Bearing the Torch Published

November 17, 2022

Bob Hutton, associate professor of Appalachian studies at Glenville State University in Glenville, West Virginia, and former UT lecturer of history, published Bearing the Torch: The University of Tennessee, 1794–2010. Hutton’s book is a comprehensive history of UT that faculty, students, alumni, Vols fans, or anyone interested in learning more about the history of UT will appreciate.

“There’s a campus history that came out in the 1980s that was in bad need of a successor. I think that mine’s unprecedented in its focus on the ever-changing quest for equality in our world and on our campuses.”

Hutton’s book portrays a biography about how UT’s history reflects both Tennessee and the nation, combining various historical contexts with UT’s own history and issues.

“I love spending time in the archives, and I do aspire to be a decent writer, and I thought it’d be nice to write something that I knew a lot of people would be interested in reading.”

“Most readers will gain an appreciation for how many times the school nearly disappeared and how many times it got much-needed help from surprising places (like the federal government, for one)” Hutton said.

“I’m hoping the book will give people a better sense of the school’s past and heritage.”

On Thursday, October 27 at 6 p.m. Hutton and writer/researcher Jack Neely were at the East Tennessee History Center to discuss Hutton’s new book. The conversation was also available to be streamed online.

—Story by Jessica Foshee

Cas Walker Stories Project

November 13, 2022

The Cas Walker Stories project gathers the stories and legends told about one of 20th century Knoxville’s most famous citizens. Cas Walker was a grocer-politician-media celebrity-music promoter-coon hunter whose colorful life has become the stuff of the region’s favorite urban legends.

The project has recorded the oral histories of many who knew Cas Walker, as friends, employees, and political rivals or allies, and collected others from the public. Many of these are gathered in Cas Walker: Stories on his Life and Legend, published by UT Press and edited by Joshua Hodge, a PhD student in the History Department who passed away while the book was in its final stages of completion. An endowment fund, raised in his honor, supports graduate research. The oral histories that Josh recorded will be deposited with the Knox County Library’s archives.

You can also hear more about the project in this episode of the Raised in Knoxville podcast, where host Todd Steed discusses the project with Ernie Freeberg. To learn more about the book or leave your own Cas Walker story, visit the link below.

From the University of Tennessee Press about Cas Walker: Stories on His Life and Legend

This wonderfully entertaining book brings together selections from interviews with a score of Knoxvillians, various newspaper accounts, Walker’s own autobiography, and other sources to present a colorful mosaic of Walker’s life. The stories range from his flamboyant advertising schemes—as when he buried a man alive outside one of his stores—to memories of his inimitable managerial style—as when he infamously canned the Everly Brothers because he didn’t like it when they began performing rock ’n’ roll. Further recollections call to mind Walker’s peculiar brand of bare-knuckle politics, his generosity to people in need, his stance on civil rights, and his lifelong love of coon hunting (and coon dogs). The book also traces his decline, hastened in part by a successful libel suit brought against his muckraking weekly newspaper, the Watchdog.

A Legacy of Jacksonian Scholarship

September 9, 2020

Dan Feller joined the Department of History in 2003 with a scholarly focus on Jacksonian politics. This spring, he retires as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities and leaves a legacy of building one of the most important and visible presidential papers projects in the country – the Papers of Andrew Jackson.

“Under Dan’s leadership, the Jackson papers project has made a bid to become the most productive and respected documentary editing project of its kind in the country,” said Thomas Coens, associate editor of the Jackson Papers. “We have published at a breakneck clip while maintaining rigorous standards of thoroughness and accuracy. Fellow scholars praise the project and in 2017, it won the Jefferson Prize.”

The project received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in 2018 to prepare Volumes 11, 12, and 13 for publication. The $325,000 grant was the second highest among the 21 awarded in the 2018 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations program.

“The generous grant was the largest we have ever received from the NEH and came as a welcome show of confidence in the quality and significance of our work,” Feller said. “Jackson is an inescapably important figure in our nation’s history. From its beginning, the aim of the Jackson papers project has been to promote our understanding of Jackson and his era by making available the crucial primary sources and documents from which we can see, directly, what our forebears said and did.”

