Design of the unofficial/official department logo by Jennifer Goetz
Message from Dr. Tom Prasch, Chair
These days, as infection tallies for the omicron variant steadily click upwards and as I register more Incompletes than usual among my final grades, I find myself imagining something like a Decameron II: a sequel to Boccaccio’s classic Renaissance frame tale. You know the one, where ten Florentines flee the plague to a countryside villa, where they wile away their time telling stories the whole ten days they stay away (not really long enough, we can notice, if you’re actually trying to avoid the plague, but what were you expecting, 1001?). Each day one of them sets the theme, each tells a tale to fit it, ten participants, ten days, Decameron.
So I imagine that, when a new batch of plague deaths hits the city, they fly from Florence again, gathering in the same countryside villa to wait out the new wave. There are fewer of them this time: Paminea has died of plague, maybe no surprise, she was the eldest of the group; Panfilo, too, and that was more startling, but he did travel a lot; Neifile won’t even leave her house; and no one knows what happened to Elissa, she’s not answering her email—oh, wait, it’s the Renaissance, isn’t it?—letter-delivering couriers have repeatedly knocked on her door, but received no answer, and she isn’t there at the villa, that much is sure. “Well, we’ll call this one Hexameron,” Fiammetta declares, “and I’ll set our first day’s theme: Survival. Who wants to start?” She turns in turn to each of the gathering; each in turn shakes his or her head, or simply looks away. Finally, she comes to Dioneo, and surely he, always the wittiest among them, the most versatile of their tale-tellers, will have something. There’s a long pause, and then Dioneo shakes his head, too, and says: “I’ve got nothing.”
So ok, maybe it’s a very short sequel. But even if Dioneo has nothing, we still have things to say.
Maybe that Decameron feeling catches the tenor of these end-of-semester days. In the semester’s final weeks, looking out at the faces in my classes—fewer faces, it must be said, with more students tuning in from a distance or listening later or just not there at all—what I saw most was exhaustion, of a deeper sort than usual, not just the three-papers-due-this-week sort of hollowed eyes. Returning to the office, I saw the same sapped and strained looks on the faces of my colleagues. Pandemics, it turns out, are hard. Nancy K. Bristow, in American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (this year's campus Iread) notes that, as the flu infections faded, an official discourse of rosy future-facing optimism was undercut in “the private sphere,” where “that optimistic narrative was most completely rejected” in favor of “a narrative of loss that ended in lives shattered by dislocation, grief, and despair” (157). Yes, we know the feeling.
Still, we continue, we move on, we look ahead. History students were among the graduates at this fall’s commencement ceremony, back in Lee Arena for the first time in a couple years. One of those graduates, Kat Le Fever, has already nabbed a full-time teaching position; she will be starting at Southwest Middle School in Lawrence in January. Rachel Goossen’s ongoing research project has earned new plaudits; her article, "'Repent of the Sins of Homophobia': The Rise of Queer Mennonite Leaders," is receiving the second-place prize for the Thomas Robbins Award for Excellence in the Study of New Religious Movements, the yearly award for the best article in the journal Nova Religio. Tony Silvestri, aside from his teaching (doing his popular Pirates course again in the spring), is busy with an amazing array of new commissions for libretti.
Robin Shrimplin is back at our front desk, too at least part time, still recovering from the effects of her stroke, but there to set a welcoming tone for the department. And maybe it’s because Robin’s back, but students are back as well. In our commons area, that is: one of us will step out of an office and find three or four of them—properly masked, always, distanced—just hanging out, talking about history, or just as often not history, about some film, another class entirely, zombies, the meaning of life, whatever. That commons-room community is part of the life of the department, and so it has been missed these last couple years. Meanwhile, from the beginning of the semester, we have kept up with an array of programs on campus, from forums and historical talks to in-person-again film nights (all discussed in detail below). Our spring course offerings offer enticing new versions of team-taught courses, as Kerry Wynn and Courtney Sullivan (Modern Languages) offer a Women in World War II course incorporating Spring Break travel to France (pandemic permitting), and as Erin Chamberlain (English) and I return to Sherlock Holmes in a course perfectly fitted for our WUmester theme of Truth. Phi Alpha Theta plans to continue looking for ways to engage our WUmester theme in film screenings and forums as well as to take on current events as they arise.
So. We continue. We move on. We look ahead.
And, We're Back!
