1356 Campus Drive, East Campus, 224 Classroom Bldg., Box 90719, Durham, NC  27708-0719 | (919) 684-3014 | history.duke.edu                            vol. 5, December 2024

Highlighting the accomplishments of our faculty, graduate students, and alumni, as well as events and other noteworthy topics.  Suggestions and submissions are welcome at history@duke.edu.  Submission is no guarantee of inclusion.

Dear Friends of History,

As the calendar year draws to a close, I write with words of gratitude towards everyone in our community: to my colleagues in the faculty for their labors, their collegiality, the insightful books and articles they publish, and their will to do good; to our staff who...   [click for full text] 

The inaugural session of our new summer experiential program, History+, went swimmingly!  Eighteen students gained hands-on research experience through one of four distinct projects over the course of eight weeks. You can access our full report—and, increasingly, details about the Summer 2025 agenda—here. We look forward to continuing, growing, and improving this program to provide unique and impactful experiences for history-loving Duke students!

Effective July 1, 2024, the Office of Global Affairs named Adam Mestyan as the next director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center and the Duke University Middle East Studies Center.  "His leadership," said Eve Duffy, associate vice provost for Global Affairs, "will be invaluable to DISC and DUMESC as they continue to promote interdisciplinary research and teaching on the Middle Eastern region and the larger Islamic world.”

Hannah Conway co-wrote an article for the August issue of Ecology Law Quarterly entitled Climate Change and the Clean Air Act of 1970 Part I: the Scientific Basis.  Super interested? Check out some related press coverage:  1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Margaret Humphreys' new book, Searching for Dr. Harris: The Life and Times of a Remarkable African American Physician (UNC Press, 2024) traces the path of Dr. J.D. Harris, who overcame enormous structural and social barriers to become one of the first Black American doctors, before even the opening of Howard Medical School in the 1870s.

Following a long election season focused on voting rights and student disenfranchisement, Gunther Peck's new book, Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819 has just been published jointly by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Nancy MacLean has been traveling to battleground states and districts since July to accompany showings of the powerful and critically acclaimed new documentary, Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy, engaging local audiences in conversations about the existential stakes of the recent national election. Ken Burns called the film “a great and powerful and timely film, filled with the dread this moment engenders; the cynical misuse of religion to advance aims diametrically the opposite of Christianity’s mission.”

This spring, Nancy will teach her last course before retirement (😭) to focus more on democracy defense and writing her next book (😀).  Her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, was just released in a 30th Anniversary Edition by Oxford University Press, with a new preface by the author.

In May, Martin Miller presented his paper, The Case for Republicanism in Late Imperial Russia, at the Fourth Venice World Multidisciplinary Conference on Republics and Republicanism at Venice International University in Italy. His recent book, "Observers: Western Documentary Photography in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991," is in production at Routledge and is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2025.

Kudos to DUS James Chappel, whose new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (Basic Books, 2024), was named one of The New Republic magazine's Best Books of the Fall and also reviewed in The New Yorker.

Chappel also gave a lecture on Britain and the Second World War to about 40 inmates at the federal correctional facility in Butner. If any faculty would like to participate in the Duke in Prison lecture program, please get in touch with him! 

Phil Stern’s 2023 book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press) was honored with the Stansky Book Prize, cited as "a deeply researched and sweeping reinterpretation of the British Empire since the sixteenth century."  The prize is awarded annually by the North American Conference on British Studies for the best book published anywhere by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies since 1800.

Nicole Barnes boldly turned Halloween into an opportunity to promote her work-in-progress,  “Think Before You Flush: Your Body’s Secrets to a Healthier Ecosystem."  Her research focuses on Chinese farmers' use of human excretions (euphemistically called nightsoil or, more recently, humanure) for agricultural fertilizer. This practice can be done safely and without undue stench, though farmers in the south typically kept their nightsoil too wet, and in the north they kept it too dry to attract a healthy community of the microbes capable of rendering humanure safe and pleasing to the senses.  The more you know...

A group of Yale University faculty members has named A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World, by John Martin (Yale University Press, 2022), as the fifth winner of the Pelikan Award, a biannual prize awarded by Yale University Press to a distinguished book on religion published by the Press in the previous two years. "The committee was impressed by the book’s profoundly original argument, deep research, diverse frames of reference, and beautifully crafted narrative."

Prasenjit Duara published a chapter, “An Oceanic Paradigm of Historical Flows,” in Needham's Dialogical Vision: Understanding Science as a Multi-Civilizational Outcome, Arun Bala ed. (Palgrave Macmillan) in Fall 2024.

