. She also thanked Elisabeth Slocum, the chapter president and vice president Jeff Richards for their hard work in putting the conference together. Professor Vieth also announced the officers for next years. They are Justin Benson, the president elect and Ashley Conrad, the incoming vice president. Professor Vieth paid special tributes to Belinda Bombrisk and Rhonda Bucholtz for their assistance in organizing the conference as well. The chapter members thank all those who contributed to making the conference so successful.  

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Episode 26 of Africa Past and Present — the podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa — is now available at: http://afripod.aodl.org

This episode is devoted to the 2009 elections in South Africa. Dr.Sean Jacobs (University of Michigan) and Dr. Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University) analyze the ANC victory; Jacob Zuma an Zulu nationalism; the opposition’s weak showing nationally; Western Cape exceptionalism; and local and international media coverage.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb. It is produced by Matrix — the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online: http://matrix.msu.edu

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Mary Clingerman has successfully defended her dissertation, “On Intimate and Friendly Terms”: A Regional Comparison of Gender and Space in Antebellum American Higher Education.” Mary’s dissertation director was Lisa Fine, and the members of her committee were Maureen Flanagan, Michael Sedlak, and Robert Bonner.

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Ryan Pettengill has successfully defended his dissertation “Communists and Community: Unionism and the Rise and Fall of Community Activism in Detroit, 1932-1968.” Dr. Lisa Fine and Mark Kornbluh co-chaired his committee which included Dr. Dionicio Valdes and Dr. David Bailey.

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