Andrew Jackson is one of the most critical and controversial figures in American history and a president of great interest to the public. In recent years, Jackson has become even more relevant and controversial due to two developments: first, the tentative decision to remove him from the $20 bill in 2016; and second, the fascination with comparing Jackson to Donald Trump.

“Both of these developments have been a blessing and a curse for the Jackson Papers and its public outreach efforts,” Coens said. “On the one hand, we’re happy to play our traditional role of providing the public with the underlying facts and information that lie beneath these debates. On the other hand, the amount of misinformation that circulates nowadays about Jackson, especially within pieces attempting to compare and contrast him with Trump, is troubling, and trying to correct it all can often feel like playing whack-a-mole. Dan, however, to his credit, has been an indefatigable warrior these last four years in trying to bring some sanity and historical grounding to those debates.”

In 2016, Feller received the Faculty Outreach Award from the College of Arts and Sciences for his efforts at making UT the place to go for journalists, popular writers, and teachers who want to get the story of Andrew Jackson right. This spring, UT honored Feller with a Chancellor’s Honors Award for Research and Creative Achievement for his accomplishments as editor and director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson.

“The works produced under Feller’s leadership are deeply researched, and have already proven to be invaluable resources for those outside the academy,” said Ernie Freeberg, professor and head of the UT Department of History. “Popular historian Jon Meacham relied heavily on Feller’s counsel in writing his Pulitzer-prize winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, and more recently, Steve Inskeep of NPR published a volume on Jackson that relied explicitly on Dan Feller’s scholarship and advice.”

As a project in the history department, the papers are more than just a collection of correspondence or an opportunity to share scholarly expertise with the public.

“The Jackson papers are a recruitment tool for our graduate program that allows us to compete for top-quality graduate students with other programs that are usually better funded and have a larger faculty,” Feller said.

Max Matherne is one of the graduate students who chose UT because of Feller and the history department.

“It would be no exaggeration to say that I probably would have never attended graduate school if not for Dan Feller,” said Matherne, who was torn between a PhD in history from UT or attending law school. “My heart tugged me toward history, but my head warned me that there was little left to say about the subject I wanted to study – Jacksonian politics. A single phone conversation with Professor Feller cleared all that up.”

Six years later, Matherne successfully defended his dissertation looking at the very same topic he discussed with Feller during their first phone call.

“In many ways, Professor Feller is my scholarly role model,” Matherne said. “He is a model mentor, not just to his students but to anyone who works in the field. He knows how to balance necessary criticism with essential encouragement. Whether he’s discussing a published monograph or editing a dissertation chapter, he knows how to pinpoint illogical assumptions or gaps in evidence. As a mentor, he has always encouraged us to follow our guts and our interests, trusting that our passions and dedication would yield quality work.”

Coens notes Feller’s work ethic as one of the most memorable things that stand out during the years they worked together on the Jackson Papers project.

“Dan has high standards when it comes to the quality and accuracy of the scholarship produced by the Jackson Papers and by his editors,” Coens said. “Like any good historian worth his or her salt, I came into the job with similar standards, but Dan’s insistence on triple- and quadruple-checking information and transcriptions, on not giving up on a question or a problem until no stone is left unturned, is infectious. I have no doubt that he has made me a better historian.”

Feller’s work will not end when he retires. He will stay involved with the Papers of Andrew Jackson project through another volume, which will be his sixth, and finish a book of his own.

“I have enough researching, writing, and speaking to keep me busy as long as my energy holds up,” Feller said. “I’m not quitting and I’m not going anywhere. Like most dedicated historians, I’m in it for life.”

—By Amanda Womac

Faculty Awards and Recognitions

June 9, 2020

The Department of History faculty continues to be recognized with a range of prestigious national awards and recognitions.

Here is a partial list:

Kristen Block continued work on her second book with support of residential research fellowships from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, and the Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Tore Olsson was featured in the PBS American Experience documentary, The Man Who Tried to Feed the World. Olsson’s book, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton), received a fifth book award, The Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Book Prize, given by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organization and Voluntary Action.