Among the presentations of his recent papers are “Bio-Cultural Diversity in Monsoon Asia: The Mekong and the Forests” at UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies on 10/29/24 (see video here), as well as “The Infrastructure of Civilizationism in China since the 1980s” at Stanford University's Civilizationism, Sovereignty and Democracy:
An International Conference of the New Civilizationism Network in October 2024, where he also participated in the public roundtable, “Civilization Talk, Sovereignty and Democracy: Global Perspectives."

John D. French spent three weeks in Sāo Paulo, Brazil doing interviews and archival research for his new project on photos of the great metalworkers’ strikes led by Lula in 1979 and 1980. He also co-led a month-long field experience that brought eleven faculty, undergraduates, and students from NCCU and UNC Chapel Hill to urban periphery in the Baixada Fluminense (Rio lowlands). Hosted by local NGO the Rooted Institute, the binational team developed a grass roots research focus for the second year of a Bass Connections project on “Activism, Education, and Education for Citizenship.” The project's culmination will be an international research conference on “Brazil: Hip Hop, Religion, and Citizenship” that will be held on March 3, 2025 for which Duke hopes to host up to eleven members of the community of Morro Agudo, along with students and faculty from the local federal university (IM-UFRRJ).

One of the newest additions to our faculty, Mélanie Lamotte, was recently awarded the Douglass Adair Memorial Award from the William and Mary Quarterly for her article, "Beyond the Atlantic: Unifying Racial Policies across the Early French Empire."  She was also featured in Pirates: Behind the Legends, a National Geographic docuseries currently streaming on Disney+.

Dr. Lamotte is also working—with her students, and the support of a Paletz Innovative Course Enhancement grant—on an exhibit covering the history of slavery in North Carolina, which will be on display, concurrently, with the traveling exhibition, Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space, in Classroom Building's Franklin Gallery@History beginning January 2025.

Thavolia Glymph was formally inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in September.  She remained busy during her 2024 tenure as American Historical Association president, producing numerous articles for publication:  “Leadership from the Ground: Enslaved People and the Civil War,” in The Arts of Leading: Perspectives from the Humanities and the Liberal Arts, eds. Edward Brooks and Michael Lamb, foreword by Elleke Boehmer (Georgetown University Press, 2024); "Artificers in a Most Honorable Trade: The Historian's Craft," Perspectives on History Magazine, Nov. 2024; "Archives of a Different Sort; Marking the Battlefields of War," Perspectives on History Magazine, May 2024. 

In October, at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Dr. Glymph delivered the Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History, “Making ‘Actual Freedom:’ The Civil War and Enslaved People’s Legal Consciousness.”  In August, she gave a keynote address, “Building an Intellectual Life at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Building a Movement for an Intellectual Life,” at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. Also: Invited Fellow, Du Bois Forum Retreat for Writers, Scholars, and Artists at Troutbeck, Amenia, NY July 18 – 21, 2024; Writing Workshop for Graduate Students, University of Mississippi, October 8, 2024; Panelist, Advancement and Promotion Workshop, Duke Faculty Advancement Workshop Series, October 17, 2024

In October, Peter H. Wood attended a conference in Philadelphia on “Slavery in the North.” He presented a paper entitled “A Philadelphia Story: Uncovering the True Narrative of ‘Old Blind Hawkins,’ a Northerner Involved in the West African Slave Trade in the 1790s.” The forthcoming issue of the William and Mary Quarterly (January 2025) will include a “Forum” reflecting on the 50th anniversary of his book, Black Majority, now out in a new edition. On January 16, Wood will take part in an event at the Library Society of Charleston honoring that work and another enduring Black history volume from 1974, All God’s Dangers, by Theodore Rosengarten.

Syd Nathans’ new book is Freedom’s Mirage: Virgil Bennehan’s Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile, published in November by UNC Press.  It completes the trilogy of books he has written since retirement from Duke in 2006.  All focus on persons born in bondage on the Bennehan-Cameron plantation of North Carolina, who in different ways became free.  Freedom’s Mirage tells the story of Virgil Bennehan, an enslaved doctor who was freed in 1848, exiled from North Carolina and sent to Liberia, where he found himself mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history.  He returned the United States, and remarkably to North Carolina, only to be exiled again from the state. In 1849, he sought self-emancipation in gold rush California.   Though written last, Freedom’s Mirage is the prequel to Syd's two other books:  To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012) and A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland (2017).  Syd gave a talk about Mary Walker in Hillsborough on September 29th.  On November 1st, he talks about A Mind to Stay at the Stagville reunion of descendants of slaves sent to Alabama in 1844, where after emancipation their forebears created a Black homeland.

