Hello to all the friends of the History Department! Here in Noble Hall, we are all looking forward to the cooler weather of fall, eager new students in our introductory courses, and new opportunities and challenges for our majors. This fall also brings new beginnings for me, as I have assumed the role of department chair. I have big shoes (and neckties) to fill. Those who have followed our activities over the past four years know what a tremendous job Michael Martin has done as our leader—a big thank you to Michael.

We are also grieving the loss of our dear colleague, Michael Fry, who passed away this summer after 35 years of service to Fort Lewis College. Michael was a pillar of this department and the college, and he’ll be greatly missed. We plan to honor his life and service in September and welcome everyone to join us.

There are many exciting moments ahead of us. In September, we’ll host our annual Public History Lecture in conjunction with Fort Lewis College’s Lifelong Learning series. In November, I’ll be taking a group of students to Alabama, reprising for a new group a trip we sponsored three years ago. And in December, our seniors will present their completed research projects to a public audience. As always, we are profoundly grateful to the donors who have made many of these events possible, and we hope to see many of you in our halls again soon.

As always, there is so much to report. In this issue, we remember the life of our beloved colleague Michael Fry; share news of several upcoming History Department events; report on an FLC Foundation trip to the Grand Canyon that Dr. G led this summer; offer faculty updates and an alumni spotlight; and more.

Feel free to pass this along to friends and colleagues, and don’t hesitate to send ideas, updates, or photos for future issues—we love hearing from our students, alumni, donors, and community. Drop me a line anytime: dober@fortlewis.edu

This summer, the History Department lost our beloved colleague Dr. Michael Fry, Professor of History, after 35 years of teaching, scholarship, and service at Fort Lewis College. For generations of FLC students and faculty, Michael was a fixture of the department: a dedicated teacher and mentor, a scholar of Latin America, a tireless advocate for faculty and the liberal arts, and a colleague whose commitment to the institution ran deep.

Michael devoted his scholarly career to the history of Latin America, particularly Central America and Guatemala. A Fulbright Fellow, he lived and traveled extensively throughout the Spanish-speaking world and brought that experience into courses on Latin American, Central American, and Mexican history, the Hispanic world, and U.S.–Latin American relations. Over the years, he also led FLC students on programs in Spain, Central America, and Mexico, including as recently as this past spring, when he took students to Mexico City. His passion for languages extended beyond his own teaching. He was a persistent advocate for foreign-language education at Fort Lewis and worked with colleagues across campus to help preserve opportunities for students to study languages including Spanish and Japanese.

Guatemala stood at the center of Michael’s scholarship. His Historical Dictionary of Guatemala, published in 2018, brought together a historical chronology and hundreds of entries on the people, places, institutions, politics, economy, religion, literature, and culture of the country to which he had devoted so much of his intellectual life. At the time of his death, he was at work on a substantially revised second edition of the dictionary for Bloomsbury. He also spent many years developing a second book, Becoming Ladino: Land and Community in the Guatemalan Montaña, 1700–1840. Although he did not live to see that manuscript published, the project represented decades of research into land, ethnicity, community, and social transformation in colonial and nineteenth-century Guatemala.

Michael’s dedication to that work was perhaps nowhere more apparent than during his 2020 sabbatical. He traveled to Guatemala to conduct archival research for Becoming Ladino, only to find himself there as the COVID-19 pandemic closed archives, libraries, borders, and eventually much of the country. Before the closures, however, he had managed to scan a substantial body of archival material, and he continued working from his room for months before finally making his way home that August.

Yet scholarship was only one part of Michael’s contribution to Fort Lewis College. He served on the Faculty Senate, was a founding member and past president of the FLC chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and remained a steadfast advocate for shared governance and academic freedom. He supported generations of student historians, especially through Phi Alpha Theta, and was always willing to serve on another committee, teach an additional course, or otherwise step in when the department or College needed him. More recently, he helped establish the History Education and Research & Teaching Hub (HEARTH), which opened in 2023 as a space for students to study, collaborate, and build a community around history.