Sara Ritchey was awarded two of the most competitive fellowships in the humanities, an ACLS and an NEH research fellowship, which supported completion of her forthcoming book, The Recovery of Health: Religious Women, Caregiving, and Erasure in Late Medieval Europe.

Charles Sanft won the college’s Midcareer Research Award.

Alison Vacca received the Chancellor’s Research and Creative Achievement—Professional Promise award.

Brandon Winford won the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith book award for John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019). In addition, Professor Winford received the College of Arts and Sciences Diversity Leadership Award, and UT’s Hardy Liston Jr. Symbol of Hope Award.

Shellen Wu has been awarded a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Graduate Student News

June 9, 2020

Even as they taught classes and researched online during a global pandemic, our graduate students have consistently excelled. They won dozens of awards and fellowships last year, including international, national, and university honors. These range from dissertation completion fellowships at the Humanities Center to archival travel grants to some of the most prestigious international fellowships available to students in history.

Outside Fellowships and Grants

• Adam Aaron received a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to Indiana University.
• Jordan Amspacher received the Mary Jaharis Center Dissertation Grant in Byzantine Studies.
• Alyssa Culp received a Fulbright Fellowship (2020-21), a Short-term research grant from DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), a German Studies research grant from DAAD, and a travel research grant from the Central European History Society.
• Tess Evans received the Newberry Library’s Jack Miller Center Fellowship to conduct research this summer (2019).
• Ryan Gesme received a Fulbright Fellowship (2019-20), DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) long-term fellowship, and an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship (2020-21).
• Yiyun Huang (Malcolm) received a Clark Library/Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies Predoctoral Fellowship by UCLA, a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, the Omohundro Institute Lapidus Predoctoral Short-term Fellowship, the Michael Kraus Research Grant in American Colonial History from the American Historical Association, the Winterthur Museum Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and the Frances E. Malamy Research Fellow.
• Michael Lovell received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) award for summer language study.
• Thomas Maurer received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Exchange Program Scholarship.
• Minami Nishioka received the Social Science Research Council, Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship; the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Grant, the Organization of American Historians, Travel Grant; the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation, Research Grant; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant.
• Jeffery Saba received a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to Indiana University.

UT Fellowships and Grants

• Jordan Amspacher received a UT Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2020-21) and the Marco Anne Marie Van Hook Memorial Travel Fellowship.
• Kelsey Blake received the Marco Haslam Fellowship in Public Humanities (2019-2020) and the Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellowship (2020-21).
• Tess Evans received a UT Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2019-20).
• Alex Garnhart-Bushakra received the Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellowship (2019-20).
• Eric Gubelman received a UT Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2019-20).
• Lorraine Herbon received a UT Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2020-21).
• Claire Mayo received the Oscar Roy Ashley Fellowship.
• Minami Nishioka received a Thomas Fellowship (2020-21).
• Laura Roesch received a UT Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2019-20).
• Jeffrey Saba received a Thomas Fellowship (2020-21).
• Jason Stubblefield received the Marco Haslam Fellowship in Public Humanities (2020-21).

History Department Awards

• Alyssa Culp received the Commitment to Community Award
• Tess Evans received the Lee Verstandig Award in American History and the Joshua S. Hodge Award for the Recovery of Lost Voices
• Alex Garnhart-Bushakra received the Award for Excellence in Gender Studies
• Michael Lovell received the Thomas and Kathryn Shelton Award
• Michael Lynch received the William Anderson Award for Military History
• Claire Mayo received the Susan Becker Award for Excellence in Teaching
• Minami Nishioka received the Charles Jackson Award for American History
• Laura Roesch received the Claude Robertson Award for Excellence in European History
• Jason Stubblefield received the Bryon-Groce Award for Public History

Publications

• Josh Hodge published Cas Walker: Stories on his Life and Legend (UT Press, 2019).
• Claire Mayo published an article in the Journal of the Western Society for French History.
• Matthew Menarchek received the McClung award for the best article in the 2018 Journal of East Tennessee History.

