2014 Newsletter
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Volume XLIII Summer 2014 footnotes Wallace Named First Richard J. Stockham Jr. Chair of Western Intellectual History amford University's board of Wallace, who joined Samford’s trustees executive committee history faculty in 2002, specializes in S announced at its March 6 meeting religious and intellectual history and that Dr. William Jason Wallace will be researches the relationship between the first professor to hold the Richard J. religion and political thought. Stockham Jr. Chair of Western In addition to a number of articles Intellectual History. and review essays, he is the author of The chair is named in honor of Mr. Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Richard Stockham, Jr., a Birmingham Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, native and Princeton University graduate 1835-1860 (Notre Dame, 2010). His who cared deeply about the educational latest book, Collapse of the Covenant: value of the Western and Christian The Transformation of the Puritan Ideal, intellectual traditions. is forthcoming from The Johns Hopkins As outlined by the board, the holder University Press. of the Stockham Chair provides Among his other professional SAMFORD UNIVERSITY administrative oversight of the honors, Wallace earned the 2011 Howard university's Core Texts Program. For College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Wallace, these duties include managing Teacher award. the Cultural Perspectives (UCCP) curriculum, defining the needs of the curriculum, and assessing and revising the program as needed. Fulbright Grant Awarded to History Graduate for Second Consecutive Year or the Brown said Samford history given me a great opportunity, and I hope second professor Jim Brown’s Modern Russia to make good on it in the future,” Brown F time in course sparked his interest in the central said. as many Asian region that was once a part of the years, a Soviet Union. graduating “I want to see how those different history major countries developed in the post-Cold inside: has received a War era, and am so excited to get the Oral History Projects ........................... 2 Fulbright opportunity to do so,” Brown said. Mauldin Defends Dissertation ............. 2 English In addition to his Russian history A NEWSLETTER FROM DEPARTMENT A NEWSLETTER THE OF HISTORY Brown Publishes History Textbook ..... 3 Teaching professor, Brown praised the support of Latin American Scholars to Ecuador ... 4 Assistantship. University Fellows faculty Shannon Faculty Notes ...................................... 5 History major and University Fellows Flynt, Bryan Johnson, Chris Metress and honors student Zach Brown of Franklin, Jason Wallace. Department Awards Banquet .............. 6 Tenn. received a grant from the Fulbright Having served as Editor-in-Chief of Departmental Awards ......................... 7 program to study abroad for one year. the Samford Crimson student newspaper Phi Alpha Theta News ........................ 8 Brown will be living in Tajikistan as his senior year, he also hopes to explore Alabama Historical Association Meeting .. 9 a Fulbright scholar and English teaching Tajik media during his assistantship. Alumni Notes ..................................... 10 assistant. Tajikistan is a small Central “I hope to soak up my time in Scholarships ..................................... 11 Asian country bordered by Afghanistan, Tajikistan and see possibilities while I Colonial Dames Essay Winners ........ 12 Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China. am there. The Fulbright Program has Students in Oral History Class Travel to Black Belt, Undertake ‘Food Project’ his year, several students got a unique hands-on opportunity in Dr. Jonathan Bass’s Oral History class. The small class had the privilege of interviewing T almost one hundred individuals, recording their memories of everything from life in a small town to their favorite recipes. Early in the fall semester, the class traveled to Marion, Alabama, birthplace of Howard College, to interview residents of the town about their memories of growing up in the Black Belt. Later in the semester, as the nation remembered the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, they interviewed Samford faculty, alumni, and friends about their recollections of the event. All of these interviews were crafted into narratives and published as a series on the Bull Pup blog at samfordhistory.wordpress.com. They also worked at the Samford Memories booth at Samford’s Homecoming, collecting short stories from Samford alumni. During the spring semester, the class turned to a new assignment: The Samford Food Project. The students interviewed Samford faculty, alumni, and friends, asking for their favorite recipes and the stories behind them. They hope to