News
News for Academic Year 2022-2023
April 2023
● Congratulations to Gloria Davenport who was nominated for the 2023 Staff Employee of the Year Award in the category of Devotion to Duty!! This is in recognition that she has been a source of constancy and fortitude throughout the period of pandemic, leadership changes, and gen ed revision, working tirelessly to ensure the success of our colleagues, our students, and the well-being of our department, college, and university.
● Congrats to Tina Shull! Her Detention Empire received an honorable mention for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s First Book award at the Organization of American Historians conference this weekend!! (Pictured below with Mike Amezcua who won for his book Making Mexican Chicago).
● Kudos to Jurgen Buchenau! He is cited in a leading story in education by Palmer Magri and Sam Carnes on the consideration of House Bill 96. It was picked up by WFAE and the Charlotte Observer.
● Congratulations to Ella Fratantuono and Dan Du for securing summer funding for four of our MA students from the Graduate School (made available to assistant professors for work on summer research projects. Congrats to our students as well: Ella is working with Kirsten Smitherman and Katie Cordell and Dan Du with Maverick Huneycutt and Erjan Syrgak!
March 2023
Karen Cox wrote the foreword for Allen W. Trelease’s book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, which was reissued by LSU Press earlier this month. A classic text on the original Klan, originally published in 1971, it had gone out of print and Karen worked to get it reissued given its continued relevance to today’s scholarship on Reconstruction.
Christine Haynes received a 2023 General Albert C. Wedemeyer Military History Grant (MHG) thanks to the generosity of John Berdusis. 2022 recipients were Gregory Mixon, Heather Perry, and Blake Brotze.
- Battista Faculty Award Winners:
○Hannah Hicks, who will visit the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and a smaller archive in Edgefield, South Carolina, to shore up my existing research and examine sets of court records for her ongoing book project, entitled Troubling Justice: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South. An expansive project based on research with previously neglected local court records, the book would be the first to examine African American and White women as defendants, complainants, and witnesses in southern courts from Reconstruction to 1900.
○ Christine Haynes: to conduct archival research in France to trace Maximien Lamarque’s role in the transmission of counter-insurgency tactics across the theaters of the Napoleonic wars. This proposed research is part of a broader project, the first English-language biography of Lamarque. Later famous as a hero to “Les Misérables,” whose death from cholera in June 1832 sparked the riot that featured in Victor Hugo’s novel (later musical and film) by that name, Lamarque illustrates a number of significant developments of the Age of Revolutions between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century.
○ Heather Perry: to pay for the web-host subscription and graduate student assistance to upgrade her Digital Humanities project, Carolina in the Trenches: A Digital WWI History Project. an interactive website to engage the public and educate them about the global dimensions of North Carolina’s WWI experiences. Visitors to the site click through the visual narratives, they read and interact with primary sources – historical images, maps, documents, newspaper articles, photographs, and other digitized ephemera – as they also discover stories and details about the impact of WWI on the Carolina homefront. Because many of these people, events, and phenomena – such as the internment camp located in Hot Springs described above—have yet to receive significant scholarly attention, their stories are not wellknown and the materials shedding light on them are not easily available to the general public.
○ Karen Cox: to support a trip to attend the annual commemoration of the victims of the Rhythm Club fire that took the lives of 209 African Americans on the night of April 23, 1940 in Natchez, Mississippi, which will be included in her chapter about the collective memory of the fire. At the time it was the deadliest club fire in the history of the United States, only to be surpassed by the Coconut Grove fire in Boston two years later. While there are three or four books on the latter fire, there are none that address the tragedy of the Rhythm Club. Beyond the fire, the book will illuminate its many contexts, including the Great Migration between Mississippi and Chicago, World War II America, Jim Crow, literature, and jazz history.
● Congrats to Jill Massino for a great faculty presentation, and to the Graduate History Association and GHA president Alyssa Martin for a great 2023 GHA Forum!!
Thanks to:
● Dan Dupre for representing the History major at the last Admitted Students Day event with several student volunteers.
● Thanks also to Peter Ferdinando and David Johnson who represented the History major at the last Open House with several student volunteers.
Kudos to Students and Alumni
● Brenda Tindal, named inaugural chief campus curator for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, The Harvard Gazette. See her shout out to Gregory in this article by Lynn Roberson.