After a year and a half of socially distanced classes and events, the Department hosted an in-person meet up for history majors early in the fall semester. It was wonderful to catch up with returning students and meet incoming freshmen. There were plenty of snacks and also free t-shirts featuring the nerdtastic design by Jennifer Goetz (left) celebrating the Department's longtime preoccupation with narwhals and the Black Knight ("Tis but a scratch!") from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A few pictures of students and faculty enjoying themselves at the meet up are below.
Historical Movie Nights Return to Henderson
Phi Alpha Theta's monthly tradition of hosting a historical movie night jubilantly returned to Henderson after being held virtually throughout 2020–2021 due to the pandemic.
In anticipation of Jordan Peele's remake of Candyman hit theaters, Phi Alpha Theta screened the 1992 version of the film, directed by Bernard Rose. Filmed in part in Chicago's Cabrini Green, America's most notorious housing project, Rose's cinematic exploration of the intersections of race and horror has a bit of everything: an especially Gothic lynching, as the Candyman's source story; discussions of redlining, racist urban planning, and housing segregation; gang violence and racial paranoia; urban legend and graffiti as modes through which violence is communicated and processed. Alongside this sociopolitical analysis, Rose also creates an uncanny, genuinely creepy horror story.
In September, Phi Alpha Theta reprised its screening of Die Pest in Florenz (1919). Pest was also the selection last September, when all films had to be out of copyright so they could be shown over Zoom. (See story in Fall 2020 newsletter.) This silent film directed by by Otto Rippert features a screenplay by Fritz Lang (who would later make a name for himself as director of such works as Metropolis). Pest was filmed in Weimar Germany in 1919 when, over the course of the previous year, an estimated 426,000 Germans had died in the flu pandemic; this came atop some two million Germans killed over the course of the just-finished world war, which the nation had lost. So, amid the rubble and ruin, as the German film industry began to rebuild, what better subject could there be for a big-budget, hordes-of-extras, massive-set film epic than the coming of the Black Death to Florence in 1348? The film loosely (very loosely) adapts Edgar Allen Poe's plague tale "The Mask of Red Death," refashioning the arrival of the plague as a medieval morality tale with, really, no moral at all but that death comes for us all.
October's film was The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2015), a film that had originally been slated for spring 2020 before the arrival of COVID cancelled all campus events. The VVitch focuses on a family of Puritans (the paterfamilias so pure even other Puritans cannot stand him) who have been banished from the protective wood walls of Plymouth plantation and forced to resettle at the edge of the wilderness. Hauntings ensue. Writer/director Robert Eggers rooted his directorial debut in a close study of seventeenth-century literature (the screenplay borrows heavily from the language of witchcraft pamphlets and Puritan tracts), material culture (the film features careful reconstruction of colonial conditions), and even--see that title--orthography. The result is a deep meditation on how witchcraft was understood by Puritans whose views were shaped by predestinarian thought and a fear of hellfire. It is no less creepy for all that.
November featured a fiftieth-anniversary screening of Shaft (1971). Kansas native Gordon Parks directed the film, Richard Roundtree played Shaft (and did most of his own stunts), Isaac Hayes provided the theme song so many of us can still hum. Shaft was a breakthrough film in multiple respects: the first black private eye, the founding film of blaxploitation cinema (even if Parks despaired at the label), and Parks’s greatest commercial success. In conversation with film critic Roger Ebert, Parks recalled the film’s reception: “Suddenly, I was the perpetrator of a hero. Ghetto kids were coming downtown to see their hero, Shaft, and here was a black man on the screen they didn’t have to be ashamed of,” smart, sassy, debonair, and dangerous. Nor was Parks ashamed of his contribution to commercially successful black film; as he told Ebert: “We need movies about the history of our people, yes, but we need heroic fantasies about our people, too. We all need a little James Bond now and then.” And we still do.
For the final Historical Movie Night of the semester, Phi Alpha Theta chose Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974). Brooks’s gleeful slapstick demolition of the Western genre tells the story of what happens when Rock Ridge (a town in which everyone is named Johnson) gets its first Black sheriff and tries to resist the seizure of their land by the railroad, its corporate ends abetted by a host of baddies (outlaws and bandits, of course, but also anachronistic Nazis and Klansmen and biker gangs). The screenplay, developed by Brooks and comic Richard Pryor (Brooks’s first choice to play Black Bart, vetoed by the studios), features bawdy cabaret numbers ala Marlene Dietrich, cheerful fourth-wall bashing, Yiddish-speaking Indians, one hilarious line from Friedrich Nietzsche, cream pies, fart jokes, and much general mayhem. It is also, from our perspective nearly fifty years on, atrociously politically incorrect, its humor often homophobic, misogynistic, and utterly careless in its use of racial and ethnic slurs. And yet Brooks pictured a racially and ethnically diverse image of Western settlement, frankly decades before many historians did, while pushing (perhaps with a touch too much kumbaya) against the racist strictures of his own day.
