Newsnotes
NEWS FLASH:
Joe Anderson is pleased to report that he accepted
a position as assistant professor of history in public history at the
University of West Georgia, located in Carrollton, Georgia. In addition
to teaching undergraduate and graduate level public history, American
history surveys, and upper division U.S. history courses he will also
work with the university's Center for Public History supervising field
work and student projects in state and local history.
Fall 2005
No. 14
Greetings to All:
I am looking forward to an interesting and productive year for the Agricultural
History and Rural Studies Program. As many of you know, we have been
involved in program revision for the last year, changing some course
and exam requirements, and potentially changing the name of the program
to Rural and Agricultural History. The History Department has approved
these changes, and has forwarded them on to the college curriculum committee.
Hopefully, the passage of the year will see the approval of these revisions
on up the line, and we will soon have a new and improved program. I
will certainly keep all of you posted.
Another new and exciting development is the program's 2005 sweep of
the Agricultural History Society's graduate student awards. Joel Orth,
Ph.D. 2004, won the Gilbert Fite Award for the Best Dissertation in
Agricultural History for his work, "The Conservation Landscape:
Trees and Nature on the Great Plains.” Dr. Joseph E. Taylor (now at
Simon Frasier University) advised Joel on the project. Derek Oden won
the Everett Edwards Award for the best student article submitted to
the journal Agricultural History for his piece "Selling Safety:
The Farm Safety Movement's Emergence and Evolution from 1940-1975."
As of 2006, the Agricultural History Society will begin having annual
meetings, rather than its traditional thematic symposia. The first of
these meetings will be in June of 2006 in Boston at MIT. In 2007, the
History Department and Agricultural History and Rural Studies program
will host the Agricultural History Society's annual meeting on the Iowa
State University campus. I hope to see a number of you at one or both
of these meetings!
The History Department welcomes Katherine Mellen Charron as its new
African American Historian. Dr. Charron brings expertise in African
American women's history, women's history, the history of education,
and a number of other fields into the department.
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Director,
Doctoral Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies
New Student
The program welcomes Kevin Howe. Kevin is a graduate of Grand View College
and Drake University Law School. He continues to practice law, and is
a published author of fiction.
Although Rick Woten has been a member of the program in spirit for some
time, he formally joined the AHRS program in the fall. Rick has his
bachelor's and master's degrees from Iowa State University. A couple
of additional converts should be joining the AHRS program
dur-ing the academic year, as they finish their master's degrees and
move on to doctoral work. I will be posting their names as their entry
into the program becomes official.
Continuing Student News
SUE ATKINSON: Sue is continuing her work on her dissertation,
a study of the interaction of ethnicity and religion in voting behavior
(by township) in Iowa for the late 1800s up to 1920.
JENNY BARKER-DEVINE: In the spring of 2005, Jenny passed
her preliminary examinations, and is now ABD. She also published her
first book, A Century of Brotherhood: Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Iowa
State University, 1905-2005 (published by Sigma Alpha Epsilon).
She is the department's 2005 Matterson Award winner for her essay, "Mightier
Than Missiles: the Rhetoric of Rural Civil Defense for Midwestern Farm
Families, 1955-1970.” She is currently the project assistant for the
new history of Iowa State University, and is working on a chapter about
student life for the volume.
JOSEPH ISENBERG: Last spring, Joseph Isenberg took
the Foreign Service Examination for entry into the Department of State.
He passed, and has been invited to enter the next round of the competition,
the oral assessment, which he is scheduled to undergo in early November.
Currently, he is also teaching the American history survey as an adjunct
instructor at Ellsworth Community College.
ALEXANDRA KINDELL: Alexandra Kindell is currently teaching
three classes at California State University at Fullerton, and also
taught a Saturday course at a local liberal arts college. In October,
she presented a portion of her dissertation research, “Bringing the
Poor Farm West: Social Welfare in Rural California,” at the Western
History Association annual meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is currently
completing her dissertation on the development of family farming in
nineteenth century California.
DEREK ODEN: Derek continues to work on his dissertation
on the farm safety movement in the U.S. Derek is the Agricultural History
Society's 2005 Everett Edwards Award winner for the best student article
submitted to Agricultural History for his work "Selling Safety:
The Farm Safety Movement's Emergence and Evolution from 1940-1975."