● Sylvia Marshall (MA, Public History Concentration, May 2022) began her new job as archivist for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation in Richmond, VA, January 2023. https://vawarmemorial.org/
● MA student, Blake Brotze, who is completing his thesis in our program under the supervision of Dr David Johnson, got accepted into the Ohio State Ph.D. program, where he will study under Dr. Bruno Cabanes. Blake hopes to study how the human conflict in World War I shaped the way we understand animals, particularly dogs in Britain.
● MA student, Brie David was accepted into the University of Alabama PhD program
● MA student, Alyssa Martin was accepted into the University of California, Irvine PhD program and The Ohio State PhD program.
● MA alum Jacob Taylor (Dr Goldfield was his committee chair) will be starting a Ph.D. in History at UNC-Chapel Hill. Jacob says he will be “working with Dr. Fitzhugh Brundage and Dr. James Leloudis on a history of Autism in North Carolina from 1940-2000, trying to re-define Autism as a civil rights issue historically and not a medical issue.”
● History Honors student and UNC-Charlotte men’s soccer senior Alex Willis has been named a second team Academic All-American following his final collegiate season in the Queen City the College Sports Communicators organization announced, Wednesday.
February 2023
● Congratulations to Jurgen Buchenau for his article on Alvaro Obregon, “How Mexico’s “Undefeated Caudillo” Met His End”! It appeared in Americas Quarterly and is available here.
● Congrats to Carmen Soliz who was featured in this very interesting Pagina Siete article in recognition of her recent book prize!
● Congratulations to Karen Cox who has accepted the Lewis P. Jones Visiting Professorship at Wofford College for Spring 2024! She also has an essay in Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, which made the New York Times Best Seller List, landing at #8 in its first week.
● Kudos to Oscar de la Torre whose article, “The Well That Wept Blood: Ghostlore, Haunted Waterscapes, and the Politics of Quilombo Blackness in Amazonia (Brazil)” was published in the American Historical Review!
January 2023
● Tina Shull has published a co-authored chapter with Climate Refugee Stories contributors in a new book on climate migration, Shifting Climates, Shifting People (Pilgrim Press) pdf here
● Congrats to Carmen Soliz who was featured in this very interesting Pagina Siete article in recognition of her recent book prize!
● Karen Cox has an essay Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, which made the New York Times Best Seller List, landing at #8 in its first week.
● Sonya Ramsey’s podcast is available here: History New Books Network Podcast on Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey
November 2022
● Amanda Pipkin’s recent book, Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572-1725, has been awarded the 2022 Best Book Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG). This book “examines how religion and religious activity intersected with the category of womanhood by focusing on case studies of women active in shaping the Dutch Reformed Church. Working against the belief that family structures necessarily inhibit female textual production, Pipkin places women’s devotional writing within the context of their lived religious practices and personal networks to demonstrate how these practices and networks encouraged their development as writers and thinkers. Dissenting Daughters offers a detailed, precise account of both these women’s religious writings and their family networks to argue that it was through domestic worship and writing that these women gained the authority to minister to family, friends, and a broader audience both in the Dutch Republic and abroad. This exceptionally well-researched and carefully written book demonstrates how some early modern women creatively drew upon the power and authority accorded to them as wives, mothers, and sisters to advance their own beliefs.”
September 2022
● Great news: John David Smith’s daughter Lisa donated to the GMSR Black Lives Matter scholarship and got her employer, The Deloitte Foundation, to match her gift of $250!
● Congratulations to Peter Ferdinando, Jason Newton, and Hannah Hicks who are now retitled Assistant Teaching Professor and to Carol who is Associate Teaching Professor as a result of the NTT Policy adopted by CLAS Faculty Council!
● Shimon Gibson published “An Iron Age Stone Toilet Seat (the ‘Throne of Solomon’) from Captain Montagu Brownlow Parker’s 1909–1911 Excavations in Jerusalem” in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly.
● Carol Higham has been nominated for the University Teaching Excellence Award! Recipients will be announced Friday, Sept. 30, at the UNC Charlotte Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.
● David Goldfield was featured in a Sept. 19th Constitution Day Event at 10am in COED 065. On the web: go.charlotte.edu/CJUS.Constitution.2022. See flier below:
● Tina Shull was named a finalist for Atkins Library’s Faculty Engagement Award!
August 2022
● Mark Wilson was recognized at University Convocation for his 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
● The new student body president and one-time History Freshman Learning Community participant, Tatiyana Larsen, recognized Oscar Lansen’s vital positive impact through his teaching and support for his first year students at University Convocation. Link here: (6.45 is where it starts). https://ucomm.charlotte.edu/livestream
● Gregory Mixon received National Endowment for the Humanities funding for a summer institute; Project: “The Quest for Freedom, 1865-1954”.