In April 2025, Fort Lewis College recognized Michael’s extraordinary career by awarding him the Roger Peters Distinguished Professor Award. In nominating him, his longtime colleague Dr. Ellen Paul described Michael as representative of a generation of FLC teacher-scholars whose “integrity, stability, and teaching effectiveness” helped build the College’s reputation. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting description.

For those of us in the History Department, however, Michael’s absence is felt in ways that are harder to capture in a list of publications, courses, committees, or awards. He was our colleague and friend. Michael, often accompanied by his beloved dog, Bear, was part of the fabric of our department. His influence lives on in the scholarship he leaves behind, in the institution he helped sustain, and above all in the thousands of students who passed through his classrooms during his 35 years at Fort Lewis College. We will miss him greatly.

The History Department and Fort Lewis College will honor Michael’s life and service at a memorial gathering on Thursday, September 17, 4:30 – 6:00pm in the Vallecito Room, Student Union Building. We hope that former students, colleagues, friends, and members of the community will join us.

FLC History Department and FLC Life-long Learning presents

Landscape Scale History in Southeast Colorado

Eric Leonard, Public Historian

Thursday, September 24, 7:00 pm

Noble Hall, Room 130, Fort Lewis College

Public Lands Professional and Public Historian Eric Leonard will describe Southeast Colorado’s three national historic sites: Amache, Sand Creek Massacre, and the Bent’s Old Fort. Established between 1960 and 2024, these parks tell a cohesive 100-year story of westward expansion, resource extraction, persecution, and displacement. This program will explore how and why they were established, and what each park says about the American moment in which it was preserved.

Ed. Note: this fall, Dr. Gulliford will once again lead his History River Trip on the Upper San Juan River in Southeastern Utah. Thanks to donors and community support, this trip is highly subsidized for all FLC students and costs only $20 (that is NOT a typo!!). It is also open to faculty and staff for $400. This trip typically runs around $1200. Spaces are limited so book soon.

The first flyer below is for students and the second for faculty and staff.

Save the Date: Senior Seminar Presentations December 5, 2026

Each year, History majors complete a year-long sequence culminating in their senior theses. A highlight of the process is the public presentation of their research, where students share their work with the community and hone their presentation skills.

This year’s Senior Seminar Presentations will take place on Saturday, December 5. We’d love to see you there! Once the schedule is finalized, we’ll share additional details.

 FLC Foundation History Trip in the Grand Canyon 

Ed. Note: This past June, Dr. Andrew Gulliford led the ninth annual FLC Foundation Trip, taking alumni, community members, and friends of the College on a 14-day, 226-mile journey river trip through the Grand Canyon. Below is an abridged version of Dr. G’s account of the trip, taken from his Durango Herald column, Gulliver’s Travels. All photos courtesy of Andrew Gulliford.

The greatest camping trip ever is a 14-day, 226-mile expedition on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. For this June’s ninth annual Fort Lewis College charter tour, 20 of us had seven guides, three rafts, and four specially built Grand Canyon dories to tackle the longest stretch of whitewater rapids in North America. Five million visitors come annually to Grand Canyon, but only 26,000 travel the river corridor.

Our guests included local folks from Durango, Farmington, and Aztec, NM, as well as friends of the college and alumni from Minnesota, Bali, and Jakarta, Indonesia. For everyone, including my wife Stephanie Moran, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and though we worried about low water levels on the Colorado River, the guides did not. Yes, the water was low for early June, but in the post-dam era of Glen Canyon Dam our launching level of between 6,000 and 10,000 cubic feet per second (CFS) is often a fall, winter, and spring water level. Each time, in each season, the rapids are different. Some rocks are more visible. Others hide beneath the river’s surface.

Three raft companies in Grand Canyon regularly use dories. We were with the best—AzRA or Arizona Raft Adventures. We had consummate guides who were safety-oriented, cooked fabulous meals, practiced excellent teamwork, and showed us how metal and wooden Grand Canyon dories, which evolved from fishing boats in the Pacific Northwest, could perform as whitewater race cars careening through tall, breaking waves and over 100 rapids.

