As we put another lively academic year in the books, I found myself musing about recent developments and how they reflected what has made and continues to make UM History special and strong. So to that end, a few thoughts: Uninhibited Rigor. The quality of our department has long been built on the faculty’s commitment to investigating the past in all of its complexity, to consistently asking the most difficult questions and to leaving no stone unturned. As you’ll see below, this is an ethic of the faculty reflected in their dynamic research agendas, but it’s very much an ethic that we impart to our students. I saw it in action in diverse venues this past semester. At our Lockridge Workshop, faculty and graduate students again gathered to discuss works-in-progress and to push each other to enhance the clarity and reach of their scholarship. |
|
|
|
At UM’s Conference for Undergraduate Research (UMCUR) a few weeks back, ten History students presented their research essays and made it clear that our advanced writing and research courses (taught this semester by Claire Arcenas and Eric Zimmer) remain a vital capstone in our curriculum. It was also clear that stirring the life of the mind—the uninhibited mind—continues to be what we do best. This was similarly on display at the annual Northwest Regional Phi Alpha Theta in late April. Thirteen students, accompanied by Jody Pavilack and me, made the trek to Bellingham, Washington to share their research findings with other historians across the region. From Indigenous and environmental politics in the 1970s West to the Nullification Crisis and public commemoration of U.S. statesmen who compromised with slavery, their papers consistently raised difficult questions and provided insightful answers grounded in evidence. Three students—Jacob Schmidt, Michael Larmann, and Sean Kellogg—had essays nominated for best paper prizes. I thank the many of you who contributed to the Harry Fritz Fund for Student Excellence, which made this trip possible. |
|
This year, thirteen UM history students presented their work at the Northwest Regional Phi Alpha Theta. They were accompanied by Professors Jody Pavilack and Kyle Volk.
|
|
|
Engagement. We’ve shared the creation of our new H. Duane Hampton Public History Program and our new undergraduate and graduate certificate programs—all of which aim to connect faculty, students and history with the wider public. That mission continues. This semester and continuing next year, a healthy National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant is helping us create new courses, document the lived experience of COVID-19 and offer a no-cost History-led summer humanities institute for high school students. |
|
This year, we welcome Dr. Eric Zimmer to our faculty to teach courses in western, environmental, Indigenous, and public history.
|
|
|
New Blood. Like all good academic departments, our strength is in our young faculty. As you likely know, new faculty hires have been hard to come by over the past several years. This has been particularly the case for us in the history of the U.S. West where we’ve lacked a consistent presence since the retirement of Professor Dan Flores. I’m excited to share that this changed this semester when Dr. Eric Zimmer joined our ranks to teach courses in the history of the American West, environmental history, Indigenous history and public history. He’ll be with us through all of next academic year, and you can learn more about his expertise and approach here. Welcome, Eric!
|
|
|
|
Dedication. I’d like to take this opportunity to recognize the many contributions of Professor Michael Mayer, who is retiring at the end of spring term. Mike joined our department in 1988 after earning his PhD at Princeton University and teaching at St. Vincent College, the University of Alabama, the University of Illinois and Auckland University in New Zealand. He is, as many of you know, a widely regarded expert on the Eisenhower presidency and the history of civil rights in modern America. Over the course of his career, Mike has been a cornerstone of our graduate program, directing the program for two decades and mentoring numerous MA and PhD students. |
|
Professor Michael Mayer, a specialist in 20th century US history, is retiring at the end of this year |
|
|
|
Mike has also been an intrepid advocate on campus for History and the Humanities writ large. He has served on more university committees than he probably cares to remember, but in each assignment, he represented our department with the deepest of commitments. Mike has persistently demanded transparency and excellence from UM’s ever-changing administration and, perhaps most importantly, has been an unrelenting advocate of academic freedom and a staunch defender of due process on and off campus. His selfless contributions to our department and to UM–along with his regular volley of presidential quotes and 1970s disco references–will be greatly missed. We wish him well. As always, please keep in touch and reach out to me at any time with news and thoughts. And should you find yourself in Missoula, please stop by the department on the second floor of the Liberal Arts (Eck Hall) building. |
|
|
|
|
This summer, Professors Claire Arcenas and Eric Zimmer, along with Ph.D. Candidate Michael Larmann, will be leading a one-week summer program called “Exploring the History of the Missoula and Bitterroot Valleys.” The program is an opportunity for high school students in the Missoula area to get a first-hand immersive experience of the history of the area they live in! Thanks to the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the program is cost-free for participants. The program is open to students ages 15 to 19 and will run June 27-July 1, 2022. Applications are open through May! Professor Arcenas, one of the leads on the project, says the program will “help [high school students] make sense of their community and our current moment.” The program is also a good way to introduce high school students to the UM history department and help them get a better idea of whether UM is a good fit for them. This program is a pilot. If successful, UM will organize more summer programs that will allow opportunities for high school students to increase their understanding of the world around them. |
|
|
