CAS News

History

Founder’s Day Presenter: Amanda Pilcher

By

Studying and living at UP for four years has transformed senior Amanda Pilcher from a history buff to an aspiring history professor. Her love for the University has shaped her career goals.

“In ten years, I hope to have earned my Ph.D. in history and begun a job at a university much like UP,” Amanda said. “I want to teach at a school which emphasizes the importance both of research and ensuring strong student education.”

Amanda said she has been influenced heavily by the professors at UP, not only educationally, but personally as well. She has particularly appreciated the instruction of Patrick Murphy, a professor in the music department.

“Throughout my time at UP, he has shared with me his time, talent, and patience. As a result, he has allowed me to grow both as a student and an individual,” she said.

At Founders Day, Amanda will present her senior history thesis, which focuses on the American women’s rights movement in the 1860s. She will explain how the Civil War pushed American women to think about their roles in society.  She recently presented the same work to the Northwest Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference, which is the honor society for HIstory students.  At the Founder’s Day breakfast, Amanda was also awarded all three of the top student prizes for History, as well as an award from Fields Hall.

Inspired in part by her experience at UP, Amanda hopes to do a year of service work after graduating this May.

“Not only have I been challenged academically, but I have been called to think about my role in society and how I can work to improve our world,” Amanda said. “UP has prepared me not only to be successful in the working world, but as an individual in a global society.”

Northwest Regional History Conference

By

Laura Frazier addresses Phi Alpha Theta Conference

The History Department and its Rho Pi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, hosted the Northwest Regional
Conference on April 4-6.

The PAT Conference the largest regional conference in the country and included 140 student presenters from over 20 different schools around the region, including University of Idaho, Montana State University/Billings, Gonzaga University,Western Washington University, Portland State, and Linfield College. Eight students from UP presented their research at the conference, including: Joseph Frischmuth, Sarah Lynch, Elizabeth Tertadian, Justine Roades, Laura Frazier, Amanda Pilcher, Nicholas Chun, and Andrew Otton. The conference program can be found at http://sites.up.edu/history/files/2013/03/NWPAT-2013-Program-.pdf.

[nggallery id=25]

Peter Ames Carlin Lecture

By

Portland author Peter Ames Carlin will present a lecture,”Revolving Sounds: How the Beatles and the Beach Boys Created Art-Rock in the 1960s,” on Tuesday, April 16, at 7:30 p.m., in Buckley Center room 163. His talk is free and open to faculty, staff, students, and the public.

Carlin has written critically acclaimed biographies of Paul McCartney (Paul McCartney: A Life, 2010), BrianWilson (Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, 2007), and Bruce Springsteen (Bruce, 2012). His talk will contrast the personal and creative stories behind the work of Lennon & McCartney and Beach Boys founder and composer Brian Wilson. Carlin will explore an intriguing paradox: while the Beatles’ creative explosion was fueled by confidence and collaboration, BrianWilson’s creativity grew out of deep-seated fear and a stiffening resistance to his creative impulses, yet both sets of creators were chasing the same ideal and inspiring one another along the way.

The lecture is an off shoot of the honors course in progress,“Beatles, Beach Boys, and God,”led by Brad Franco, History, and Michael Cameron, Theology. For more information contact Cameron at ext. 7369 or cameronm@up.edu.

CAS Colleagues

By

The Spring edition of “Colleagues” took place Thursday, March 7, from 3:30-5:00pm in BC 163. Faculty gathered to listen to Christi Hancock from the History department present, “Thinking about the Past through Story-Telling and Women’s Lives” as well as Andrew Guest from the Social and Behavioral Sciences department discuss, “The social science of sports: Explorations during one (long) sabbatical at three (very different) universities.”

 

[nggallery id=23]

Lois Leveen Lecture and Reading

By

Lois Leveen

Author Lois Leveen will give a talk and read from her work on Thursday,March 21 at 4 p.m. in Shiley 319. The lecture is titled “Telling Secrets: Mary Bowser, Race, Gender, and the Fictions of History,” and will explore what it means to teach—and learn—African American history through fiction. At 7:30 p.m. in Buckley Center room 163, Leveen will read from her 2012 novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser as part of the English department’s Readings and Lectures Series, and is co-sponsored by the History department.

Lois Leveen is a Portland-based author and performer.  Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, the New York Times, onstage at PerformanceWorks Northwest and NPR’s LiveWire, and in film festivals around the country.  Her first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins/William Morrow), is based on the true story of a free black woman who became a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War–by pretending to be a slave to the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. A former faculty member at UCLA and Reed College, Leveen gives talks and leads classes at museums, libraries, and schools throughout the country.

For more information contact Molly Hiro, at ext. 8031 or hiro@up.edu.

