BGSU history faculty, students, and alumni attended the Ohio Academy of History Meeting last Friday and Saturday.
Dr. Mancuso and Dr. Martin attended to support grad students giving papers (Dr. Mancuso also gave an interesting paper on the history of hazing at BGSU). Chase Fleece, Chloe Kozal, McKade Schultz, and Andrea Freimuth (ACS) all gave excellent papers, as did Sara Butler-Tongate (University Archives). It was also good to see department alums attending and presenting papers. Don Eberle (PhD) and Jacob Mach (ABD, Purdue) gave well-received papers, and we also ran into Chris Blubaugh (MA).
Let’s look forward to next year’s OAH at Kent State!
Four historians, all alumnae of BGSU’s Department of History, made presentations and renewed collegial ties earlier this month at a conference organized by the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) and hosted by the University of Guelph in southern Ontario.
Authored by Emma Brown (B.A. History, Media Production at BGSU, graduated December 2022)
Two years ago in April of 2021, I got an email from a professor I’d only ever had through an asynchronous class. It was the end of a school year spent fully online and this email was an opportunity I could only dream of. The absolutely incredible Dr. Melissa K. Miller of the political science department was working on a documentary and wanted me to be a undergraduate researcher that summer. The documentary was looking at Trailblazing Women in Ohio politics and with my history major and media production minor she thought I would be a perfect fit with the three other undergraduate researchers. Of course, I accepted!
As the Gary Hess Lecture approaches and our speaker, Bill Allison, is a distinguished graduate of our program, we take the opportunity to share this post of our colleague Dr. Doug Forsyth about the department’s contributions to the field of Policy History —Amílcar E. Challú
Rob Carlock earned an MA in History and a Graduate Certificate in Public History from BGSU in May 2019. This fall, he will enter his second year in the PhD Program in History at George Mason University.
Bowling Green State University was my home for 6 years as I worked my way through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. I then left Ohio to pursue a PhD in history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, sadly leaving behind a support network and family I had built during my time there. It has certainly been a challenge, especially since my first year has been synchronous online learning due to COVID-19. Although I have yet to meet my peers and faculty in-person, I was able to connect with many of them and begin to forge new relationships. With my peers, my connection is definitely a sense of unity that we are tackling such a daunting task together; with the faculty, my connection is a sense of confidence and support as they encourage me to continue identifying and expanding on my interests.
Author: Brittany Von Kamp, recent graduate from the History M.A. program
When pursuing a publisher for
his book manuscript Beyond Truman: Robert H. Ferrell and Crafting the Past
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), author Dr. Douglas Dixon responded with a
laugh—that several editors rejected the book’s thrust, saying: “Nobody cares
about historians.” Dixon explained that this was a major hurdle in getting the
book to readers who, in fact, do care about the challenges faced by past masters
in doing history. What challenged
Ferrell, as the field evolved into the twenty-first century was postmodernism,
the New Left, and social and cultural history.
Though Dixon feels Ferrell is an important person to study, the book is
much more than merely a study of this important presidential, diplomatic, and
military historian, though his biography is central to it. Instead, the author
had to find a way to make Ferrell’s world larger than the historian himself, to
fit Ferrell into the larger historical narrative – a task that many historians
face as they write about their own research. In the end, Dixon says that “the
book is not just about Ferrell; it’s about the larger culture of history and doing
history,” particularly in the last half of the twentieth century to the present
day.
Much as historians might want to take an article or conference paper from conception to completion in one semester, in fact we often take longer. Last spring, Dr. Matt Schumann’s rendition of our Historiography course (HIST 3797) won an award for introducing students to key elements and mindsets of the historian’s craft, including an appreciation that their projects might exceed the scope of the class. One student from last Fall’s course, AYA Education major Mr. Benjamin Stuck, has now spent a year on his project, a history of the War on Drugs, and he just received a CURS grant this Fall to support his ongoing research.
In this post, Dr. Schumann asks Mr. Stuck
for some perspectives on his evolving project, where it has been and where it’s
going.
We just received an email from our alum, Dr. Stephanie Gaskill, that warmed our hearts in this (not so cold, so far) January. Stephanie graduated from BGSU with a history major (2008) and M.A. in history (2010)/ She is now the education director of Operation Restoration, an organization that is bringing college to Louisiana prisons. Stephanie’s path illustrates the many ways in which historians change the world, for the public good, little by little. You can be part of her efforts by sending a copy of Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girlor supporting the organization in other ways.
Being a student of the past has had a funny way of defining my present and future.
Dylan Emahiser in Aikido Uniform
My name is Dylan Emahiser, a recent graduate of BGSU. As you might imagine, I spent my time there focused on history. I still focus on history but am now nearly as far away from BGSU as one can geographically get.Continue reading →