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The Department of History
Alumni Newsletter: June 2021
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| Andrew R.L. Cayton, a much beloved History professor at Miami University, died on December 17, 2015 following a long illness. To honor his legacy, the Department of History has established the Andrew R.L. Cayton Memorial Fund.
The fund commemorates Professor Cayton’s profound impact as an instructor, advisor, and mentor of generations of students in the History Department and at Miami University. The fund will support history students’ research, internships, and other opportunities to expand their education and to prepare them for a wide range of careers.
Donations can be made by clicking the red button below. Please reference “Andrew R.L. Cayton Memorial Fund” in the memo section.
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Dear History Alumni and Friends:
As the summer approaches, the History Department emerges from a long and challenging, but also remarkably productive year. During the spring students and faculty continued to study, learn, and research while adhering to a wide array of safety protocols. Some classes were remote, and others combined in-person and online components. As the year went on, faculty became proficient in online teaching, and experimented with new pedagogies. Thanks to Zoom, numerous guests visited our classes, students met fellow-students at other institutions, or interviewed experts in their area of study. Nevertheless, by the spring, a majority of our classes were able to feature regular face-to-face meetings or were fully in-person. Many of us rediscovered the pleasures and rewards of looking each other in the eye and meeting in regular classrooms.
In this way, the department’s work continued unabated, as I hope this newsletter will show. One story explains the remarkable growth of a history magazine aimed at a large audience, which the History Department is proud to co-sponsor along with our colleagues at The Ohio State University. Co-edited by Dr. Steven Conn, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective showcases the power of history in recovering the backstories behind the news headlines with which we are bombarded every day. It reminds us that journalism may be an important first draft of history, but that we definitely need the second (and third) drafts historians can offer. Origins is now embarking on a new partnership with Getty Images, which will open up its superb photo archives for a project entitled, “Picturing Black Lives.” I encourage you to check out the journal and become a regular reader.
History faculty also participated in efforts of Miami’s Humanities Center to disseminate humanities inquiry. This spring, Drs. Conn, Kimberly Hamlin, and Steven Tuck offered remote lectures in a series, co-organized with the Miami Alumni Association, on “Objects that Changed the World.” It is a form of engagement with our alumni which we are keen to continue in the future.
This newsletter also features samples of the kind of innovative teaching spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Andrew Offenburger and his students in “Researching Midwestern History” conducted notable research on the history of Storm Lake, Iowa, engaging directly with a range of local partners. Likewise, students in “History Through Literature,” taught by Dr. Stephen Norris, interviewed experts on the work of the great novelist Vasily Grossman.
Last but not least, I am proud to report that a large group of history majors graduated in May. This included a talented cohort of History honors students, who presented their research during a successful, very well attended History Honors Symposium. The work of one of these newly minted graduates, and of two other students, is featured below. Congratulations to all!
I hope that you and your families have weathered the pandemic in the best way possible, and can now look forward to better times. On behalf of the History Department, I send you our best wishes for the summer season. We always welcome your news and look forward to being in touch again in the next academic year. Meanwhile, don’t forget to follow us on the department’s Facebook page.
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| Miami Historians and the Success of Origins
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 | Performing COVID-19 health checks in India (Source: Getty Images)
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Our online magazine, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, produced in collaboration with the History Department at Ohio State, publishes a variety of content -- feature articles, short pieces, book reviews and more -- and now reaches over 200,000 readers each month. Last summer, Origins published over 3 dozen articles to help put COVID-19 in historical context.
At the start of 2021, Origins launched an exciting new project in partnership with Getty Images. Working with Getty's unparalleled photographic archive, Origins will publish a series of photo essays titled "Picturing Black Lives." Authors will choose images from Getty's collection and then drill deep into their historical significance.
"The range of Getty's images," says Origins editor and W. E. Smith Professor Steven Conn, "is truly staggering. Having access to them will allow us to bring Black history to readers in all its diversity."
The project is still under development and will go live later in the summer. In the meantime, if you haven't spent any time with Origins, check out the website.
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| Objects That Changed the World
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This spring semester, the Miami University Humanities Center, in collaboration with the Alumni Association, began a well-attended lecture series entitled “Objects that Changed the World. Lectures on Transformative Human Creations.”
No fewer than three history faculty have already contributed: Dr. Steven Conn lectured on “ The Model T,” Dr. Kimberly Hamlin discussed the history of “ The Birth Control Pill,” and Dr. Steven Tuck took his audience on a tour of the ancient Roman world in a lecture on “ Concrete.” Click on the images or links to hear these fascinating talks.
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This spring, students in Dr. Andrew Offenburger’s new course, "Researching Midwestern History," focused their work on Storm Lake, Iowa, a town transformed in recent years by industrial agriculture and immigration. Students conducted interviews with workers, community leaders, journalists, and scholars to examine the last thirty years of the community's history.