It’s been a busy spring for the Public History Program! We hired a new faculty member, Eric Zimmer, who brings his extensive public history experience both to the classroom and to our new Advisory Board, which includes UM alumni and local public history partners. We also established a new graduate-level certificate in public history, enabling our graduate students, as well as our undergraduates, to gain experience and credentials in this growing field. We also established new virtual internships with the Montana Historical Society and the State Historical Preservation Office, as well as continuing to work closely with community partners including the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. At the conclusion of this academic year, the directorship will pass from Anya Jabour to Leif Fredrickson, who has been teaching our popular course on “Doing Local History.” In addition to directing the public history program, he will add new courses to his repertoire, including “Hell on Wheels: The Automobile in America." |
|
UM’s public history program takes pride in our partnerships with local, state and national public history institutions where our students complete internships in preparation for careers in public history. This newsletter spotlights two of our current interns and showcases some of the diverse opportunities in the wide world of public history. Both of these interns are completing their internships remotely in conjunction with Helena-based institutions, the Montana Historical Society (MHS) and the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). We are excited to celebrate these new partnerships in collaboration with Diana DiStefano (MHS) and Kate Hampton (SHPO), both UM alums!
|
|
Kali Zaglauer combs through boxes of historic photos to find images to use in a forthcoming documentary about African Americans in Montana. |
|
Documentary-Making By Kali Zaglauer This spring semester (my last full semester) I have been so lucky to have been able to participate in this internship! And it has been nothing short of an incredible experience. My mostly remote internship entails documenting and sharing Montana's African American Heritage via the State Historic Preservation Office in Helena. My advisor for this internship is an awesome UM Alum, Kate Hampton, who has been a wonderful guide in the world of history and navigating how to practice this career at a state level. She was kind enough to give me a personal tour of the Montana Historical Society and the State Historic Preservation Office which sits adjacent to the State Capitol building. My internship has involved sitting in on interviews, archival research, historical context development and identifying significant historic properties. I have been a Missoula liaison for this project, focusing mostly on the African American history of Missoula and the University of Montana. This project has given me a developed background knowledge on African American history in Montana, and an increased passion to spread the love of diversity, and the love of culture to those who live in this gorgeous state. Everyone should have the education, the tools and passion to make everyone feel included and appreciated in the Treasure State. What’s next for me? I love world history and politics- dabbling in everything from world cultures to the toppling of regimes. This summer I will have a BA in History with a Political Science minor in hand after having a bit of a non-traditional, but valuable, experience here at UM. I also earned a certificate in Public History which trained me in skills such as oral history and taught me how to share history in various mediums accessible to everyone. I am also personally interested in social justice and criminal justice reform. I imagine going further in my education, while having a career that allows me to pursue my passions. The path ahead of me is wide open! |
|
|
|
Editorial Work & Digital Humanities By Lauryn Tecca I will have completed two history internships by the end of this summer. Both are incredibly useful public history experiences that I am excited to have had the opportunity to complete. Currently, I am completing a virtual internship with the Montana Historical Society (MHS) in Helena on copy-editing and photo research. Part of my weekly work is to edit citations for articles and book projects, checking meticulously for any errors in formatting. Photo research is by far my favorite part of this internship. I get to read articles on Montana history and then find photos within the MHS databases to illustrate these articles. Going on the most intense searches for the perfect picture to capture an author’s point has been a great exercise in researching obscure topics. This internship has helped me refine my writing and research process, something that has been great for my coursework. It has also given me a glimpse of how historical publications operate, something I knew very little about. Over the summer, I will intern at the University of Nebraska’s Freedom Stories Lab. The program in which I will participate is called “Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West,” which examines over 8,000 habeas corpus petitions from Black and Indigenous petitioners in the 19th century. It includes a broad range of tasks, including data collection, legal inquiry and transcription. I’m thrilled to spend the summer working on a project that allows me to do more research with a team of students from across the country. I’m not 100% certain what I would like to do in the future, but I do know that I would like to attend graduate school. Working on perfecting my formatting with MHS and collaborating on a research project at the University of Nebraska will be unbelievably helpful in whatever scholarly pursuits I have in the next couple of years. I would encourage anyone who can apply for a public history internship to do so, even if just to experience a part of the historical field that might not come to mind when thinking about future career plans. Editorial Note: Lauryn Tecca applied for this fully-funded internship as part of a nationally competitive process. Her stipend covers housing and living costs in Lincoln, Nebraska for the entire summer. Congratulations, Lauryn! |
|
|
|
Two UM alums published their books this spring. Their family members approve!