● Chancellor Gaber offered Shimon Gibson kudos for this report on an amazing archaeological discovery made in Jerusalem by a team from the History Department at UNC Charlotte. He also had this online article appear in May regarding the baptism sites at the Jordan River.
● Jurgen Buchenau’s new reader, “The Mexican Revolution: A Documentary History” is coming out on October 3.
● Tina Shull’s book, Detention Empire (pub date Oct 4) is landing in mailboxes! She also has an essay in the anthology Abolition Feminisms, vol. I published in Haymarket Books in August.
● Jason Newton signed an advanced contract for his book, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest.
News for Academic Year 2021-2022 Happy Earth Day – Tina Shull April 25, 2022
Dr. Steven Sabol on understanding the war in Ukraine.
March 18, 2022
Gregory Mixon-Sonya Ramsey Black Lives Matter Scholarship
October 13, 2021
UPDATE: An anonymous donor has generously come forward, and if we can get 10 donors to give it will unlock a gift of $500 to the Mixon-Ramsey Black Lives Matter Scholarship!
Join us in celebrating these two incredible faculty members and make a donation today! Crowdfunding for the Mixon-Ramsey Black Lives Matter Scholarship
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Erika Edwards Finalist for 2021 Harriet Tubman Prize
August 19, 2021
“Gregory Mixon-Sonya Ramsey Black Lives Matter Scholarship” and its first winner, Candace Silver
June 4, 2021
May 28, 2021
May 5, 2021
Congratulations to Erika for winning another book prize, the Western Association of Women Historians Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award. This award is for a monograph, article, book chapter or electronic media that illustrates the use of a specific set of primary sources.
Fields of Revolution Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964By Carmen Soliz
May 5, 2021
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands…
Public History students land prestigious internships
April 16, 2021
This summer, students in our public history program will be gaining valuable experience while also applying the skills and knowledge of the classroom in a real-world environment. Two students, Kaila Dollard and Sylvia Marshall, will hold highly sought after internships with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Two more students will be making their mark with local organizations – Sydney Johnson at the Charlotte Museum of History, and Kayla Schultz for the Charlotte Pride History Project.
Internships are a valuable way for students to gain…
No Common GroundA book by Karen L. Cox
April 14, 2021 When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century–but they’ve never been as intense as they are today. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469662671/no-common-ground/ Tindal named director of Harvard Museums of Science and Culture History and Africana Studies graduate and a former Visiting Lecturer April 14, 2021
Volume 7: The Central Powers In Russia’s Great War And Revolution: Enemy Visions And Encounters, 1914-22A book edited by John Deak, Heather R. Perry and Emre Sencer
August 28, 2020
This volume brings together the work of researchers in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Turkey, who are generating important, archivally based scholarship in their respective fields, languages, and nations of study. The larger goal of this volume is to sit in conversation with the others in this series that directly deal with Russia and its Great War and Revolution. Therefore, the volume provides an entry point for scholars who need a quick assessment of recent historiographic perspectives from the “other side of the hill.”
Hiding in Plain Sight Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine RepublicA book by Erika Denise Edwards
June 16, 2020
http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Hiding-in-Plain-Sight,7299.aspx
Department Statement of Solidarity
June 11, 2020
Department Statement of Solidarity
We, the faculty of the Department of History at UNC Charlotte, reacting with grief and anger at the recent killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, combined with subsequent events, feel compelled to offer the following statement to our faculty and staff, as well as to our students, friends, and the broader community. We do not habitually issue such statements in response to specific episodes of tragedy and injustice. However, we believe that the current situation is so overwhelmingly serious that…
PROFESSOR RECEIVES PRIZE FOR ‘BEST BOOK IN MODERN FRENCH HISTORY’A book by UNC Charlotte History professor Christine Haynes
January 28, 2020
A book by UNC Charlotte History professor Christine Haynes has been chosen the best in modern French history (post 1815) over the previous two years, receiving the inaugural Weber Book Prize from the UCLA Department of History.
The Eugen Weber Book Prize in French History is a biennial prize that is named for the eminent French historian Eugen Weber (1925-2007) and includes a cash award of $15,000. The prize was announced at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January in New York City. Haynes will receive the award formally in May when she delivers a talk at UCLA…