In the Archives

June 9, 2020

Alyssa Culp spent the summer of 2019 researching in Munich, Germany, at the Bavarian State Archives and Bavarian State Library. Before arriving, she had some ideas about what types of documents she might find in the collections. The reality, however, is archives are full of unexpected surprises that lead research in exciting directions. About halfway through her trip, Alyssa discovered a document written by a physician requesting a morgue for his district. He sent this request following a shocking incident in which a young man sprang out of his coffin just as it was being lowered in the ground. Alyssa was fascinated by this story and the physician’s reasoning that a morgue was needed to prevent more such incidents involving “the living dead.” As she dug deeper into the documents she found that this history surrounding the morgue was even more fascinating. With a bit of luck and help from an archivist, Alyssa found an entire collection about the Bavarian morgues. The collection contained physician reports about the dire need for morgues, pamphlets on how to design coffins to prevent live burial, warnings of corpses as cholera carriers, reports of local disdain for the morgue, and even architectural plans on how a proper morgue should be constructed.

A few weeks later, Alyssa delivered a talk about this research at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and the audience was enthralled. Their questions prompted her to think even more about the cultural, religious, and social understandings of death and how they changed with these establishments. Alyssa left Munich with new questions about how the morgue challenged previous ways of dying in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Alyssa never expected her dissertation to move in this direction.

“This collection essentially found me,” she said. “I believe that is the true beauty of research and working in the archives; you never really know where the manuscripts and collections might lead you.”

Jordan Amspacher traveled to Paris in 2019 to conduct archival research for his dissertation, “Troya Victa: Empire, Identity, and Apocalypse in the Frankish Chronicles of the Fourth Crusade.” While there, Jordan had the opportunity to examine numerous thirteenth-century manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His experiences in France’s most renowned library left him humbled and inspired. The archivists generously assisted him in his research, without a second thought allowing him access to some of France’s oldest and most beautiful national treasures. Jordan was blown away by his experiences with the manuscripts themselves. Many of them were beautifully illuminated, with careful and deliberate lettering, colored rubrications to aid in reading, historiated initials, and expansive gold leaf plating which sometimes took up as much as half a page of parchment. Jordan appreciated the experience of connecting with the past in the archives.

“To hold within your hands the actual physical record of the thoughts penned by an author eight-centuries deceased, and then to feel those thoughts inhabit your own consciousness, as though they have a will to grant some measure of immortality to the otherwise nameless scribe who gave them form elicits sentiments which the confines of the written word simply do not have the power to convey,” he said.

For his next research trip, Jordan looks forward to holding and engaging with more rare texts in Munich and Colmar, including the three extant manuscript copies of Gunther of Pairis’ Hystoria Constantinopolitana.

Malcolm Huang’s research on the cultural ties between Qing-China and colonial North America focuses on the circulation of Chinese tea and tea culture. In 2019, this project sent him to research collections in Guangzhou, China, and Salem, Massachusetts. Getting settled in at a new archive always requires a fair amount of paperwork initially. Malcolm noted that in order to access special collections at Zhongshan University in China he had to walk across the campus on an exceptionally hot and humid day to get the required two letters of support from the associate head of the history department. Physical discomfort aside, this effort paid off. Once he got the temporary reader’s pass and was allowed to enter the archive, he enjoyed a great degree of freedom. The staff were helpful and allowed him to take as many pictures of the sources as he needed.

In addition to Guangzhou, Malcolm’s research took him to the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts. In the course of two months, he collected sources about America’s Old China Trade, tea consumption and sale in the colonial era, as well as the physicians’ records and prescriptions about how they administered tea as part of the remedy to patients. Particularly fascinating were Edward Augustus Holyoke’s papers. Although the finding aid did not list tea as a key word for this collection of papers, working through this collection was well worth the effort. Malcolm found that Holyoke’s correspondence talked about tea quite a bit. For Malcom, this was an exciting discovery because it means that colonial physicians not only believed in tea’s medicinal usages, but actually administered them as medicine.

This experience highlights an important lesson about how archives are organized and classified. Sometimes the collections that seem like they would be useful (due to the catalog description or keyword listed in the database) turn out to be dead ends. Then, there are other collections that do not initially seem like they would yield important information, but prove to be full of unexpected insights.