Stay tuned in this coming semester for a fresh slate of films geared to our WUmester theme of Truth (see story below). These will include F for Fake (1976), in which Orson Welles (master charlatan himself, as anyone who knows of his “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast will recall) takes us on a slyly deceptive mock-documentary tour of the world of art forgery; The Return of Martin Guerre (1976), Daniel Vigne’s exploration of an actual episode of identity theft in early-modern France (with close collaboration by historian Natalie Zemon Davis); Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang’s silent futuristic masterpiece, and also another examination of unclear identity as the film asks: who is the real Maria, the woman or the robot? (ok, this one only barely fits the “Truth” umbrella, but we had requests); Through Martha’s Eyes (2006), Charles Cranston’s film, based on Marcia Cebulska’s screenplay, which, looking at slaveholder Thomas Johnson and his Shawnee Mission efforts to re-educate (or de-Indianize) Native Americans, asks about the truth behind Kansas’s “free state” image; Kevin Willmott's The 24th, which investigates the truth behind the "Houston riots" of 1917; and Life of Brian (1979), Monty Python’s comic search for the true Messiah.
Phi Alpha Theta Presents...
Research talks and panel discussions carried on this semester utilizing a hybrid of in-person and Zoom platforms. Read on for details and links to recorded presentations.
The Baddest Man in Town with Professor Eric McHenry
"Ev'rybody body talk about Stackolee," one of the early tunes declared, and song after song seems to confirm it. Poet Eric McHenry took a deep dive into digitized Black newspapers and the American songbook in his exploration of the roots of the Stagger Lee legend, tracking the tale back to the St. Louis barroom where, on Christmas night 1895, William Lyons was gunned downed by Lee Shelton (aka Stack Lee, or Stagolee, eventually Stagger Lee), and then forward through its multiple musical permutations. Eric McHenry, professor of English, shared his findings in a presentation on September 9.
The Truth about Critical Race Theory: A Forum Discussion
Anyone reading the headlines lately will have heard a lot about Critical Race Theory (CRT), and about attempts by local schoolboards, state legislators, and national policymakers to eliminate it from classrooms. But protests and polemics tend to lack footnotes, and looking at the sources confirms that these critics' characterizations of CRT bear little resemblance to the theory itself. In September, Phi Alpha Theta, along with the Department of English and the WU School of Law's Comparative and International Law Center, co-sponsored a forum discussion about CRT. The aim of the discussion was to understand the central claims and concepts of CRT, as well as the context surrounding attempts to ban it and what restrictions on teaching about race actually mean for teachers and students. The forum featured presentations by: Steve Hageman, Center for Student Success; Craig Martin, School of Law; Kara Kendall-Morwick, Department of English; and Tom Prasch, Department of History
Seeking Truth in Bleeding Kansas with Professors Bruce Mactavish and Kelly Erby
On May 21, 1856, a large posse of Missourians led by Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones, Alabaman Jefferson Buford, and former Missouri Senator David Rice Atchison attacked the free-state settlement of Lawrence, Kansas Territory. The “sacking” of Lawrence, as the eastern free-state press soon labeled these events, marked a major turning point in the Kansas territorial struggle, as will be discussed here. And yet, knowledge of many of the key facts regarding the May attack on Lawrence remain unknown or controversial.
The role Atchison played in the raid is particularly divisive. In the days following the assault, an incendiary speech attributed to Atchison circulated in which the former Senator declared to the posse gathered at Lawrence, “Boys, today I am a Kickapoo Ranger, by God!” and goaded his listeners to “Spring like your bloodhounds at home upon that d--d accursed abolition hole,” loot the homes of “those infernal [negro]-stealers,” and “cool [revolvers & bowie knives] in the heart's blood of all those d--d dogs, that dare defend that d--d breathing hole of hell”—all this in the name of Southern rights. Publication of the speech in eastern Republican newspapers like the New York Tribune and Chicago Tribune helped to make the attack on Lawrence a moral victory for the free-state side and shifted public opinion from disfavor for free-sate defiance of territorial law to admiration for the restraint free-state settlers had shown in not responding to such violence. Atchison, however, denied ever making such a speech, and proslavery and antislavery sources alike supported him in this claim.