The revitalized, student-run Duke History Union grew in both membership and impact throughout the fall term with a number of engaging events aimed at undergraduates, capping it all off with a Holiday Gala for the entire department- students, staff, and faculty alike.  A good time was had by all in East Duke's Parlors on Friday, December 6.  Many thanks to the DHU officers and members who have worked so hard to rebuild this important community and strengthen the student-faculty connection.

Our new "History Hub" encompasses the department's intellectual community-building activities.  Many in-house gatherings will soon be occurring in Classroom Building 224, better known as the "Fishbowl," which is currently being remodeled to better accommodate workshops and meetings of various types.

Following the makeover, the room will be re-christened Gavins Commons, after pioneering historian Raymond Gavins who, among many other accomplishments in the fields of American and oral history,  was the first African-American to join the Duke history faculty, in 1970. Gavins' impact over his 45 years at Duke was immeasurable, from the countless students and faculty he mentored to the monumental Behind the Veil Project that remains, to this day, a cornerstone of the Rubenstein Library's digital collection.  Gavins died in 2016 but his profound legacy lives on at Duke, and beyond.

On December 2nd, we were pleased to welcome Nate DiMeo, of the acclaimed podcast, The Memory Palace, to Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.  This was the first East Coast stop on DiMeo's book tour, and he read a number of stories—presented with original animations, adding a new visual dimension to the "podcast experience"—that exemplified his unique approach to public history (a subject near and dear to the heart of this department), sat for a Q&A with DUS James Chappel, and signed copies of his new book, which were sold at the event.  It was a packed house, and we thank Mr. DiMeo, our CDS co-sponsors for providing the event space, and the many folks who came out to this packed event.  You can read more about it in this article by Trinity Communications but, better yet, you can listen to the podcast and see what all the fuss is about.  A 15-minute episode will be well worth your time, guaranteed!

Another event we are very much looking forward to is "An Evening with Jamelle Bouie" on February 6, 2025. Bouie is a columnist for The New York Times and, just a few weeks after the presidential inauguration, he will speak on the historical nature, impact, and implications of the (re)election of Donald Trump. In anticipation of significant public interest, this event will be held in Reynolds Theater at the Bryan Center.  If you're reading this newsletter, this event is likely to be of interest to you.  We encourage you to attend!  You can keep abreast of our upcoming events by visiting our calendar listing here, or email us at history@duke.edu to request being added to our "history-news" listserv.

Jessica Muñiz is currently serving as an Exhibition Consultant for the Duke 100: Names to Know exhibit at the Museum of Durham History. The museum team learned about the Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz: Latinés at Duke exhibit in the Franklin Gallery and expressed interest in incorporating Latinx voices into their own exhibit. This project, says Jessica, "highlights how history exhibits created within our department can inspire local public history institutions to engage with our historical interpretations. I’m particularly proud of my collaboration with them because we’ve done the important academic work to highlight the marginalized voices of Latinx students at Duke. Now, the community has the opportunity to learn about their stories as well. My hope is that by doing so, Latinx voices will become less marginalized in Durham."

Jennifer Morgan (PhD, 95), Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History at NYU, was a 2024 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the "genius grant") for her work in "deepening understanding of how the exploitation of enslaved women enabled the institutionalization of race-based slavery in early America and the Black Atlantic."  The MacArthur Fellowship is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.

Helen Shears (PhD, '24) won the Parker-Schimitt Award, given by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association, for the best Ph.D. Dissertation in European History nominated by a member of the Section or a faculty member at a Southern college or university.  Helen is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College.

Alyssa Kuchinski (PhD, 24) will be starting a new position at Harvard as a College Fellow in their History Department where she will teach two courses in the Spring ("Beyond the Game: The History of U.S. Sports and Society" and "Capital in Crisis: A History of U.S. Economic Emergencies"). She also welcomed her first child, Theo, a few weeks after defending her dissertation.

Christina Davidson (PhD ’17) recently published a book, Dominican Crossroads: H. C. C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation, with Duke University Press. Davidson is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

The Urban History Association named Allison Raven (PhD ’23), currently a Junior Fellow at Rice University, a finalist for the Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History for her dissertation, “Separate But Equitable: Colorblind Progressivism and Resegregation in Austin Schools.”