To support graduate student research travel, please contribute to the History Department Enrichment Fund.

Celebrating Five Years of the Fleming-Morrow Lecture

June 9, 2020

Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor at the University of Delaware, delivered the Fifth Annual Fleming-Morrow Distinguished Lecture in African-American History, February 27, 2020. In her presentation, “The World is Ours, Too: Black Women, Global Activism, and the New Black Travel Movement,” Gill explained that the new black travel movement is not new at all, but a continuation of a phenomenon that began in the 1940s and one that has a great deal to teach us about the tensions between political activism, leisure, and global freedom struggles. 

Gill’s presentation was especially exciting as it marked an important milestone for the Fleming-Morrow Lecture, as we celebrated five years of its existence. In February 2015, Professors Shannen Dee Williams (now at Villanova University) and Brandon K. Winford co-founded the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African-American History through the University of Tennessee Foundation. The endowment honors the distinguished careers of Professors Cynthia Griggs Fleming and John H. Morrow Jr., two pioneering African-American professors in the UT College of Arts and Sciences and Department of History. The endowment provides annual funding for a lecture in African-American history and two student awards in African-American and military history. 

In fall 2017, the Fleming-Morrow Endowment reached the fully endowed level whereby it is now self-supporting and approaching the $50,000 mark. It has become a premiere event with attendance from faculty, staff, and students from the university, as well as from members of the broader Knoxville community. We welcome your continued support moving forward as we seek to grow the Fleming-Morrow Endowment and take it to greater heights.

Click here to support the Fleming-Morrow fund.

Waiting out the Pandemic

June 9, 2020

Like playing musical chairs, when COVID-19 hit you grabbed the nearest chair and hunkered down. Any chair would do, and in my case, it was the Albright Institute, where I found myself virtually alone, rattling around a 100-year-old stone compound in East Jerusalem during a pandemic. That I found myself at the Albright Institute was not unexpected; I was awarded a fellowship for this spring. It’s the rattling around alone and doing the cooking that was the unexpected. I arrived in mid-January as one of six fellows, along with a full staff, and the usual assortment of Albright denizens who come and go in strange and unknowable orbits. Due to COVID-19, by early March, Agatha Christie style, we were whittled down to two, and I was doing the cooking. There are undoubtedly much less accommodating places to wait out a pandemic, and on that score I consider myself very fortunate.

The W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, is a hulking relic of a colonial past that shares more of its DNA with the British Raj than the less corporeal American version. Of the 27 American overseas research institutes, the Albright is the second oldest; the building dates to 1925 and is situated in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian side of town, just down the street from Herod’s Gate in the Old City. The building and its contents are a full expression of a kind of languorous miasma best associated with the close of the Ottoman Empire (think the film Pascali’s Island).

Life at the Albright is all about the building, and the omphalos of the building is the courtyard. The compound, constructed in 1925, is comprised of three two-story buildings (including two subterranean repurposed cisterns); a director’s house and lecture hall, a research library and hostel, and a kitchen/dining room/common room (along with a few apartments) that form a U shape around one of Jerusalem’s true hidden gems, an exquisite garden courtyard. The courtyard is a consistently cool and serene preserve that recalibrates pace to an even more languid tempo than the rest of dusty, sleepy Jerusalem.

The Albright is downright monastic, and even in the best of time the world passes it by. As I said, it’s a good place to hunker down. I have access to an excellent research library 24/7, we get food deliveries twice a week, we have a small grove of lemon trees and a rosemary hedgerow, a tenth of a mile circular driveway that makes a good track, and Wi-Fi, of course. Sadly, the place is not haunted, other than by the history of the Middle East.