In the century and a half since these events, the rich historiography of “Bleeding Kansas” has come to no convincing conclusion regarding the part Atchison did or did not play in the raid, and historians remain divided over the authenticity of his so-called “Kickapoo Ranger” speech. This talk by Professors Bruce Mactavish and Kelly Erby examined what we really know about Atchison’s speech and how it was reported in the national press. Erby and Mactavish further discussed how historians seek the truth about Bleeding Kansas and the obstacles they confront in doing so.
Spring 2022 Upper-Division Course Offerings
HI 300 A Pirates: Yo ho! Curse the King and all the higher powers! This course explores the history of the Atlantic region in general, and the Caribbean Sea in particular, during the Golden Age of pirates, c.1640-1725. We will explore the geopolitical situation in the New World in the 16th and 17thc. which gave rise to the conditions in which piracy grew and thrived. We will discover the many reasons why men (and some women) became pirates; the various types of pirates; pirate methods; life aboard the sailing ships of that era; pirate culture and traditions; and the islands and ports which they called home. We will meet infamous pirates such as Captain Morgan, Charles Vane, Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, Bartholomew Roberts, Anne Booney, and many others. We will study the development of the modern fascination with pirates in literature and film, the ways in which the modern image of pirate was crafted, and how this romantic image differs from the reality of pirate life on the high seas during this period. Finally, a series of creative re-enactive projects will round out students’ appreciation for and understanding of the period. Student work will include Midterm and Final exams, a research project, extensive reading and analytical writing on primary and secondary sources, with participation in various class activities. ‘Tis not an easy mark, this class, and ye can lay to that. So be ye warned. This course can be taken to fill either European or American degree requirements. (Tues. 5:30-8:00) Silvestri
HI 300 B Sherlock Holmes: Historians love Sherlock Holmes because Arthur Conan Doyle's tales so deeply imbed us in the material culture of the late Victorian era. Scholars of literature love Sherlock Holmes because the tales do so much to crystallize the detective genre. We all love him because he's our favorite eccentric detective, bringing his array of arcane knowledge and his deductive method (and his quirky habits) to bear solving mysteries. The course will explore both the canonical stories and novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective's long afterlife, all the way to current variations like the BBC's "Sherlock" and CBS's "Elementary" (and yes, we'll even glance at the Robert Downey, Jr. version). Students will be required to do regular response papers reacting to course materials and each will develop and present a research topic on the material. (1:00 – 2:15 MW) Prasch
HI 300 E Women in World War II: In this interdisciplinary course, we explore women’s roles during WWII in French and A survey of the history and theology of the Magisterial, Radical, and Roman Catholic Reformation movements of the early sixteenth century, with particular emphasis on the religious ideas and practices of leading reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola. Reformation ideas will be examined within the context of the experiences of these principal figures and of the public they addressed and by whom they were interpreted. The reformation will be considered in relation to the cultural, social, economic, and political changes of the early modern period. American fiction, film, autobiography, and history. Frequently cast as victims, resistors, collaborators, patriots, and protesters, women were expected to play a wide spectrum of roles during WWII and the period immediately afterward. This course explores the female experience during the war and its aftermath, and aims to investigate the various representations of women as agents or victims of change. During spring break week, we will travel to Paris and Normandy to explore locations that figure prominently in the sources we will be reading. This is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the historical experience of war and the way it is remembered. (11:00-11:50 MWF) Wynn
HI 300 VA: History of American Childhood: This online course focuses evolving notions of childhood from America's colonial period to the present. Students will trace the evolution of this history from the perspectives of children and youth, reflecting identity formation encompassing social, cultural, political, economic, and educational influences. Class components include films, book reviews, class discussions, and writing assignments. This upper-division course can be taken to fulfill U.S. history degree requirements. (online) Goossen
HI 322 A Kansas History: A comprehensive survey beginning with the land itself and its earliest inhabitants and ending with an overview of the state today. Political and economic aspects of the state’s development are covered, but there is also an emphasis on social and cultural history. Analysis of the evolutionary and dramatic changes in agriculture, education, transportation, manufacturing, and the social fabric lead to a better understanding of the state’s history. Several papers and essay exams. (11:00-12:15 TR) Mactavish
HI 363 Borderlands and Beyond: This course explores Latino history in the United States within the broader U.S., Latin American, and global economic perspective. Beginning during the Spanish colonial period and including the major formative events in U.S./Mexican/Latin American history, (Mexican Independence, Texas independence, Mexican-American War, Mexican Revolution, Spanish-American-Cuban War, etc.), the course asks students to think about the multiple meanings of borders, past and present, as well as the changing role of migration and immigration within that historical context. (TR 9:30-10:45) Morse
After Afghanistan: An International Brown Bag
As readers of our last newsletter will recall, soon after President Biden announced, on April 14, that American troops would be withdrawing from Afghanistan, Phi Alpha Theta quickly pulled together an end-of-semester forum, "Endgame in Afghanistan", on April 22 to review the history of that conflict from a multidisciplinary perspective (you can still watch that forum, here). Soon after that, Baili Zhang asked Tom Prasch if he would be willing to reprise the topic to lead off this semester’s International House brownbag series; Prasch in turn drafted Political Science adjunct Kris Ailslieger, one of the other forum participants, and someone who had on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan (back in 2011, “the last time America was going to withdraw,” as he puts it), to join him.
