Department of History Spring 2020 Newsletter

Erik Alexander, PhD spent the 2020 spring semester on a productive sabbatical working on several writing projects, which included two research trips to the New York State Library in Albany and the University of Chicago Library for work on a new book project. In February, he chaired a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship selection committee at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. His article “‘The Wisest Counsel of Conservatism’: Northern Democrats and the Politics of the Center, 1865–1868” will be published in the Civil War History journal this fall. He also recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post drawing some parallels between federal-state relations during the Civil War and the current health crisis. Alexander spent part of his sabbatical finishing his book manuscript with the University of North Carolina Press on Reconstruction politics. In April, Oxford University Press published a chapter written by Alexander entitled, "The Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction" in The Oxford Handbook of American Political History.

Christienne Hinz, PhD presented her current research on gamification pedagogy, "Games Are Not Magic: Strategies for Deepened Learning in a Gamified Classroom" to the North American Simulation and Gaming Association, and presented "Assessment-Informed Game Design: Effective Game-Design for the University Classroom," to IndieCade, the International Festival for Independent Games. Hinz was also interviewed for the podcasts, "Game Level Learn!" and "Board Gaming for Education."

In October, Bryan Jack, PhD presented “Erase and Replace: St. Louis, Sites of Slavery, and Civic Progress” at the Architectures of Slavery Symposium at the College of Charleston. Additionally, Jack was featured by St. Louis Public Radio for his work on an article co-authored with history major Jennifer Sumida, “‘This Place is a Hellhole’: Popular Culture and the Racial Othering of East St. Louis, Illinois,” which appeared in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture. During the fall semester, Jack published two articles and presented them at conferences. Jack’s article, “‘To Preserve the Historic Lore for Which St. Louis is Famous:’ The St. Louis Historic Markers Program and the Construction of Community Historical Memory” appeared in The Confluence. 

Jeff Manuel, PhD spent the spring semester on a fellowship sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Along with Tom Rogers of Emory University, he is writing a book on the transnational history of alcohol fuels in North and South America.

Rowena McClinton, PhD researches topics pertaining to Cherokees and the Cherokee Nation before the 1838-1839 forced removal, the politics of Indian Removal, Moravian missionaries and their missions among a host of Indian tribes, and Indian spirituality. As an invited speaker, McClinton presented “Becoming Moravian in North Carolina,” sponsored by Wake Forest University and Moravian Archives-Salem. As a Newberry Scholar in Residence since 2002, McClinton continues to be assigned a Newberry carrel to research and write. She frequently mines the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry, which contains the largest and most extensive collection of Indian materials in the world. Her current book project, The John Howard Payne Papers, 7-14, is scheduled to be published in 2021 with the University of Nebraska Press. After a long career of service and dedication to SIUE and the Department of History, Rowena McClinton is pleased to announce her retirement at the end of the summer semester.

Jennifer Miller, PhD is co-director of the history graduate program and director of the interdisciplinary European Studies minor. This past fall, Miller signed a contract with Bloomsbury Press to write Women and Gender in Modern Europe:  An Inclusive History of the Long 20th Century. Miller was also included as a key external contributor on a National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Humanities Connections” grant for a multi-year project titled “The Memory Commons, the Memory Collective, and Memory Collaborative.” She presented at two conferences last fall. In Portland, Oregon at the 2019 German Studies Association annual meeting, Miller participated in a roundtable on “Migration in Germany: New Directions in an Emerging Field” on where the scholarship in European Migration studies is headed. Miller also presented at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Louisville, Ky in November on “What Migration History can teach us about Europe’s Past, Present, and Future.” At the April 30 Board of Trustee’s Meeting, Miller was officially promoted to the rank of professor. 

During the fall Jason Stacy, PhD presented on Walt Whitman’s Civil War journalism at the American Literature Association’s annual meeting in Boston. Additionally, he co-wrote an NEH grant proposal with the Walt Whitman Archive (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). In spring 2019, Stacy completed a chapter for an edited collection, The Making of the Midwest: Essays on the Formation of the Midwestern Identity (1789-1900), with Hastings College Press, and in fall of 2019, he completed a textbook, Fabric of a Nation: A Brief History with Skills and Sources (Bedford/Freeman/Worth- 2020) with co-author Matthew Ellington. Stacy also finished his monograph manuscript on Spoon River Anthology and the myth of American small towns in the 20th century entitled Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, which is under contract for publication by the University of Illinois Press. 