As we spun and danced in the waves a wall of water crashed over my side of the boat. I forgot to close my mouth. I drank half of that wave and bailed the other half. Doing the dory dance in Grand Canyon the phrase is shake, rattle and BAIL!—which we learned as an instant command from our guide and boat captain. Sitting in the front meant going through a car wash several times a day.

There were miles and miles of Colorado River flat water, which was ocean green and almost iridescent, and about 10% of our trip was riffles and rapids with famous names like Badger Creek, Soap Creek, Hance, Sockdolager (a 19th century boxing term for a knock-down blow) and Grapevine. This became a unique history trip with dories that have in boatman’s terms “sensitive trim.” Passengers moving a butt cheek left or right can make all the difference in a raging rapid.

In the afternoon, once we settled onto our beach front property and after we’d found our camping spots, set up a tent or two, and rustled through wet burlap bags to find cold beverages, I told tales from the Grand Canyon’s human history. Listening to history talks became a diversion from the usual guest behavior of watching “guide tv” or eyeballing the guides as they created delicious camp cuisine. After dinner we shared more stories and waited for white ribbons of stars to appear, which are dramatic above the canyon’s black cliffs. Campers with red bulbs on their headlamps looked like large fireflies swarming a darkened beach.

During the day we studied geology and came to understand Major John Wesley Powell’s observations. His crew ran the canyon for the first time in 1869. Powell realized that harder rock walls predicted bigger rapids which occur at fault lines as do ancient Native American trails that we frequently hiked. In the Inner Gorge of 1.7-billion-year-old schists and granite, within black rock containing improbable streaks of white and pink quartz, we saw the roots of the earth from the basement of time.

But Major Powell’s expedition had the wrong boats. He brought heavy Great Lakes boats made of oak that sat two oarsmen on separate seats who could not see forward. Another man looked down river and frantically moved a tiller. Powell’s boats had keels, making them cumbersome, while our specially constructed smooth-bottomed dories zipped through waves.

“In a dory everything is different depending upon how the boat is loaded, where the passengers are sitting, and what the wind and currents are,” explained trip leader Jim Norton. He added, “If I’m going to be rowing, I’d rather row a dory though it has a fixed hull. Dories are so responsive. They are a truth serum. If you’re on, you’re on, and if you’re off, the river is going to tell you. A raft is a snowplow compared to a dory’s elegance. Dories are great fun and beautiful to ride in, but if you crash a dory, it’s a giant metal hazard.”

We had no crashes, no flips, no passengers with an OBE or “out of boat experience.” Our expert AzRA guides knew just the right lines to take whether it was river right, river left, or a slipslide down the middle.

We watched lizards doing pushups on rocks. A coiled rattlesnake dozed twenty feet from one of our tents and red ants usually had the right of way. We enjoyed time on the beaches and only had one night with a windy sand blast at 1:30 a.m. After the notorious Hance Rapid, Norton laughed and said, “I am delighted to have had six feet of happiness for our line through the rapid.”

It was not just whitewater fun. We spied two heron rookeries in the river, a sunbathing heron with wings spread wide, a bewildered beaver, and dozens of desert bighorn sheep. Ravens greeted us at almost every campsite. One night a ringtailed cat sunk his teeth into a coffee creamer. We hiked up creeks and canyons, played like minks in the turquoise blue waters of the Little Colorado River, and visited Elves Chasm, Stone Creek, Shinumo Creek, and Fern Glen.

FLC’s Planned Giving Officer Dave Kerns explained, “Studying history while traveling through Grand Canyon let us connect with the land and its stories firsthand. It’s one thing to read about the canyon’s geology and human history, but it’s another to see it, touch it, and feel its power. That’s the essence of experiential education.” For questions about future trips contact him at 970-759-9632.

In those fourteen days and 226 miles, strangers became friends. We laughed and cheered after a perfect run through Lava Falls. We helped load and unload the boats, did kitchen chores. We had our adventure, our dash of danger, but we were always in good hands. We became a floating community of canyoneers. Most if not all of us would return in a heartbeat.

To read the full unabridged piece, see the Durango Herald.