Much had changed by the time Prasch and Ailslieger did their presentation, “After Afghanistan,” on September 15. Above all else, the summer’s withdrawal, and the almost simultaneous calamitous complete collapse of the Afghan government, Taliban takeover of the country, and the consequent chaotic effort to extricate American Afghan allies before the last American presence disappeared, fundamentally changed the facts on the ground. So Prasch and Ailslieger offered a rather changed presentation at the start of the fall semester, one which considered a different set of questions. The talk’s description: “As the American military departs from Afghanistan and urgently tries to arrange the exit of Americans and American allies still in the field, it is worth providing key background on the recent history of Afghanistan, the initial impetus for American involvement and the changing mission over time, as well as to consider what was (and was not) accomplished and how enduring (or not) the accomplishments of the last two decades will be in the wake of Taliban takeover of state.”
WUmester 2022: Truth
The Department is looking forward to participating again this spring in Washburn's WUmester, an initiative that seeks to engage the entire WU community in a cross-disciplinary learning experience on timely subjects and help students see the connections between the subjects they study in the classroom and real-world debates and problems. This year's topic truth has particular relevance to the study of history. How do power and privilege shape who gets to make truth claims about the past? What forces affect which historical “truths” are heard and believed, and which are hidden, ignored, or discredited? What happens when people living in a society together—especially a multicultural democracy—do not agree on what is true about their past ?
We will report on all the ways the Department gets involved in WUmester in our spring newsletter. For now, please mark your calendars and plan to join us for two WUmester events highlighted below.
Annual Harman Lincoln Lecture featuring Professor Kellie Carter Jackson
This event has been postponed until February 2023 due to the recent spike in COVID cases across the nation.
Jackson is a nineteenth-century historian in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and the author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
WUmester Keynote Address by Albert Woodfox
March 1, 2022 at 6:00 PM in the Bradbury Thompson Alumni Center
Woodfox, a member of the Black Panther Party who was wrongfully convinced of murder and held in prison for 43 years. He spent much of that time in solitary confinement until his conviction was overturned with the assistance of the Innocence Project. Mr. Woodfox wrote, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope, a 2019 non-fiction National Book Award and Pulitzer-Prize finalist.
Fall Commencement 2021
The Department was thrilled to honor its fall graduates back in Lee Arena at a commencement ceremony on December 17, 2021. Below, graduates Calvary Lyle, Kat LaFever, Dalton Tripe, and Austin Tripp pose for pictures
Tom Prasch serves as Fall 2021 Grand Marshal
Our own Tom Prasch served as grand marshal at the College of Arts and Sciences commencement ceremony. Below he poses with mace in hand. Laura Stephenson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and additional members of the platform party stand ready to follow the grand marshal in to Lee Arena.
Congratulations to our Fall 2021 graduates:
Katherine LaFever
Calvary Lyle
Dalton Tripe
Austin Tripp
Graduates, good luck in your future endeavors! Stay in touch!
Connect with the Washburn Department of History on Twitter (@wuhistory), Instagram (@HistoryBods), & Facebook (@ WashburnUniversityHistory).
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