Jacki Hedlund Tyler, PhD, Director of Social Studies Education and Assistant Professor of History presents “A Woman’s Space: School Boards in the Nineteenth Century West.” The event will be held on Nov. 7 from noon to 12:50 p.m. in 207 Monroe Hall.

Holding a school board position and voting in school elections was an important role for women in the nineteenth-century American West, but did they participate in a “domestic” or “political” space? Described by male peers as moral leaders of their households, western women extended their socially acceptable talent of raising children to the teaching profession and to governing bodies of education. Presumably, then, women’s participation on school boards and voting in school elections took place within an environment that did not challenge the gendered division between the home/private and the public. But it would be incomplete to view these roles and women’s desires to vote in school elections as well as serve on school boards as merely taking place within the extension of the home. Over the course of the century groups of western women had sought a space to act as political participants. As school board members, women asserted gendered definitions of family authority and challenged political perceptions of suffrage, inheritance, education, and the legal understanding of “head-of-household.”

Professor Robert Bartlett of the 51¸£ÀûÉç Sociology Department has been awarded an Artist Trust Grant for his Jumping Into the Fire. Bartlett’s work examines the story of the 555th Parachute Infantry Batallion.

Jumping Into Fire is a documentary that uncovers the hidden story of the only all African-American paratrooper unit in military history. Hidden stories like this one are part of a larger narrative about race and racism in this country. This grant will help bring this story to light.

Come meet author Kate Brown as listen as she talks about ±Ê±ô³Ü³Ù´Ç±è¾±²¹,Ìýnuclear families, atomic cities and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters.

The event will be held on Friday, Oct. 12 at noon in the Showalter Auditorium. Refreshments and a meet-and-greet to follow the presentation.

By Vickie Shields

Michael Conlin,ÌýPhD,Ìýis a professor of history and current president of the United Faculty of Eastern (UFE). I recently caught up with Professor Conlin, to discuss his ,ÌýOne Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching toward the Civil War.

³Õ³§:ÌýWhy was it important for you to take on this subject matter at this time?

²Ñ°ä:ÌýThe American Civil War still looms large in the national consciousness. Some of the issues it has raised still remain to be resolved,Ìýi.e., the discrimination and ill-treatment of African-American, and the places of liberty and race in our national identity. I was struck by the plasticity of nationalism and national identity in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) era of the United States. Both slaveholders and abolitionists claimed the mantle of the Founders and both groups did so perfectly legitimately. 

³Õ³§:ÌýWhy is our understanding of the period leading up to the Civil War important to understand in the context of the American Revolution?

MC: It demonstrates the centrality of slavery to American national identity right from the beginning and persisting in important ways up to the present day. The Founding Fathers bequeathed a mixed legacy to subsequent generations. On the one hand, they justified their rebellion against the British monarchy on the grounds of natural rights. They also took effective steps to limit and even ban slavery in some areas: e.g., the end of American participation in the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory in 1787, and the gradual abolition of slavery in the Northern states (1780 to 1803).

On the other hand, all 13 original states were slave states. Many of the political and military leaders of the United States were slaveholders. The new United States government took several steps designed to protect the right of certain Americans to own some of their fellow human beings, culminating in the various protections for slavery in the U.S. Constitution. This fundamental tension between liberty and oppression was present throughout the American Revolution and has persisted to the present day.

In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, white Southerners grounded their defense of slavery, which culminated in the secession and rebellion of 11 states in a perfectly legitimate understanding of the historical legacy of the American Revolution. At the same time, antislavery Northerners and enslaved Southerners advocated abolitionist measures hearkening back to same American Revolution.

³Õ³§:ÌýWhat did you discover about the contradictions inherent in our Founding Fathers, Washington, and Jefferson?

MC: Both Jefferson and Washington neatly personified this fundamental tension between liberty and slavery, between freedom and oppression. Jefferson was the author of several thoughtful denunciations of slavery. In the mid-19th century, Abolitionists used the stirring words from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, as well as his misgivings about slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia,Ìýto claim the mantle of the Sage of Monticello. Jefferson also took concrete antislavery actions as a statesman. Jefferson was largely responsible for keeping slavery out of the Northwest Territory via the Northwest Ordinance (1787) and Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1807. Washington freed his slaves at great cost to his heirs and privately expressed dismay with slavery.

At the same time, slaveholders in the mid-19th century claimed that Jefferson and Washington were one of them: a benevolent slave master who looked after his slaves in a paternalistic way. In fact, both Jefferson and Washington cruelly exploited the labor of their slaves complete with harsh punishments, chronic deprivations, and division of nuclear families by slave sales. Despite their high-minded public rhetoric and private misgivings, they profited handsomely from the misery of their slaves.  Of course, Jefferson also had a coerced sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. While Washington did manumit his slaves, he only did so after he had died so that he benefited from their labor for his entire life. Moreover, he did this privately. Had the Father of his Country freed his slaves in a public and noteworthy fashion his example would have been a powerful one for other slaveholders to follow. Lastly, Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 into law and hounded a fugitive slave,ÌýOna Judge, to the fullest extent permitted by the law and then some.

In the end, the words and deeds of these two slaveholding Founders offered something for both opponents of and advocates for slavery in the mid-19th century to make use of when they argued about the place of slavery in their understandings of American national identity.

VS: Your book takes on the concept of “competing histories” and bias in memory of historical events. Why is this approach important?

²Ñ°ä:ÌýHistorians are constantly revising history. Oscar Wilde famously said, “the one duty we have to history is to re-write it” and he was correct. History is not one grand narrative. Instead, it is a bunch of competing narratives that contradict each other (and sometimes themselves). I argue that the “history wars” of the 1840s and 1850s over slavery and the Founders is quite similar to the “history wars” fought in the 1990s and 2000s over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution or the recent brouhahas over Common Core and the AP history test. The act of remembering and misremembering (and forgetting) historical events is ongoing. What is included is important but what is left out is sometimes more important. It is important for us to remember that history is not dead and dusted. History is not static. It is alive and dynamic. I like to say that I and my colleagues in the 51¸£ÀûÉç History Department “make history” every day.

VS: For fun, I am told you and Emeritus History Professor Dick Donley had the same doctoral advisor. Tell me about that.

²Ñ°ä:ÌýDick Donley was one of Robert W. Johannsen’s first graduate students and I was one of his last. Our time at the University of Illinois was separated by 32 years! We both have fond memories of his mentorship and the University of Illinois library (the third largest academic library in the U.S.). Although I did not meet him until the end of my first quarter at 51¸£ÀûÉç, we have become fast friends and good colleagues. Dick has kindly read One Nation Divided by Slavery and my current book project tentatively entitled Constitutional Conflict. Dick has a sharp eye for awkward syntax and a mastery of the historiography even as an emeritus professor. He is also is more gentle than our PhD advisor, who once returned a chapter of my dissertation with the comment “It reads like an encyclopedia article.” He did not mean that as a compliment!

Psychology Professor Russell Kolts is garnering international acclaim for his research in compassionate-based therapy for anger and other powerful human emotions. He is the author of The Compassionate Mind Approach to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy and most recently, An Open-Hearted Life: Transformative Methods for Compassionate Living from a Clinical Psychologist and a Buddhist Nun, with Thubten Chodron.