Report on the History of Matthew P. Deady and Frederick S. Dunn
Report on the History of Matthew P. Deady and Frederick S. Dunn By David Alan Johnson Professor, Portland State University former Managing Editor (1997-2014), Pacific Historical Review Quintard Taylor Emeritus Professor and Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History. University of Washington Marsha Weisiger Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History, University of Oregon In the 2015-16 academic year, students and faculty called for renaming Deady Hall and Dunn Hall, due to the association of Matthew P. Deady and Frederick S. Dunn with the infamous history of race relations in Oregon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. President Michael Schill initially appointed a committee of administrators, faculty, and students to develop criteria for evaluating whether either of the names should be stripped from campus buildings. Once the criteria were established, President Schill assembled a panel of three historians to research the history of Deady and Dunn to guide his decision-making. The committee consists of David Alan Johnson, the foremost authority on the history of the Oregon Constitutional Convention and author of Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, Nevada, 1840-1890 (1992); Quintard Taylor, the leading historian of African Americans in the U.S. West and author of several books, including In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (1998); and Marsha Weisiger, author of several books, including Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (2009). Other historians have written about Matthew Deady and Frederick Dunn; although we were familiar with them, we began our work looking at the primary sources—that is, the historical record produced by Deady, Dunn, and their contemporaries.
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