Steve Tamari, PhD published an edited volume, Grounded Identities: Territory and Belonging in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East and Mediterranean, last summer by Brill Publishers. It is a collection of essays on attachment to specific lands including Kurdistan, Andalusia and the Maghrib, and geographical Syria in the pre-modern Islamicate world. Within the collection, Tamari wrote a chapter titled "The Land of Syria in the Late Seventeenth Century: ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi and Linking City and Countryside through Study, Travel, and Worship."

Allison Thomason, PhD has been busily conducting research on the senses and sensorial experiences in the ancient Near East. Along with her co-editor, Kiersten Neumann from the University of Chicago, she is currently preparing a large anthology on the subject, Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East, which will be published by Routledge soon. She has also been nominated two years in a row to discuss her research on the senses for a national speaking tour with various local chapters of the Archaeological Institute of America. Finally, she figured if she was department chair, she might as well go for it, so she is currently serving a three-year term as the co-chair of the program committee for the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the largest international professional association of archaeologists of the Middle East. This conference meets annually, with upwards of 1,500 attendees and 700 paper presentations, and keeps her busy with program preparation and conference calls.

This year, Kathleen Vongsathorn, PhD was invited to present papers on "The Politics of Family Planning" in Uganda at the U.K.'s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and "Navigating Decolonization and Expansion in Uganda's Rural Mission Hospitals" at a conference on Africa and nongovernmental organizations in the 1960s at the Institute for Historical Research in London. She also presented a paper on "The Limits of Biomedicine: Training Traditional Birth Attendants in Uganda, c. 1970-2019" at the annual African Studies Association conference in Boston. This April, Vongsathorn's co-edited volume on Tracing Hospital Boundaries: Integration and Segregation in Southeastern Europe and Beyond, 1050-1970 was released by Brill Publishing.     

Throughout the summer and fall, lecturer Nichol Allen worked with Professor Emeritus of History and former SIUE Interim Chancellor Stephen Hansen, PhD, as the project coordinator for Living History Days: A Chautauqua with Mark Twain and Friends hosted in Edwardsville's City Park last September. Additionally, Allen was selected by SIUE’s Education Outreach Speaker Series to present research on “The History of Soul Food” at the Collinsville Public Library. In October she traveled to Howard University to share original research at their “African/Diaspora Migrations, Displacement, and Movements” conference. In March 2020, Allen again worked with SIUE’s Lifelong Learning Speaker Series culminating in a presentation on the tumultuous history of Mary Ellen Pleasant. 

As of July 1, the Department of Historical Studies will officially be recognized by the SIU Board of Trustees as the Department of History. This is not the first time the history program has undergone a name change; however, and in honor of the transformation, we thought it fitting to offer a brief history of the Department of History at SIUE.

In 1957 SIU expanded in the Metro-East area, building educational centers in Alton and East St. Louis after the success of its 1949 Belleville center. With this second wave of expansion into the Metro-East, SIU began offering a more diverse baccalaureate-oriented curriculum, marking the beginning of a history curriculum. Despite the offering of history course selections, no history department or faculties yet existed. This absence was remedied in the following school year with the genesis of a Social Studies Division in the 1958-1959 school year, offering courses in geography, government, history, philosophy and sociology. In the same academic year, 14 separate history courses were offered at the Alton and East St. Louis campuses, despite only employing two history faculty members.

The year 1961 marked an expansion of the faculty members to seven but also signaled an organizational change as the Social Studies Division was changed to the Social Sciences Division, with an additional offering of anthropology. With the completion of a small number of buildings in 1965, the Edwardsville campus location opened. With the opening of the new campus, the undergraduate catalog no longer referred to the history curriculum as “History,” but as the more formal sounding “historical studies.” The 1965 Historical Studies faculty consisted of one full professor, six associate professors, seven assistant professors, and four instructors - marking its growth from the two full-time members six years earlier.

