By Max Daugherty, History senior.

This is a public presentation produced in HIST4001, Professional Practices in History.

“What will the end of the world look like?” It’s an uneasy question, but most of us have thought it. Today, we may draw on modern popular culture to think about it and imagine zombies overrunning the world. We may draw on scientific predictions or science fiction and imagine natural disasters one after the other. Or we may gain inspiration in prophecies about Judgement Day. All these answers have one thing in common: they are stories that encode the experience, wisdom and feeling of a culture and pass it on from one generation to another, and sometimes one place to another, one culture to another. This article is about one of these stories that survived the test of time. This story begins in ancient Scandinavia or what is now known as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

Amílcar E. Challú (Assoc. Prof. of History, and chair)

Chad Iwertz Duffy (Assist. Prof. of English)

Faculty in English, History and the Institute for the Culture and Society have been collaborating in a project funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities — CARES Act grant. This project has three big objectives: 1) to support our humanities programs to adapt to the new pedagogical needs of COVID times; 2) to mitigate the negative impact of the COVID crisis; 3) to learn from the multimodal experience in the humanities. Chad I. Duffy (English) and Amílcar E. Challú (History) are the co-principal investigators.

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.

 With the end of the spring semester, the History Department bids a fond farewell to Dr. T. DeWayne Moore, a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor who taught for the Department during the 2019/2020 academic year.  DeWayne specializes in African American, 20^th-century, and public history.  The Department was fortunate to have him on the faculty, if only for a year. 

The coronavirus pandemic and accompanying shutdown of schools, colleges and universities required a rapid transition of face-to-face courses to online offerings. History faculty adapted quickly and well, changing syllabi, assignments, and course activities. Here are some images of how History faculty and students adapted to unprecedented circumstances.

It is with great sadness that we learned that Dr. Ron Seavoy, emeritus professor of the Department of History, passed on March 25th. Ron retired in the early 1990s but was an active presence in our department until very recently. It was common to see Dr. Seavoy biking down the streets of Bowling Green to his retiree office in Williams Hall.