Student Report from the Field

Ed. note: This past summer, Jackie Lawless traveled to Japan with financial support from the History Department in order to conduct research for her Senior Thesis (supervised by Dr. Ober). Her thesis compares how Uchimura Kanzo’s (1861-1930) and Endo Shusaku’s (1923-1996) writings resolve the conflicts and tensions surrounding the spread of Christianity in modern Japan. Her report is below.

The rebuilt Urakami Cathedral stands behind the ruins of the old Urakami Cathedral, along with statues that survived the atomic bombing (top). 

Selfie with the oldest surviving church in Japan, Oura Cathedral (bottom). Photos courtesy of Jackie Lawless

Hello! My name is Jackie Lawless, and I am a senior History Major. This past summer, I traveled to Tokyo and Nagasaki to research my senior thesis on Japanese Christian authors (1860’s-1990’s). On this trip, I experienced Japan’s Christian history firsthand by visiting many churches, museums, libraries, and colleges. Some highlights include Urakami Cathedral, the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, and the International Christian University in Tokyo. 

Nagasaki was incredible; I had never been to a place with such a rich syncretic cultural history. As a port town, Nagasaki experienced many cultural influxes, including Portuguese Catholicism in the 1500’s. Nagasaki soon became known as the “Little Rome” of Japan until 1587, when Christianity became banned in Japan. The Kyushu region of Japan faced the harshest persecution after the failed Christian samurai rebellion known as the Shimabara Rebellion. As I traveled, I saw many of the sites that inspired Endo Shusaku’s 1966 masterpiece: Silence. I had never realized the true gravity of the persecution of Christianity in Japan. As Professor Jeremiah Alberg of International Christian University explained it to me, all throughout history the only comparable Christian persecution of this size is that of the early church in Rome. Finally, due to sheer coincidence, I was in Nagasaki on the 81st anniversary of America dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. On August 9th, protestors crowded the atomic hypocenter, with signs reading “Stop Nuclear Testing” and “70,000 dead.” Buddhist monks chanted sutras, people gave speeches, and high schoolers decorated the river barriers with murals on world peace. Despite the crowds and noise, right around the time when the bomb went off 81 years ago, it was complete silence, with only the bells of the Urakami Cathedral breaking it. Overall, an amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience, made possible by the History department.  

HIST 313: Wilderness in America | Andrew Gulliford

HIST 334: U.S. War in Vietnam | Paul Kuenker

HIST 345: Archival Theory and Practice | Michael Martin

HIST 378: Two World Wars in Europe | Ellen Paul

HIST 392: Identity and Politics in Modern Asia | Douglas Ober

And plenty of HI-1’s, other lower-levels, History Internships and more!

Dr. Gulliford has a new book (yet another!) out next month with the University of Utah Press, entitled Lonesome Landscapes: Stories from National Conservation Lands. Lonesome Landscapes is the first comprehensive history of the Bureau of Land Management’s vast National Conservation Lands—thirty-seven million acres spanning eleven western states and Alaska. From the publisher: “Drawing from archives, interviews, and field reporting, Gulliford reveals the unsung heroes who safeguarded these lands, from pioneering rangers to grassroots advocates in Native American and Hispanic communities. With vivid stories of explorers, cowboys, hermits, and even an alligator named Clem, this book blends scholarship with storytelling. Lonesome Landscapes is both a definitive history and a call to keep America’s wild places in public hands—an essential read for anyone passionate about the West.” Congratulations, Dr. G!

He continues to hear from former students and welcomes email contacts and connections. Like all of us in the History Department, he isproud of our student successes. Email Dr. G at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu

In addition to taking over as chair, Dr. Kuenker is thrilled to be teaching his History, Myth, and Memory course once again this fall. He’ll be taking a group of students in the class to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama, to visit and contemplate museums, art installations, and memorials related to the histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. This summer, Dr. Kuenker continued his work with the College Board, helping lead the scoring of more than 500,000 AP U.S. History exams and producing new questions and content for future exams.

Dr. Martin spent a rather quiet summer after June 30, once he was no longer Chair of the History Department. He thoroughly enjoyed his time as Chair but, after four years, was ready to hand it off to Dr. Paul Kuenker. Being Chair can be rather taxing service, but also rewarding when you get to lead one of the best departments on campus!