I’ve been able to get my work done, put on a few pounds, and learned how to mix a decent sidecar (and yes, I feel conjured up by central casting). But all this torpor comes at a price; like everywhere, COVID-19 has cast a deep and unsettling pall on the place. With no fellows or guests, the flow of both funds and intellectual energy have dried up. In such a pensive time, big questions have plenty of room to bubble to the surface. And as president of the Albright, I have a front row seat in trying to make sense of all this all, trying to revision a future of unknown dimensions, trying to figure out just who’s Zooming who in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Most days begin with me and the director discussing the current situation and the necessary steps to ensure the safety of the residents and to keep the place running. By late-February we started cancelling a variety of programs: workshops, field trips, scholarly dinners, and the like. By mid-March, most of the fellows had left or been caught out of the country and were no longer allowed back (Israel shut down pretty quickly and thoroughly, a strategy that seems to have worked as the COVID numbers look very good and the country is now cautiously re-opening). With only two fellows left, we had to make the very difficult decision of furloughing the staff. During the next seven weeks none of the residents left the building, and while this sounds implausible, I can assure you it is not.

Since 1925 the Albright has survived a lot; changes in government, riots, wars (when Israeli soldiers tried to enter the building in June of 1967, Omar Jibreen, the cook (who was still here in 1984 when I was fellow) refused their entrance, telling them it was American property (they sheepishly abided as many of the Israeli high command knew the Albright’s reputation), and now a global pandemic.

I’m pretty sure the Albright will make it through this challenge as well, and I am working hard to ensure that will happen. We plan on reopening in August when a new group of fellows begins to arrive. We are holding our breath that we can do this safely but like every institution, so much is out of our hands. With all that is going on (and not going on), tomorrow, like every other day since mid-January, I plan on working in the library on my book project (rural elites in small scale societies in the Iron Age I – not too dissimilar to the Albright itself), taking breakfast and a few coffee breaks in the courtyard, and then making dinner. Be safe, be cautious…

–Submitted by JP Dessel

An Inspired Career Impacting Students

June 9, 2020

As spring semester closed, Lynn Sacco retired from an inspiring teaching career at UT. Sacco graduated from Marquette University in 1975 where she majored in English and journalism. Following graduation, she traveled in South America before attending law school in her beloved home town of Chicago. After practicing law for 15 years, she headed to graduate school, earning an MA in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo and then a PhD in history at USC in 2001. After a year teaching high school in one of Los Angeles’s poorest communities, Sacco arrived at UT in 2004.

She quickly became one of the department’s most popular teachers, offering richly conceived courses on topics ranging from American film to the history of rape, gay America, and a now-renowned course on Dolly Parton. A passionate mentor to her students, she has always encouraged them to engage with issues relevant to their own lives, including sexuality, race, and social movements. While these can be politically divisive, Sacco finds that students are more comfortable exploring these complex topics within the context of the past. By learning to empathize with people in history, and taking the time to understand why they arrived at the choices they made, students are better equipped to evaluate their own world view. As Sacco encourages her students, “believe what you want, but have a good reason for it.”

Her work with UT undergraduates has been recognized with numerous honors and accolades including the department’s David V. and Kathryn G. White Undergraduate Teaching Award, the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and this spring, the Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award. 

Outside of the classroom, Sacco has been an important mentor to large numbers of students through the years. She makes an effort to get to know all of her students, learning about their backgrounds and their personal struggles, as well as their academic interests and career aspirations. Her talents as a mentor are obvious to everyone in Dunford Hall who has had to step over the legs of the many students who camp outside her office door, waiting for their turn to get her advice and encouragement. Her sharp understanding of who her students are outside of the classroom has shaped her impressive service record on campus, including, for example, the work she has done with the Pride Center and as faculty advisor for Sex Week. 

Of all the classes Sacco has taught at UT, one has drawn particular attention and acclaim, on campus and around the world. Dolly’s America: From Sevierville to the World explores “how a ‘hillbilly’ girl from Appalachia grew up to become an international one-word sensation.” Sacco designed this class, a small seminar for honors students, to both explore an engaging topic and prepare students to research and write an extensive senior thesis. Beginning in 2017 the course attracted enormous attention outside the university, including in such news outlets as the BBC and the New York Times.

As the reporter for the Times discovered, Sacco’s course used Dolly Parton’s career to explore much bigger topics – the economic history of Appalachia, the history of media-constructed gender norms, the history of tourism, and much more. In this course, Dolly Parton became a doorway to understanding so much about the regional and national history that has shaped the experience of our students today. For many students from this region, understanding Dolly helped them better understand themselves.

