News

Syracuse University Press Publishes Akram Khater's Embracing the Divine: Passion & Politics in the Christian Middle East

"Embracing the Divine provides a breath of fresh air in the field of Middle Eastern history. It opens a window onto the exciting world of religious belief and practice in the eighteenth century, turning our attention to Christian experiences in the Levant that challenge the notion of Christianity as Western."

--Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics

Professors of NC State, including  Dr. Zonderman of the History Department, staged a "teach in" on Friday November 3rd to better understand the Occupy Movement.  See the WRAL news video featuring Dr. Zonderman below.

Three universities have launched a Triangle Center for Japanese Studies that will support fellowships, research, seminars, travel, guest speakers, and library development.

Read the full article at the CHASS blog

Dr. Craig Friend was awarded the  2011 Kentucky Governor's Award for his book Kentucke's Frontiers.  Kentucke's Frontiers wins for best book published in Kentucky history from 2007 to 2010.  The award is given every four years and it includes a plaque and cash prize. 

The Department is pleased to welcome Noah Strote, who will teach Modern European and German history. Noah received his BA from Columbia University in 2002 and recently completed his PhD in History at UC Berkeley, where he studied modern European history with Martin Jay, John Efron, and John Connelly. His dissertation, "Emigration and the Foundation of West Germany, 1933-1963," offers an interpretation of how Germans in the Western part of the divided country were able to recover socially and politically from the catastrophe of National Socialism and WWII. He contends that military force and economic progress alone were necessary but insufficient conditions for the Federal Republic's reconstruction and development, which required difficult ideological reconciliation and consensus-building in order to sustain its democracy.

The Department is pleased to welcome Megan Cherry, who will teach colonial and revolutionary North American history.  Megan received her BA in History from Washington University in St. Louis and is completing her PhD at Yale, where she was a Whiting Fellow and worked under the  direction of Steven Pincus, John Demos, and Julia Adams,  Her dissertation presents a history of Leisler's Rebellion (1689-1691) in colonial New York and seeks to explain why the majority of colonists in New York joined the rebellion, and why the political legacies of the  rebellion continued to shape New York politics for decades after it ended.  She argues that New Yorkers rebelled against their government for ideological and political reasons, and she places the uprising in an Atlantic context by showing its connections with English and Dutch politics. 

Assistant professor Dr. Katherine Mellen Charron  has won the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best monograph on Southern women’s history. The Southern Association of Women’s Historians will present the award during the annual meeting this November in Charlotte.

Charron was honored for her book, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark, published by UNC Press in 2009. Clark, a former public school teacher and civil rights leader, developed a citizenship training program in the mid-1950s that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and become active in the community.

Associate professor Dr. Blair L. M. Kelley  is the winner of the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award.

The Association of Black Women Historians honored Kelley for her book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson, published this March by UNC Press.

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation.

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