27 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Faculty News
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This January, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Washington, DC. While there I conducted research in the Library of Congress. But something in a quite different kind of archive, that I just happened upon, had a larger effect on me than anything I’d intentionally come to see.
01 Friday Nov 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Visit to Shanghai
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Alcohol and Drugs History Society Conference, Shanghai University
Last June, I visited Asia for the first time, traveling to Shanghai, China, to present a paper at the biennial Alcohol and Drugs History Conference, which was hosted by Shanghai University. Shanghai hosted the 1909 International Opium Commission, which led to tougher restrictions on opium production and distribution in many nations, and was an important precursor of the first major U.S. legislative regulation of narcotics, the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act of 1914. The conference went exceedingly well, due both the caliber of papers presented by a talented group of international scholars, and the warm hospitality of our colleagues at Shanghai University. Papers and panels on the history of opium regulation, international drug markets, and Chinese approaches to suppressing illegal drug use provided new insights and stimulating conversation with historians from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Meeting and conversing with Chinese colleagues who taught and conducted research in a very different system of higher education than that of the United States highlighted both differences in academic cultures and similarities in the interests, concerns, and methods of historians on the both sides of the world. Continue reading
24 Tuesday Sep 2019
Posted in Emeritus News
≈ Comments Off on Dr. Skaggs, professor emeritus of History at BGSU, receives life-long achievement medal
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At its September 20th conference at the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Historical Foundation awarded Dr. David Curtis Skaggs, professor emeritus of history at Bowling Green State University, its Commodore Dudley W. Knox Award for his significant contributions to naval history. Continue reading
16 Monday Sep 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Tracing the Stories of Poor Children in Early America
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Written by Professor Ruth Herndon
For more than a decade, I have been tracking down information about needy children who caught the attention of Boston’s overseers of the poor in the 1600s and 1700s. Continue reading
02 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Faculty News, Undergraduate Student News
When I replied “No” to Kinzey’s question, and to Colin’s follow-up, I was pretty sure of my answer.
I was wrong. The resulting historical adventure began with a lively class discussion, continued through an independent study, and eventually resulted in an article that undergraduates Kinzey McLaren-Czerr, Colin Spicer and I wrote together. Continue reading
08 Monday Jul 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on The Lunar Landing at 50: Prestige in History and Memory
I recently had an opportunity to contribute to the “First on the Moon” series of events sponsored by Auglaize County Historical Societyand the Armstrong Air and Space Museum that commemorate this year’s 50thanniversary of the moon landing. My discussion at St. Mary’s Community Public Library cautioned that our commemoration of the moon landing must firmly situate this episode in the tumultuous context of 1969. Although the lunar landing garnered immediate international admiration and adulation, its benefits were frustratingly fleeting, as other events at home and abroad continued to diminish America’s international prestige and moral authority. Continue reading
03 Friday May 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Professor Grunden obtains SOKENDAI grant in Japan
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Professor Walter Grunden has been invited to the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku, or SOKENDAI) in Hayama, Japan, to participate in a collaborative research project examining science policy under the Allied Occupation (1945-1952). Funded by an internal grant awarded to principal investigator Professor Kenji Ito (SOKENDAI), Grunden, Ito, and Professor Takashi Nishiyama (State University of New York, Brockport) will travel extensively throughout Japan this summer to conduct research in government and university archives and will begin collaboration on a book-length monograph. Their project will examine the links between occupation-era reconstruction and postwar remilitarization and economic recovery, with a particular focus on how science policy both contributed to and obstructed these processes. Grunden’s primary interest in the project is to illustrate how the Cold War era imperative to contain the spread of communism in East Asia directly informed policy decisions affecting the reformation of science institutions and the reintegration of Japanese scientists into the global scientific community even well after the occupation ended. Grunden’s preliminary findings on this subject were presented in the article, “Physicists and ‘Fellow Travelers’: Nuclear Fear, the Red Scare, and Science Policy in Occupied Japan,” published in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2018). The collaborative book-length project with Ito and Nishiyama will expand this study beyond physics and into the fields of aeronautics, engineering, and medicine. Continue reading
15 Monday Apr 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Learning about “Fred’s House” Brings A Greater Understanding of Local History
In the courses I teach on local history, my main message is that every place has a history, 
no matter how ordinary or how small. An abandoned storefront on a city block, a tumble-down farm house sitting in its lonely quarter acre, or your own home, has a history miles deep. If we’re willing to think creatively about the possibilities that small spaces hold, we can uncover intriguing stories about our communities that inspire and connect us.
29 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Is Catholic Enlightenment Possible?
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Statue of Saint Paul in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Photo Credit to Nils on Unsplash.
Recently, while working on my own research, I was struck by the parallel trials facing the writers who participated in what we might call a project of Catholic Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the current headline-making struggle to reconcile the institution of the Catholic Church with modern realities. Broadly speaking, the participants in the early modern Catholic Enlightenment were much the same as their twenty-first century counterparts: women and men who both valued their Catholic identities and sought to resolve the apparent tensions between that identity and more secular understandings of reform, progress, and essential human dignity engendered by the Enlightenment. Ulrich Lehner, the foremost scholar currently working on the Catholic Enlightenment project, depicts a project of social reform which sought to address a variety of perceived flaws within the church, from the despotic reign of the papacy and episcopacy to the church’s stance on controversial issues like slavery and the treatment of women.[1] My own research into the theological and philosophical side of all this reveals much the same: dedicated Catholics who nonetheless saw value for the Church in embracing new philosophical concepts that reconsidered the nature of human identity and individuality, many of which the Church had remained skeptical if not openly hostile. Continue reading
02 Monday Jul 2018
Posted in Faculty News
≈ Comments Off on Dr. Nicole Jackson’s Presentation at Way Library
Dr. Jackson Presenting
“Toledo’s Great Migrations: Two or Three?” BGSU’s own Dr. Nicole Jackson, Associate Professor of History, posed this question to a diverse audience at Way Public Library in Perrysburg on Wednesday evening, June 27.
The usual story identifies Toledo as part of two great migrations: Migration #1 was the movement of former slaves away from their masters’ homes after the Civil War; Migration #2 was the movement of rural African Americans to urban areas in the north and west between the 1940s and 1970s. Dr. Jackson suggested an additional Migration for Toledo: the movement of fugitive slaves from slave-holding states to Ohio, other northern states and Canada. In this alternate Migration #1, Toledo played a major role, both by creating incipient black communities and by extending the pathway from slavery to freedom for those fleeing bondage in slave-holding states. Black communities established in the Toledo area during the first two migrations attracted those who came in the third migration. Dr. Jackson’s presentation on this aspect of local history drew lively questions and discussion from the audience and provided an excellent example of the way scholars can connect the university and the public.