The impact of that course on Sacco’s students was made vividly clear when it inspired a national podcast series, Dolly Parton’s America. One episode centered on Sacco’s class and her students. The program elicited an emotional response from listeners when students talked about intentionally losing their Appalachian accents in order to be taken more seriously in the world. Polly Ann Taylor (’18), from the small town of Clintwood in far southwestern Virginia, was one of those students. After the episode was released, she spent time reading through messages on Twitter from people who have gone through the same experience. 

“The overwhelming amount of support and connection honestly made my day every time I read them,” Taylor said. “Some of them also broke my heart when I saw how the story resonated with them, how it’s also their experience, too. But it made me so glad that we were able to share our discussion the way that we did.”

As she prepares to retire from the University of Tennessee, Sacco has many plans for the future, including continuing with her current research project. Sacco’s first book, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009. The quality of her research, and its importance to her field, was recognized by UT’s Thomas Jefferson Prize the following year. Sacco’s current research draws on her interests in the history of popular culture and cinema, examining how ideas of sexuality, gender, and pleasure develop over time.

China at the Knoxville World’s Fair

November 4, 2019

The 1982 World’s Fair left a lasting impression on the Knoxville community. In fall 2018, the history department sponsored an event to commemorate the participation of the People’s Republic of China at this World’s Fair. Organized by Associate Professor Shellen Wu and hosted by the East Tennessee History Society, this event was well attended by members of the UT community and the general public. The audience learned the interesting history behind what became the most popular attraction at the fair. Invited speakers added a personal dimension to this history by reflecting on their participation and sharing their memories. 

According to Wu, China was the most popular attraction at the fair and played no small part in putting the fair in the black, even turning a profit of $57. From May 1 to October 31, 1982, 11.4 million visitors came to the fair, most of whom waited in long lines to enter the China Pavilion. Many visitors were intensely curious about China, closed for decades to foreigners. The exhibit featured a piece of the Great Wall (19 bricks to be precise), as well as a number of the recently excavated terra cotta warriors from Qin emperor’s tombs in Xi’an. Chinese artists and artisans worked in the pavilion and produced handcrafted items that were sold to visitors.

As the audience learned, the decision to bring China to Knoxville was due to the efforts of Bo Roberts, at the time president and CEO of the World’s Fair (the organization that oversaw the effort was the Knoxville International Energy Exposition Incorporated, or KIEE). Roberts talked about how he came to focus on bringing China to the World’s Fair once the Soviet Union pulled out. The Soviet Union had already begun construction on what was to be the largest pavilion and an anchor for the World’s Fair when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Carter’s strong response led to the Soviet retaliation and withdrawal from the Fair. Along with the Soviet Union, a number of other Eastern European countries also pulled out. With the loss of the anchor pavilion, it became essential for the success of the Fair to attract Chinese participation.

Roberts, along with other colleagues, made multiple trips to China and met with officials to convince them to sign on. At the time, China had no experience with the World’s Fair. One of the audience members who worked for the Fair accompanied a Chinese delegation to visit previous sites at Seattle and San Francisco. KIEE contacted politicians, including Senator Baker and former President Carter, who each wrote letters to the Chinese ambassador and top Chinese leaders to press the case. KIEE also put up $1 million to help with costs for the Chinese pavilion. Or as Roberts put it, “the best money we ever spent.”

During the event, attendees also had the opportunity to hear from local members of the Knoxville community who likewise shared their memories of this historic event. For instance, Knoxville History Project Director Jack Neely had worked at the Fair as a part of the security detail. He talked about his experience at the Fair, corralling the crowd and having to inform an extremely disappointed crowd that because of some building issues, the China Pavilion had to be closed for a day. Jack Neely read a short selection from the work of a Chinese journalist who spent two years in the US in the early 1980s and spent some time in Knoxville at the Fair. The journalist, Liu Zongren, subsequently published a memoir of his time in the US, Two Years in the Melting Pot. Liu wrote that “The Chinese Pavilion was the best part of the whole fair; many visitors had to wait outside the gate for two hours to get in….For all the Chinese staff, except the delegation head, it was their first time abroad.”