Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lectures with Thavolia Glymph were canceled. We hope to reschedule them to the spring and will notify you when dates have been finalized.

• Jacob Lee, associate professor of history, published an article entitled, “Do You Go to New Orleans?': The Louisiana Purchase, Federalism, and the Contingencies of Empire in the Early U.S. Republic,” in the Summer 2023 issue of  Early American Studies. The article examines the planned invasion of New Orleans organized by the United States in late 1803 to enforce the terms of the Louisiana Purchase treaty.

Christopher Heaney, assistant professor of history, published an opinion piece in The Washington Post, entitled: “Why we need to address the Peruvian skeletons in the Smithsonian’s closet.” In it, Heaney confronts the complex history of bodily remains held by many American museums, and considers a more diverse future in the history of anthropology.  

Rick Daily successfully defended his dissertation  in September.

Morgan Robinson was featured in a Choice Review American Library Association roundtable as part of the team collaborating on the Colored Conventions. Choice Review is a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. You can read the discussion here.

Jonathan Jones, former Richards Center postdoctoral Fellow, published a piece in the AHA Perspectives on History newsletter, entitled: “Students Critique a ChatGPT Essay: A Classroom Experiment,” The article explores ways in which ChatGPT can be used in the classroom. Read the article here. 

Evan Rothera, History department alumnus, won the Phi Beta Alpha Theta’s Best First Book Awards for his book  Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (LSU Press 2022). This project began as a 2017 dissertation under the direction of Amy Greenberg and offers a comparative history of war and reconstruction in the nineteenth-century Americas, grounded in extensive archival research in three countries.

Amy Greenberg, head of the Department of History, and George Winfree Professor of American History, delivered a talk entitled, “James Buchanan at Bedford Springs,” at the History Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The talk explored time Buchanan spent at Bedford Springs Resort and its contribution to his success as a politician.

Former director of the Africana Research Center and associate professor of history, Crystal Sanders’, forthcoming book about African Americans who traveled from the South to Northern states in pursuit of advance academic degrees in an era where graduate schools in the South were white-only, is being developed into a five-part digital series by New York’s PBS. A link to the first eight-minute episode can be found here. Additional episodes will appear in October.

Bill Blair, director emeritus of the Richards Civil War Era Center, delivered a keynote address on October 13 at The Center for Civil War Research, University of Mississippi. The keynote address was entitled: “The Union Army and the Limits of Presidential Power in the Civil War.” Find more information here. 

 Cathleen Cahill, professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Walter L. Ferree and Helen P. Ferree Professor in Middle-American History, recently gave two Zoom talks for Women’s Equity Day. The first was hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and drew from her book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement. Her second talk was for the U.S. Forest Service and focused on the political activism of federal employees, especially Native women’s suffrage activism. During this talk she also highlighted her new project focusing on Native women’s botanical knowledge.