release the interviews and recipes in printed form in the near future. footnotes Mauldin Successfully is written and produced by Defends Dissertation Department of History This summer, Erin Stewart Mauldin successfully Samford University defended her dissertation titled, “Unredeemed 800 Lakeshore Drive, Birmingham, AL 35216 Land: The U.S. Civil War, Changing Land Use 205-726-2858 • [email protected] Practices, and the Environmental Limitations of Newsletter Staff: Agriculture in the South, 1840-1880.” S. Jonathan Bass, department chair Directed by renowned environmental historian Ivy L. Alexander, office manager John McNeil at Georgetown University, Erin’s Special Thanks: dissertation drew from a wide range of sources to To all the professors in the department who helped in thoughtfully revisit important questions historians various aspects of this newsletter and to all of those have regarding the “destructiveness” of the Civil who provided updates and contributed articles to be War, the impoverishing nature of postwar cotton published. production, and the periodization of nineteenth- © 2014 Samford University century southern history. In her two years as a member of the faculty in the department of history, Dr. Mauldin has edited a published volume on environmental history (with John McNeil), spearheaded the development of a new Samford University is an Equal Opportunity Institution Environmental Studies minor, and, most importantly, received excellent that complies with applicable law prohibiting teaching evaluations in her communication arts and history classes. She is a discrimination in its educational and employment policies fine colleague and has provided invaluable support to the university history and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, age, disability, veteran status, genetic project. information or national or ethnic origin. Congratulations, Dr. Mauldin (Samford B.A., ’07) in reaching this important milestone. footnotes http://howard.samford.edu/history Veteran History Professor Completes Modern World History Textbook t has been a long road for Dr. Jim sequence (Classical Europe, Modern Brown, whose modern world Europe, Africa and the Mideast, I history text, Fairy Tales, Monsoon Asia, Latin America, and Patriotism, and the Nation-State: The finally the U.S.) combined history, Rise of the Modern West and the literature, religion and the arts, with Response of the World, came out in professors from three of those July from Kendall Hunt Publishers. disciplines in every class. Open to about Says Brown, “Looking at it from this 10% of the student body, who had to end of the process, it’s clear that the volunteer for this untested new program, book mostly grew out of a dialogue it was an Honors program in all but with Samford history students over the name. It attracted some very brave and past forty-some years.” Following is a very bright students, and remains the brief history of the department related single most educationally energizing by Dr. Brown in describing the process experience of my career at Samford, and of writing and publishing this probably did more to shape the textbook definitive text. than any other single factor. Towards the end of grad school I The GIS angle of the new textbook had begun to be aware of a folk – each of 14 chapters has a parallel consciousness-to-nationalism pattern of Google Earth chapter of literally modern state creation. Just before I hundreds of Placemarks, Paths, started teaching here (fall 1971) Polygons and Image Overlays – began Samford had just instituted the January with my participation in the term for creative, experimental courses, university’s push towards Problem- and my second Jan term here (1973), I Based Learning. Eventually I offered a course in “German history patented an interactive 3-D from the Brothers Grimm to Hitler.” A topography map for use with history nucleus of students from that class won a Youth grant in the classes (though failed to find a Humanities to study regional folklore, with me and Wayne Flynt as manufacturer for it!). But the real faculty advisors. I wound up getting involved in a major Ford turning point for me was Foundation grant to replicate the popular “Foxfire” student-done participating in the AEGIS grant of 2001-2005. Two magazine nationwide and that helped launch the Journal of geographers, two biologists, and me, the one historian, won this Experiential Education, and I eventually took a post-graduate $200,000 National Science Foundation grant to integrate GIS in the semester in Intercultural and Folk Studies on my first Sabbatical gen ed curriculum, using ArcGIS/ArcMap as our platform. The grant leave. work was successful enough that we took some of our teaching My beginning assignment at Samford was as one of two models on the road, as far afield as the International