History Alumni prominently featured

By

Anna Sokolov with photo of her parents.

History Alumni Anna Sokolov has been featured in two stories in the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Anna is currently working on her MAT with social studies and language arts licensure at Western Oregon University, and is in her third year of working in an alternative high school, and really enjoying it. “Who knew I would get along with delinquents so well?!” she said.  “I am working as the Business to School Liaison, which means my main responsibility is coordinating the Service Learning projects for the school, which is a lot of fun!”

Anna coordinated a school-wide Service Learning project involving Amnesty International’s Global Write-a-Thon event and the newspaper picked it up and ran an article about it.

Read the story here.

Anna wrote her senior history thesis on her father, Victor Sokolov, a prominent Russian dissident. The newspaper also spoke with her about her father.

Read the story here.

Women admitted to UP!

By

In 1951, the University of Portland began admitting women as students to the College of Arts and Sciences.  Though women had been admitted to nursing and music before the 1950s, since these were considered the proper sphere for women’s activities, the opening of CAS prompted the opening of the entire campus to women who wanted to study in any field.

The display featuring this milestone in the University’s history was created by the University Museum using photographs from the University Archives for the display case on the first floor of Buckley Center. Visit the display the next time you are in BC!

[nggallery id=17]

 

American women in the 1950s:

In her best-selling 1963 publication, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan painted a picture of a 1950s world in which a life of domesticity proved the only option available for American women, noting that college admission rates for women had actually declined from the 1920s to the 1950s.  Although Friedan’s claim accurately reflected some aspects of 1950s America- including the shifting gender ideologies brought about by the post-World War II era- it didn’t capture or define all of American women’s experiences in the 1950s.

In reality during the 1950s American women continued to attend college; they continued to work outside of the home (in fact married women’s labor force participation, increasing since the 1920s, continued to climb upward throughout the 1950s); women continued to be involved in political activities, spearheading some of the first anti-nuclear and peace organizations of the McCarthy era; and, though often over-looked, women such as Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Rosa Parks, and Jo Ann Robinson played critical roles in laying the groundwork for and organizing the Civil Rights Movement.

If you’d like to learn more, consider taking one of the following courses in the Fall, 2013:

HST 316: History of Modern American Women

SW/PSY 356 Perspectives on Human Sexuality

For further reading:

Joanne Meyerowitz, editor, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Post-War America, 1945-1960, (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1994.)

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, (New York: Basic Books, 1999.)

History Journal Wins Top Prize . . . Again!

By

University of Portland’s history department awarded first place for student journal, Northwest Passages

University of Portland’s Department of History department was awarded first prize in the Gerald D. Nash History Journal competition for its student journal, Northwest Passages. This marks the second year in a row that the journal has placed first and the fourth time overall.

The 2012 Northwest Passages editorial team includes 2012 alumni Tessa Daniels, Cassie Passion, and Whitney Simpson; senior Renne Erb; and junior Lindsey Tsuruda. Faculty advisor is history professor Mark Eifler.

Northwest Passages is sponsored by the Rho Pi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. Published in the spring of each year since 2000, each edition of the journal includes several senior theses as well as a diverse sample of smaller papers completed in history courses offered throughout the academic year. The writings are selected by the editorial team which is staffed entirely by students. Each year over the past six years, the journal has received recognition in a national journal competition.

Hands on History

By

Students in Mark Eifler’s History 420 this semester are reading, transcribing, and researching a collection of unpublished letters of a surgeon from the US Civil War.  The letters of William Peck were digitalized and given to the university by Jane Leeson, who lives in the North Portland neighborhood.  The letters begin in 1854 and go through 1870, and cover Peck’s work as a doctor, lawyer, surgeon, officer, political worker and businessman during this traumatic period of history.

The collection was digitalized last summer in order to preserve the letters, and to make it easier to view and study them without increasing any deterioration of the original pages.  The letters are now being transcribed and researched. [Read more…] about Hands on History

Making History

By

Prof. Hancock recently won the 2012 Herbert S. Schell Award from the journal South Dakota History for her article “Being ‘all things to all men:’ Louisa Irvine Riggs and the Cultural Implications of Women’s Missionary Work.”  She is also the author of “Healthy Vocations: Field Nursing and the Religious Overtones of Public Health,” recently published in the Journal of Women’s History.

AT UP, Prof. Hancock teaches Women’s History, African American History, and the History of Social Movements and Reform.In addition to teaching, she is also on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Oregon Historical Quarterly.  She recently co-hosted a presentation with Gertrude “Trudy” Rice, entitled Trudy’s Story: The Remarkable Career of One of Oregon’s First Registered Nurses of Color.  Following this presentation Prof. Hancock conducted an oral history recording session to preserve this story from Oregon’s past.  The audio-video recording will be available to students through the UP library.