KNUT OYANGEN: Knut passed his preliminary exams in
the fall of 2004, and is now ABD. In the spring, he was Visiting Fellow
at the Center for Rural and Regional Studies at Southwest Minnesota
State University. As a part of that fellowship, he presented a public
lecture at SMSU: "Representative Government? Minnesota's Political
Elite, 1890-1920." He also wrote a book review for the Journal
of the Social History of Drugs and Alcohol. Knut is the Garst Fellowship
recipient for the fall of 2005.
CAMERON SAFFELL: Cameron continues as Curator of Agriculture
and director of the Oral History Program at the New Mexico Farm and
Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces. He is working on his dissertation,
a history of cotton farming in the American west. Cameron is the Garst
Fellowship recipient for the spring of 2006.
BOB WELCH: Bob completed his first year of graduate
school last spring. The highlight of the year was his work on the 1931
"Cow War" in Cedar County, Iowa. He hopes to present that
research at the Agricultural History Society conference in June. He
is currently writing his master's thesis, a reconsideration of agricultural
tenancy in the nineteenth century through a case study of Henry C. Vanzant,
a farmer who moved from Tennessee to Iowa in the 1840s, and rented the
same farm from 1850-1880. As Bob writes, “What makes the situation interesting
is that Vanzant acted as a mortgage lender and land speculator WHILE
he was himself a tenant. The working title is `Tenancy Considered: The
Life of Henry C. Vanzant.'”
RICK WOTEN: Rick successfully defended his master's
thesis this past spring, "Navigating the Era of Improvement: The
Des Moines River Lands Grant." He presented a paper entitled "Improving
the River and State: The Legacy of the Des Moines River Lands Grant,"
at the Midwest Popular Culture Conference in St. Louis, Missouri October
14-16, 2005. Additionally, he has forthcoming several biographies
in an Iowa Biographical Dictionary to be published by the Annals
of Iowa.
News from Our Graduates
Ginette Aley, PhD 2005, graduated in the spring of
2005, and began a tenure-track assistant professor position at the University
of Southern Indiana. Her dissertation, "John Tipton's West: Power,
Relationships, and the Emergence of the American Midwest, 1800-1839,"
is now under review at University of Indiana Press. She has begun a
second book project with Ohio University Press, looking at the Midwest's
home front during the Civil War, tentatively titled "The Civil
War in the Heartland: Iowa's Experience." An article, "Grist,
Grit, and Rural Society in the Early Midwest," was the lead article
in the summer issue of Ohio Valley History. Two book chapters
that have been in-press will come out this fall or early winter (Kent
State University Press and University of Nebraska Press). Ginette has
reviewed four books, and presented two conference papers: "Crops
Promising, Money Scarce, Counterfeit Plenty: the West during the Era
of the 1819 Panic" at the WSSA in April and "Agents of Influence:
Agriculture, Internal Improvement, and Federal Indian Policy in the
Making of the Early Midwest" at the Society of the Historians of
the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in July. She remains an abstractor
for the Journal of Southern History, for which she received
an award from ABC-Clio this past spring. She remains the Graduate Student
Liaison for the Agricultural History Society and was appointed to numerous
committees including the AHS Program Committee for the 2007 Annual Meeting
at ISU. Additional projects include developing projects on Fugitive
Slaves on the Frontier, the Free-Produce Movement, and Women & Agriculture
of the Mid- and Far West. She has been asked to develop a seminar for
the Newberry Library's Rural History Series, probably with a western
women's history theme.
Joe Anderson, PhD 2005, successfully defended his dissertation,
“Industrializing the Corn Belt: Iowa Farmers, Technology, and the Midwestern
Landscape, 1945-1972” and graduated in August of 2005. A portion of
his dissertation will appear in print in Technology and Culture
in October of 2005. He is currently teaching for the History Department
at Iowa State.
Randal Beeman, PhD 1995, continues as a professor of
history and archives director at Bakersfield College, Bakersfield, California.
Stephanie Carpenter, PhD 1997, is associate professor
of history at Murray State University, in Murray, Kentucky. Stephanie
is finishing the 2nd edition of the Historical Dictionary of the
International Food Agencies: FAO, WFP, WFC, IFAD, with Scarecrow
Press. She will be chairing a session on women and war at the Ohio Valley
History Conference in October.
Jean Choate, PhD 1992, is a full professor at Coastal
Georgia Community College, Brunswick, Georgia. Jean writes, “I was invited
to participate in a Roosevelt Reading Festival at Hyde Park on June
25, 2005. This was the second festival to bring to the public's attention
books written by scholars who had used the Roosevelt library. Ten scholars
were invited and gave readings. I talked about my book, Disputed
Ground, Farm Groups that Opposed the New Deal Agricultural Program.