In keeping with the growth of SIUE and the Social Sciences Division’s history program, the Illinois Board of Higher Education approved a Master of Arts degree program in history in 1967, under the umbrella of the Social Sciences Division. In 1971, the Board of Trustees decided to change the five fields in the Social Sciences Division (anthropology, earth science, historical studies, government and public affairs, and sociology) into independent departments. This marked the creation of the Department of Historical Studies, a name it has maintained for nearly 50 years until its July 1, 2020, recognition as the Department of History. The history of the department shows that the changes experienced by history faculty and students mirror those for all of SIUE, and the department and our programs will no doubt continue to evolve with the University. 

As a young woman, Shirley Portwood, PhD was encouraged to strive for more in life, growing up with a family that stressed education’s importance. In her teens, Portwood expressed an interest in becoming a nurse to work as support staff for her brother who also wanted to work in medicine. Her parents, though, asked, “Why work as his nurse, when you could go to medical school and become his partner?” Once in college, she chose another path and planned on teaching history at the middle or high school level. Again, others encouraged her to further her education and attend university past the baccalaureate level and she completed a Master of Arts in history in 1973. It was while earning her master's and working as a teaching assistant leading discussion sections that she knew the college classroom was her home. During her second year in graduate school, she thus began her career in collegiate education, beginning at St. Louis Community College – Forest Park, where she continued to work in various capacities, eventually serving as department chair until 1981.

While still in graduate school, Portwood’s advisor encouraged her to continue her education and receive her terminal degree; it was out of this encouragement that she applied to the PhD program at Washington University, where she graduated in 1982. In the final year of her PhD program, SIUE hired the soon-to-be-doctor Portwood as an instructor in history where she continued her work even after her retirement in 2007, until spring 2010. In 1994, she earned the title of full professor, and in 2007, she was nominated and confirmed as a professor emerita in honor of her prolific writing, teaching and service career.

Throughout her career, Portwood has maintained a diverse set of interests, with a particular keenness for local and regional history. She attributes this attachment to local history to its ability to reach into the classroom as well as the ease with which she could research while working. Local history was a potent tool to be used in the classroom, according to Portwood, who encouraged her students to conduct local history, allowing for much more hands-on research by students while gaining valuable skills and learning about their own pasts and heritages. As a result, students were able to help each other with their topics, and thus history became a community-building event inside the classroom. It was this ability for history to foster a community that was the spark for Portwood’s interest in history at the very beginning of her career.

Connecting with students and community building are some of her proudest achievements, and why her favorite courses to teach were the upper-division specialized or research courses where “by digging into more and more primary data and reading newspapers…once students find something that sparks their interests and how it ties into what we are covering in class, their excitement showed. They couldn’t wait to share their stories with each other.” While discussing education with faculty members she knew at other schools, Portwood discovered the Metro-East area’s uniqueness precisely because of this high level of student engagement in their topics and each other. In this context, they could learn about each other and branch out to speak with other’s whom they wouldn't otherwise be in contact with because of the diverse learning environment the area provides and encourages. Her ultimate goal has been to push students out of the track mindset and encourage them to see potential in themselves, the same way she was encouraged to do so throughout her education and career.

In 2013, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn appointed Portwood to the SIU System Board of Trustees, where she served until 2019. While serving on the board, Portwood vocalized her opposition to the unequal financial distribution in the SIU system and continued to be politically active, advocating for the advancement of people of color, women and others. Her work as a member of the board is part of a long history of demanding change to the status quo which has led to changes in hiring practices.

In special recognition of her teaching and service, numerous awards for her innovation and excellence in the classroom as well as her work as a humanitarian have punctuated Portwood’s career. In 2003 she received an NEH Fellowship from Harvard University. Among other achievements, the SIUE Graduate School inducted her into the Alumni Hall of Fame in 2019, and in 2020 the University planned to honor the service she has rendered to the SIU system as a member of the Board of Trustees and her years of teaching excellence with special recognition during the spring commencement ceremony, which has been rescheduled for August.