|
|
This spring, two alums who earned their MA degrees from UM published their first books! Cody Dodge Ewert published Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origins of Modern Educational Politics, and Virginia L. Summey published The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts. Since they both began work on these projects as graduate students here, we asked them to tell us more about the path from MA to book. Q: You began work on these books in the MA program at UM. Could you tell us about how you came to this subject and your early work on it? Summey: I'm a native North Carolinian who moved out to Montana after undergrad and took six years before starting my MA. So when I was in Dr. Jabour's "Writing Women's Lives" class I thought it would be fun to write about someone from North Carolina. I first came across the name "Elreta Alexander" I believe on the NC History Museum website and had never heard of her! I was initially afraid that I wouldn't be able to find enough on her, but that ended up not being a problem at all! Ewert: I wrote an undergraduate research paper about the playing of the national anthem at sporting events, a practice that—so I learned—dated to the late 1890s. This piqued my interest in patriotic culture during the Progressive Era more broadly. One of the books I was reading on the subject contained some material about patriotic education programs from the time, and I just wanted to know more. So, I decided to dig in. Q: You continued work on these books in your PhD programs (and beyond). Tell us how the projects developed. Summey: I applied to the Ph.D. program at UNC-Greensboro specifically because their archives and special collections housed the Elreta Alexander collection. Thank goodness I got in! I love UNCG! My advisor was Dr. Charles Bolton, who was also working on a biography of former Mississippi Governor William Winter at the time. I was so fortunate to have Chuck guide this project from thesis to dissertation. Also, being in Greensboro where Judge Alexander lived and worked made the additional research much easier! And Dr. Jabour was also able to be on my dissertation committee. Having someone on my committee who was a part of the project from day one was extremely helpful. Ewert: I mostly used my master's thesis as a springboard, in that I kept my topic but decided to start fresh in terms of how I approached the research. When I entered my doctoral program, it was a huge asset to already have a grounding in the relevant scholarly literature, not to mention a clear sense of what kinds of sources would be useful to me. Early on, I changed the focus of my research to center less on what happened inside of schools, and more on how school reformers pitched their ideas to the public. Similarly, while my thesis had a national scope, I began to think that state-level case studies might be more effective. I ultimately decided to focus on three unique states from distinct parts of the nation—New York, Utah, and Texas—in hopes that doing so would offer a sense of how these educational trends evolved as they moved from place to place. I think that approach ultimately worked well, as I didn't have to do any major restructuring to turn the dissertation into a book. It was also fun for me to really dive deep into the histories of each of those places. Q: Any final thoughts or words of wisdom on the path from MA to published author? Summey: The biggest thing I've learned during this decade-long process is to trust my gut. I knew I had a good story. Not all professors were keen on a biography as a dissertation. But I ended up with the perfect advisors who believed in me and the work. The first press I approached was also lukewarm, and asked me to write a book about civil rights in Greensboro with Judge Alexander "as a character." But the second press was excited and all in before I even finished the proposal. Listen to all the advice your mentors have to offer, but also believe in yourself if you know your work is important. Ewert: Revisions are key, so you need to be willing to tinker. It also helps to find other people you can share your work with. Most importantly—and I realize this is easier said than done—try to have fun with it. |
Graduating senior Kayla Irish has combined her love for history and math in unexpected ways. |
|
|
Kayla Irish is a graduating senior at UM with a double major in history and statistics. Since her graduation she has been working at the Wheeler Lab in UM’s computer science department, and has been accepted into the Statistics PhD program at University of Washington for the coming fall. History and math aren’t two things people usually put together, but Kayla comments, “[h]istory satisfies my interest in qualitatively understanding people’s decisions, and statistics allows me to visualize and summarize them in a completely different way.” She says data is a powerful thing and history allows her to think critically about this data. Looking back at her years at UM, Kayla reflects: “College was significantly more transformative than I ever could have imagined, and I mean that in the best way possible. It was fun, awful, stressful and amazing, and I learned so much about myself, built meaningful relationships with my peers and professors and explored a huge breadth of material.” |