The program ended with a dinner for the authors and guests.”
Francis Danquah, PhD 1991, is a full professor at Southern
University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
He writes, “The following publications belatedly appeared this year
in the following journals: "Sustaining a West African Cocoa Economy:
Agricultural Science and the Swollen Shoot Contagion in Ghana, 1936-1965,"
African Economic History, 31, (2003): 43-74, and “Capsid Pests
as "Cocoa Mosquitoes": A Study in Cash Crop Infestation and
Control in Ghana, 1910-1965, Journal of Third World Studies
vol. xxi. no.2 (2004): 147-166. My article in the Agricultural History
journal however appeared in a timely fashion: “Reports on Philippine
Industrial Crops in World War II from Japan's English Language Press,”
Agricultural History Vol 79 no. 1 (Winter 2005): 74-96. I also
presented a paper on "The Role of the Supernatural in Asante Militarism
in the Eightenth and Nineteenth Centuries," at the Southern Conference
of African American Studies Incorporated at Montgomery, Alabama, February,
2005.”
John Davis,
Ph.D. 2002, is currently an independent scholar in Ames, Iowa. The Herbert
Hoover Presidential Library Association has named him the 2005 George
& Carol Olmsted Foundation Scholar for his project "Responses
to the post-World War I depression: Commerce Papers' reports on winter
1921-22 social conditions, discussion of public works, and comments
on highway construction."
Anne Effland, PhD 1991, continues to work in the Economic
Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington,
D.C.
Valerie Grim, PhD 1990, has been appointed Chair of
the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana
University. She has also been appointed to a three-year term on a commission
associated with rural education in collaboration with the United Negro
College Fund.
Kevin Hill, PhD 2002, continues as the ISU History
Department's undergraduate advisor. This year he has written nine articles
on medieval agriculture and other medieval topics for three different
historical encyclopedias (The Encyclopedia of Medieval Science,
Medicine, and Technology, The Encyclopedia of World History,
and The World History Encyclopedia) and has had a paper on
the English gentry accepted at the International Congress on Medieval
Studies, to be given in May 2006.
Peter Hoehnle, PhD 2003, continues to run the Amana
Print Shop and work in the area of communal studies. Peter writes “I
will/have made three presentations this year: one at the Amana Sesquicentennial
symposium, one at the Shaker Seminar in Cincinnati in July and one later
this month, at the Communal Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. . . . I published one trade book, Amana Style,
in June. It is about local arts and crafts and was co-written with Marjorie
Albers. I am about to publish “Christian Metz: German- American Religious
Leader and Pioneer" which I edited from the 1948 dissertation of
F. Alan DuVal . . . it is a project I have worked on for quite a while.
I am also working on my edited edition of "Two Years Experience
Among the Shakers" by David Lamson. I will be teaching three adjunct
courses at Cornell College, Mt Vernon, Iowa this winter.”
Bruce Homann, PhD 2002, continues to teach history
at the Coon Rapids campus of the Anoka Ramsey Community College in Minnesota.
Joel Orth, PhD 2004, won the Gilbert C. Fite Award
for best dissertation on agricultural history for 2004. He continues
to work on refining parts for publication. This year Joel accepted a
full time position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is teaching courses
on environmental history, modern America, and teaching methods. He is
also the social studies credential advisor for Cal Poly.
Lisa Ossian, PhD 1998, continues to teach at Southwestern
Community College, Creston, Iowa.
Claire Strom, PhD 1998, continues as an assistant professor
in the History Department at North Dakota State University. She is the
editor of Agricultural History. Claire writes “I would just
like to encourage your graduate students to submit papers for the Edwards
Award and their dissertations for the Fite Award. ISU really cleaned
up last year with Derek Oden and Joel Orth. I need three copies of papers
or dissertation by December 31 for consideration.”
Louis Tremante, PhD 2000, is a Senior Advisor in the
College of the University of Chicago.
Cherilyn Walley,
Ph.D. 2002, continues to work as a historian for the U.S. Army Special
Operations Command at Fort Bragg (NC). She edits and contributes to
Veritas, the publication of the Special Operations Command.
Douglas Wertsch, PhD 1992, is a professor of history
at Athens State University, in Athens, Alabama.
Research and Travel Support
Iowa State University graduate students may apply to the Graduate College
for one travel and one re-search grant each fiscal year. The applications
require a brief budget. The forms are available on the Graduate College
web site.
Iowa State University's Department of History offers the prestigious
Garst Dissertation Fellowship each year to a graduate student or students
in the advanced stages of dissertation research and writing. Students
intending to apply must submit a formal letter of application and a
current vita to the program director by 1 March 2005.