In retirement, Portwood has renewed her interest in several research projects that had fallen to the wayside after being appointed as a member of the Board of Trustees. She has expressed an interest in traveling, as she and her late husband, Harry Portwood, had always enjoyed traveling. One of the perks of studying regional history, she says, was the ability to take a drive or weekend to research and find unique ‘off the beaten path’ restaurants and new friends along the way. The husband and wife duo traveled to six continents (forgoing any excursions to Antarctica). In retirement, she hopes to continue engaging in personal research, but also states she still has a desire to see new places and work with groups that offer enrichment and attention for those who need it the most.

This year the Department of History created a new scholarship award, the Dr. Shirley Motley Portwood and Harry Michael Portwood Award for undergraduates studying African American history, in honor of Portwood and her family’s lasting commitment to education. If you would like to make a contribution toward this new undergraduate award, Give to the Department of History.

In February 2020, Madison Historical Encyclopedia conducted a three-day lesson plan at Liberty Middle School teaching Ms. Rachel Harris' eighth-grade classes how to become archivists. Students were taught how to identify artifacts relevant to their local communities and families. They then brought a historical artifact to school and with the aid of the Madison Historical team created data for their unique object by identifying it, generating historical context and situating it as part of a larger historical narrative. Students also worked with IRIS Technician Ben Ostermier to scan their artifacts on a flatbed scanner or have their artifact photographed by a Madison Historical Encyclopedia team member and added to the website. The entire digitized collection from the Liberty Middle School students can be accessed here on the Madison Historical website. The visit was also featured by SIUE's College of Arts and Sciences news page and the Edwardsville Intelligencer. Additionally, Madison Historical received a collection of 79 recorded oral histories in the fall from Professor Emerita of History Ellen Nore on the history of the SIU system and SIUE. Throughout the next school year, their team of graduate and undergraduate students will be processing and digitizing the collection for publication on the digital encyclopedia. This collection will more than double the number of oral histories on the site.

In spring 2019, History 425 students led by Jason Stacy, PhD, annotated and edited Legends of Mexico, a 1847 book written by George Lippard, as part of a collaborative project with Nebraska's Hastings College Press. The book was printed and published in fall 2019 by Hastings students. Students involved with the editing, annotations and writing of the introduction and appendices are: Nichol Allen, Patrick Ayres, Scott Both, Brendon Floyd, William Geiger, Aimee Lafrance, Cassandra Lampitt, Shannan Mason, Alice Morgan, Kendyl Schmidt, Phillip Schneider, Louis Thuet and Tyler Young. 

Ami Null earned her Bachelor of Science in history from SIUE in 2015. After a small hiatus, she began pursuing a Master of Arts in history and Museum Studies Certification program in spring 2019. Null's current research is focused on ethnographic museum studies. Her thesis is an examination of the degree that 19th-century collectors continue to exert authority over contemporary curatorial practices. Outside of her studies, Null works in informal educational outreach at the Saint Louis Science Center and as a graduate assistant at the SIUE University Museum, where the museum team is working on a mass inventory project of over 30,000 objects.

This summer, Master of Arts student Olabode Shadare traveled to Washington D.C. to gain access to and research at the National Archives. Shadare was selected as a recipient of an RSS Grant through SIUE to help defer the costs of travel. His research topic is on the lives of market women in 1960s Nigeria. 

Abbigayle Schaefer is the recipient of numerous departmental awards this year as the grantee of the Timothy P. Fisher Award in Historical Studies, The Kimball, McAfee & Riddleberger Award in Historical Studies, and the Mary A. Maguire Dunnagan History/Philosophy Writing Contest Award. Schaefer graduated summa cum laude in May with an Applied Historical Methods specialization in addition to double-minoring in anthropology and music performance. Schaefer also recently completed an internship at the Becker Medical Library at the Washington University School of Medicine and is currently in search of a permanent position to continue her work in public history. 

With the completion of the spring semester, Phillip Schneider successfully defended his thesis in April entitled, "'The World Will Little Note': The Gettysburg Address and Its Many Interpretations in Newspapers, Political Discourse, and Textbooks since 1863," to graduate with his Masters of Arts in history this May. After graduation, Schneider plans on continuing his work at Civic Memorial High School in Bethalto where he plans on revamping the social studies and history curriculum to increase student analytical and critical thinking skills. 

If you have information to share, please contact:

cschoem@siue.edu
618-650-2414
Department of History
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Peck Hall 0318
Box 1454
Edwardsville, IL 62026-1454