|
|
|
|
|
Claire Arcenas’s book, "America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life" will be published by the University of Chicago Press in July. John Eglin presented “The End of the Affair: Girolama Piccolomini’s Portrait of James Boswell” as part of the conference “Linda Colley: A Woman in World History,” held at Princeton University in honor of his dissertation supervisor. Leif Fredrickson’s public and applied environmental history work was spotlighted in the journal Nature in a feature article on political pressures put on government scientists. He wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the past and future of federal climate change policy. His environmental history class developed an interactive timeline that was published as part of a digital project on the history of the EPA and Climate Change that Leif curated. He also co-authored articles in the American Journal of Public Health (on the history of children’s health) and Environmental Sociology (on environmental justice at the EPA). |
|
Professor Arcenas’s new book examines the influence of British philosopher John Locke on American thought. |
|
|
Anya Jabour published an op-ed in the Washington Post on the history and politics of birth control and an op-ed in History News Network on the Gilded Age origins of Galentine’s Day. She also published an article on female friendship in turn-of-the-century New York, one on single women who purchased vacation property in Canada in the early 20th century, and another on “How Bicycles Liberated Women in Victorian America.” She also gave a talk for the Humanities Institute, “Trailblazer: How Katharine Bement Davis Promoted Women’s Rights in the Workplace, at the Polls, and in the Bedroom," based on her current book project, which is represented by Mullane Literary Associates. Tobin Miller Shearer’s commentary, “The Value of De-Coupling Race and Crisis in White Communities,” was featured on Inside Higher Ed’s Academic Minute. He has continued to maintain an active public speaking schedule with appearances and invited lectures at Messiah University (PA), St. Mary’s College (IN), Reedley Peace Center (CA), Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN), Calvert Library (MD), First Mennonite Church (IN), Embodied Philosophy (CA), Kiwanis Club (MT) and many local events. Tobin is also the recipient of a highly competitive Summer Stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support his work on the first biography of civil rights activist and historian Vincent Harding. His project is entitled, “Vincent Harding: Storied Into Being, A Biography.” Kyle G. Volk received the University of Montana’s 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award. This award is UM’s highest teaching honor and recognizes faculty who have exhibited a history of excellence in teaching and demonstrated exceptional impacts on student learning and success. Eric Zimmer, the University of Montana’s new A.B. Hammond Visiting Assistant Professor of Western United States History, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on the #Landback movement discussing how tribes are continuing to buy and reacquire sacred and tribal lands. |
| • | India Hite is this year’s winner of the Paul Lauren Human Rights Scholarship. | | • | Abigail Holderbaum is one of this year’s three Robert O. Lindsay Scholarship winners. | | • | Kayla Irish is this year’s recipient of the Richard Drake Writing Award for undergraduate students. | | • | Sean Kellogg is this year’s recipient of the Scott Allen Meyer Memorial Scholarship. | | • | Clara McRae is one of the two recipients of the Edward Earl Bennett Memorial Scholarship. | | • | Scott O’Donnell is one of this year’s three recipients of the Robert O. Lindsay Scholarship. | | • | Antonina Pavlovic is one of the two recipients of the Henry J. Olson Scholarship. | | • | Jessamyn Reichert is this year’s recipient of the Harold E. Blinn Scholarship. | | • | Jason Stahl published “Hi-Line response to fatal Amtrak derailment,” which discusses the 2021 disaster in which an Amtrak train derailed with over 100 passengers inside. | | • | John Stefanek (MA 2021) has accepted a position as a Library Technician at Mansfield Library. John reflects: "I've always wanted to work in a library setting, and I'm excited to be joining the wonderful folk at the Mansfield Library. I look forward to utilizing my education to take part in the preservation of knowledge." | | • | Kasey Swisher is one of the two recipients of the Henry J. Olson Scholarship. | | • | Lauryn Tecca is one of the two recipients of the Edward Earl Bennett Memorial Scholarship. | | • | Dylan Yonce is this year’s recipient of the Jules A. Karlin Endowment. | | • | 2022 History Department graduates Maddie Hagan and Cassidy VanderVoort were featured in campus news spotlights. |
|
|
College of Humanities & Sciences History Department
University of Montana - 32 Campus Drive
Missoula, Montana 59812 |
|
|
|
|