This course was part of an initiative called HumanitiesWorks, which aims to apply skills developed in humanities classes to real-world enterprises or communities. The results of this class' research -- more than 40 interviews, 20 transcripts, and 30 written pieces -- were detailed in class blogs and will be donated to the Buena Vista County Historical Society. Several op-eds will also be published in the Storm Lake Times in the coming weeks.
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Students in “History Through Literature,” taught by Dr. Stephen Norris, spent the spring 2021 semester reading the works of the Soviet-Jewish author Vasily Grossman. Although he had established himself as a writer before World War II, Grossman became famous during that conflict, where he served as a frontline reporter from Stalingrad and other locales. He was with the Red Army when they discovered the Nazi death camps in 1944, writing "The Hell of Treblinka," which was later submitted to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
After the war, Grossman wrote his long novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, which brought him into conflict with the Soviet state. Students read these novels, his short stories, his essays, and the 2019 biography of Grossman by Alexandra Popoff. The hybrid format allowed for the class to have Zoom visits with Professor Polly Jones, a University of Oxford scholar who has written on trauma in Soviet fiction, Robert Chandler, the primary translator of Grossman in English, and Alexandra Popoff, Grossman's biographer.
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| Jessica Baloun graduated with a degree in History and International Studies in the Spring of 2021. She won the first prize of the 2021 Libraries Award for Undergraduate Research Excellence (LAURE) for the research she conducted for her History Honors thesis, advised by Dr. Stephen Norris.
Jessica explains her project as follows:
My thesis, entitled Before the Numbers Disappeared: Media and Perception of the 1937 Soviet Census, explores the ever-daunting and churning machine that was Soviet media. My research is situated in the period before its collection, highlighting the issues the state faced in collecting data to help run a socialist society and prove the Soviet experiment was a success. Soviet newspapers like Pravda and the Moscow News presented the census as a point of pride for the country and painted its enumerators as national heroes. However, diaries of census-takers and participants revealed that many Soviet citizens deeply feared handing over personal information to census-takers, believing that doing so would lead to imprisonment or worse. Mirroring the 2020 U.S. census’s citizenship question, my thesis looks at controversies of religion, nationality, and anti-Soviet thought and how the census became a conduit of the overall unease within the Soviet population.
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examines the experiences of evacuees, deportees, and refugees in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Central Asia during World War II. Each displaced person's status and origins could restrict access to jobs, housing, food, and government support. These challenges to survival defined the shared experiences of displaced people in Central Asia. This research adds to our understanding of societal and human behavior in crisis times and develops our understanding of the Soviet Union's reaction to World War II. Assessing the Soviet Union's inability to solve the humanitarian crisis of displaced people and how its actions worsened the situation, can help us better understand the failures and successes of policies in humanitarian crises today. It can also help create plans and solutions for the disasters, human-made or otherwise, of the future.
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These materials, made accessible through QR codes on display there, included object labels, written interpretations, and audio files. As of May 14, the QR codes had been accessed 125 times.
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| Michael Ufferman ‘94 became the author of Florida Criminal Practice and Procedure (Thomson Reuters) in 2019.
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| Dr. Matthew Gordon is the author of the biography Ahmad ibn Tulun: Governor of Abbasid Egypt, 868-884. Makers of the Muslim World (Oneworld, 2021). His article on “Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE)” is forthcoming in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2, eds. Craig Perry, et al. (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Kimberly Hamlin was selected as an inaugural winner of Miami University’s Woman of Excellence award for 2021. Dr. Hamlin continued her busy schedule of lecturing, writing op-eds, and giving interviews on her recent biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener, women’s suffrage, the #MeToo movement, and other aspects of women’s history and rights.
Dr. Andrew Offenburger is the editor of the memoir The Aimless Life by Leonard Worcester, Jr. (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). “Worcester’s 1939 memoir of his ‘aimless’ life describes an important period in U.S. and Mexican history from the perspective of an American miner, musician, and entrepreneur.”
Dr. Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has been named book review editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, the periodical of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and the flagship journal in the field of early United States history.
Dr. Stephen Tuck published the second edition of his A History of Roman Art (Wiley, 2021) and the following articles: “Ludi and Factions as Organizations of Performers,” Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Oxford, 2021); “Terrae Motu Conlapsum: A post-earthquake rebuilding inscription at Pompeii in imperial and local contexts,” The Classical Journal 117.1; and “Grounding the Ny Carlsberg Vespasian: Analysis and Alternatives” Roman Sculpture in Context: Selected Papers in Ancient Art and Architecture 6.
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College of Arts and Science • Miami University
254 Upham Hall • 100 Bishop Circle • Oxford, OH 45056
Phone: 513-529-5121 • Email: history@MiamiOH.edu
© 2021 Miami University. All rights reserved.
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