Events
- Annual Convention
- Great Teaching Round-up
- Leading from the middle
- fall conference for faculty leaders
- The Texas Network
"I think there is something more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren't enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision."
Events: 2009 History Schedule
History Summary
Friday, 9:30-11:00 a.m.
"Abraham Lincoln and Slavery"
Speaker: Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History,Columbia University
Friday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.
"Writing History: The Evolution of the American History Textbook"
Speaker: David Goldfield, Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Friday: 4:00-5:15 p.m.
"War of Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War"
Speaker: Brian DeLay, Assistant Professor of History, University of Colorado-Boulder
Saturday, 10:30-11:45 a.m.
"What FDR Would Say to Barack Obama"
Speaker:Bill Brands, Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
Friday, February 20th, 9:30-11:00 a.m.
"Abraham Lincoln and Slavery"
Speaker: Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History,Columbia University
Slavery, and especially its extension into the western territories, became the focus of a bitter national debate that divided churches, shattered political parties, and helped bring on a military confrontation that lasted four years. The North went to war to preserve the Union after eleven Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. In time, the conflict became a struggle to destroy slavery and emancipate African Americans in bondage.
Union victory ended slavery, bringing the entire nation, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, a "new birth of freedom." Yet the war left it to future generations to confront the legacies of slavery and to embark on the still unfinished quest for racial justice.
Biography:
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of this country's most prominent historians. He received his doctoral degree at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. He is only the second person to serve as president of the three major professional organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians.
Eric Foner is a winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates (1991), and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University (2006). He was named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities in 1995. In 2006, he received and the Kidger Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship from the New England History Teachers Association. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, and holds an honorary doctorate from Iona College. He has taught at Cambridge University as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Oxford University as Harmsworth Professor of American History, Moscow State University as Fulbright Professor, and at Queen Mary, University of London as Leverhulme Visiting Scholar. He serves on the editorial boards of Past and Present and The Nation, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, and many other publications, and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows, including Charlie Rose, Book Notes, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and All Things Considered, and in historical documentaries on PBS and the History Channel. He was the on-camera historian for "Freedom: A History of Us," on PBS in 2003. He has lectured extensively to both academic and non-academic audiences.
Friday, February 20th, 2:30-3:45 p.m.
"Writing History: The Evolution of the American History Textbook"
Speaker: David Goldfield, Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Since the late 19th century, textbook writing has been a significant business and educational enterprise. History textbooks have reflected current events perhaps more than the historical episodes they cover. A survey of how these texts have changed over time and why.
Biography:
David Goldfield received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. Since 1982 he has been Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He is the author or editor of thirteen books on various aspects of southern and urban history. Two of his works–Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (1982) and Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (1990)–received the Mayflower Award for nonfiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history. His most recent book is Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (2002). When he is not writing history, Dr. Goldfield applies his historical craft to history museum exhibits, voting rights cases, and local planning and policy issues.
Friday, February 20th, 4:00-5:15 p.m.
"War of Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War"
Speaker: Brian DeLay, Assistant Professor of History, University of Colorado-Boulder
Over the past decade, historians of the colonial era have increasingly come to rethink American history along continental lines. While acknowledging the centrality of Anglo-American economies and institutions, a continental approach is attentive to the entire landmass that would become the United States, rather than just the expanding sphere of Anglo-American domination. One consequence of adopting such a continental perspective is that we necessarily pay much more attention to native peoples, who, we now realize, often tipped the balance in struggles between competing American empires. DeLay’s talk will push this approach into the 19th century to argue for a new interpretation of the U.S.-Mexican War. During the 1830s and 1840s native peoples of Texas and the Southwest, Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches, especially, waged a devastating and largely-forgotten war against northern Mexicans. In so doing, Indians remade the ground upon which Mexico and the United States would compete in 1846 and 1847 – economically, demographically, politically, and militarily – helping to transform North American boundaries for all the continent’s peoples.
Biography:
Brian DeLay received his PhD from Harvard University and teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His book, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. He is coauthor of the U.S. History textbooks Nation of Nations and US/ A History. His articles have won prizes from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; the Western History Association; the Conference on Latin American History; and the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Saturday, February 21st, 10:30-11:45 a.m.
"What FDR Would Say to Barack Obama"
Speaker:Bill Brands, Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
Franklin Roosevelt set the model for presidential leadership during time of economic crisis. How much of that model applies to today's situation? How much has history passed by? What is the role of presidential personality in addressing national ills? How much does leadership depend on followership?
Biography:
H. W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous works of history and international affairs, including The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (1993), Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East (1994), The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (1995), TR: The Last Romantic (a biography of Theodore Roosevelet) (1997), What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (1998), The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), The Strange Death of American Liberalism (2001), The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rus and the New American Dream (2002), Woodrow Wilson (2003), and Andrew Jackson (2005). His writing has received critical and popular acclaim; The First American was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller. He lectures frequently across North America and in Europe. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Atlantic Monthly. He is a regular guest on radio and television, and has participated in several historical documentary films.
History Section Chair: Ashley Cruseturner, McLennan Community College