Each semester, Phi Alpha Theta, Kappa Iota Chapter, sponsors a travel
grant for active members in good standing who present their work at
academic conferences. Students can receive up to $200 for travel expenses
or conference registration fees. For more information on membership,
as well as application forms, please visit the PAT website, www.stuorg.iastate.edu/pat.
Further questions may be addressed to the Chapter Advisor, Dr. David
Hollander, at dbh8@iastate.edu.
Graduate Fellowships
CENTER FOR RURAL AND REGIONAL STUDIES
SOUTHWEST MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY
The Center for Rural and Regional Studies at Southwestern Minnesota
State University will be hosting its second AHRS student as a Rural
and Regional Fellow this spring. John Davis was at the Center in 2003,
and Knut Oyangen will be there in the spring of 2004. The Center chooses
new fellows biannually. Those interested in this program at Southwest
Minnesota State University, Marshall, Minnesota, should consult the
Center's web site: www.southwestmsu.edu/regional/fellows/Fellows.html.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
Graduate students and graduates of the AHRS program may find opportunities
to pursue their interests through the Smithsonian Institution's fellowship
program.
Graduate Student Fellowships - These fellowships allow students
to conduct research for ten-week periods in association with Smithsonian
research staff members. Applicants must be formally enrolled in a graduate
program of study, must have completed at least one semester, and must
not yet have been advanced to candidacy in a doctoral program.
Predoctoral Fellowships - These fellowships allow students
to conduct research for periods of three to twelve months. Applicants
must have completed coursework and preliminary examinations for the
doctoral degree, and must be engaged in dissertation research. In addition,
candidates must have the approval of their universities to conduct their
doctoral research at the Smithsonian.
Postdoctoral and Senior Fellowships - Postdoctoral Fellowships
of three to twelve months are available for scholars who have held the
doctoral degree or equivalent for fewer than seven years as of the application
deadline. Senior Fellowships of three to twelve months are available
for scholars who have held the doctoral degree or equivalent for more
than seven years as of the application deadline.
Deadline: January 15th (postmark) for awards to begin on or after June
1st For further information, go to www.si.edu/ofg/fell.htm
Awards
The Agricultural History Society is now accepting
submissions for its 2005 awards. All submissions should be made by December
31, 2005.
Claire Strom, editor
Agricultural History
Minard Hall
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND 58105-5075
Any questions about the awards can be directed to the editorial office
at (701) 231-5831 or
www.usi.edu/libarts/history/AHS.
The Everett E. Edwards Award
Deadline: December 31, 2005
Amount: $200 to graduate student author and publication of article
The Everett E. Edwards Award is presented to the graduate student who
submits the best manuscript on any aspect of agricultural history and
rural studies during the calendar year 2005. The award includes an honorarium
and publication in the fall issue 2005 of Agricultural History.
Gilbert C. Fite Dissertation Award
Deadline: December 31, 2005
Amount: $300 honorarium
The Gilbert C. Fite Dissertation Award will be presented to the author
of the best dissertation on any aspect of agricultural history completed
during the calendar year 2005. Please submit three (3) copies of the
dissertation. The award includes an honorarium of $300 and a certificate.
Wayne D. Rasmussen Award
Deadline: December 31, 2005
Amount $200 honorarium
The Agricultural History Society offers the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award
to the author of the best article on agricultural history, broadly conceived,
published by a journal other than Agricultural History during
the calendar year 2005. The award includes a $200 honorarium for the
author and certificates for the author and publisher.
Theodore Saloutos Book Award
Deadline: December 31, 2005
Amount: $200 honorarium
The Theodore Saloutos Book Award was established in 1982 in memory of
the distinguished historian and past president of the Agricultural History
Society. An annual award of $500 is presented to the author of a book
on any aspect of agricultural history in the United States, broadly
interpreted. Publishers should send four copies of the book for consideration.
Web
Sites of Interest
For more information about agricultural history and rural studies, as
well as funding opportunities, search the following websites.
Agricultural
History and Rural Studies ( http://www.history.iastate.edu/aghistory.shtml)
Agricultural History Society
( http://agriculturalhistory.ualr.edu/)
H-Net Humanities &
Social Sciences Online (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~rural/)
Phi Alpha Theta ( http://www.phialphatheta.org)
Rural Women's Studies Association
(http://www.uncp.edu/rwsa/)
State Historical Society of Iowa
(http://www.iowahistory.org/)