He is finishing up one book—his work on the eighth-century Irish commentary on the Psalms—to finally send off to the publisher by November. He also renegotiated a contract for another book, which he will submit for publication by November 2027. That book will examine how everyday people in early medieval Europe (c. 750–950 CE) learned theology at a rudimentary level, using sermons preached to local communities as its primary source material. The renegotiation became necessary when his previous publisher sold its English-language titles to a different publisher, putting him somewhat back to ground zero on the book. He will also be submitting his application for a Fall 2027 sabbatical to complete the project.

Other than that, he read a lot of great books for leisure (again, after June 30), which was incredibly fun, relaxing, and restful. Now he is ready for the new school year to start.

This past summer, Dr. Ober traveled to Nepal and India to continue research for his book manuscript, The Idea of the Indigenous: How Asia Rewrote a Global History. The trip went wrong in all the right ways, delaying the book’s completion a bit but adding further nuance to its analysis.

He also completed the first English translation of Rahul Sankrityayan’s Hindi-language Merī Yūrop Yātrā, a lively account of the celebrated Indian writer’s six-month journey through Europe and Africa in 1932–33. Part travelogue, part history, and part political portrait of the 1930s, the book recovers a voice that is at once worldly, comic, opinionated, humane, and insatiably curious. The result is a European travelogue unlike almost any other. The translation is currently under review with publishers, with hopes that it will appear in print next year.

In July, Dr. Ober was also interviewed by the Better Burma Foundation on its Insight Myanmar podcast. The resulting two-and-a-half-hour conversation ranges across his first book, Dust on the Throne, the history of Buddhism in modern India, Buddhist networks between India and Burma, World Cup football, and the many political uses of the past.

This fall, Dr. Paul continues to guide our seniors through their senior seminar and thesis in HIST 496, the culmination of a three-semester sequence required of all History majors. The course will conclude in December with the completion of a formal thesis and a public presentation on Saturday 5 December to which all community members are invited.

Dr. Paul is also teaching a range of courses in European history. In Summer 2026, she taught two online courses: Western Civilization II and the upper-division Hitler and the Holocaust. In Fall 2026, she is offering a super load of Western Civilization, along with the senior seminar. In Spring 2027, Dr. Paul will teach Two World Wars in Europe (HIST 378) and a couple of liberal arts core Western Civ sections. The History department offers a range of lower-division courses each term that helps all students complete their general education credits. These courses often spark interest in the field and lead students to pursue a major or minor in history. She looks forward to guiding students through these courses as they develop the research and analytical skills that will carry them forward beyond Fort Lewis.

Aspen Frick (BA, History 2024) works in communications and social media on projects at the intersection of public land use and Indigenous land management. She works with the National Parks Conservation Association and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, as well as other partners, advocating for environmental justice.

This work continues themes Aspen explored in her Senior Thesis in History, which examined the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the tensions it created between Indigenous land ownership, corporate structures, and traditional land use. Her research considered how requirements to generate profits could limit the ability of Native communities to determine how their lands were managed and could affect traditional subsistence practices—practices that encompass not only livelihoods but also the sharing of culture and its transmission to future generations.

Aspen lives in Durango and still makes time to visit her family in Alaska.

We are very proud of our alumni and would love to share their stories. Please email us with stories of how you have used your History degree, or places you have visited with some historical connections you would love to share, along with a photo of you there, or at your job putting that degree to work!

We also have a map of the United States in our department hallway. We would love to pinpoint where our alumni are at. Eventually we would like to build up an electronic version to include on our website in the Alumni Updates section. Please let us know where you are at!

The History Department thanks Copy Editor Deedee Schadt for her work on this publication.

Our work would not be possible without the generous support of our community donors. Your gifts are testaments to the value of history, critical thinking, and the liberal arts in a complex and interdependent world.

Your ongoing contributions are most appreciated, please consider donating to one of our funds to help us continue this valuable work.

History Associates Fund

Reese Kelly Excellence Fund

Public History Fund

Duane Smith Lecture Series

General Ron & Miss Jane Fogleman's History Excellence Endowment