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Newsletter

Newsletter

UT History Department Documents Key Year in Andrew Jackson’s Presidency

Cover image of volume 12 of The Papers of Andrew Jackson

In partnership with UT Press, the UT history department published the 1834 volume of The Papers of Andrew Jackson in December 2023. Documenting in rich detail one of the most important years of Jackson’s presidency, the volume covers Jackson’s “war” against the Bank of the United States, as well as his administration’s infamous program to force the removal of Native Americans from their homelands in the Southeast.

In 1834 Jackson continued his longstanding effort to pry the province of Texas loose from Mexico. Other matters engaging Jackson included corruption scandals in the Post Office and at Mississippi land offices, fractious disputes over rank and seniority among Army and Navy officers, and a fire that gutted Jackson’s home in Tennessee, the Hermitage.

These stories and many more are told in The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume XII, 1834. Presenting more than 500 original documents—public and private letters, memoranda, and official papers—in full annotated text, the volume is the latest installment in an ongoing series that has been called “the gold standard of historical documentary editing.”

Volume XII is the sixth and last produced under the editorship of Daniel Feller, now a UT Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Associate editors Thomas Coens and Laura-Eve Moss are UT research faculty in history. The index was completed under Michael Woods, Feller’s successor as UT history professor and Jackson editor. Financial support was provided by the UT College of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Tennessee Historical Commission, and the Watson-Brown Foundation.


Remembering Professor Bruce Wheeler (1939-2023)

On Tuesday, April 9, the UT Department of History and the Knoxville History Project collaborated on an event to honor the late Professor Bruce Wheeler. Wheeler joined the department in 1970 and served the UT Knoxville campus and community for over four decades.

“No list of accomplishments can fully convey all that Bruce Wheeler meant to the UT campus and the history department,” colleague Ernest Freeberg wrote in a memorial tribute. “He will be remembered for his ability to share his love of history with a wide audience, his never-failing curiosity and good humor, and his generous support of his younger colleagues and our students.”

The program’s speakers recognized Wheeler’s many and varied accomplishments. He was a distinguished historian who wrote an important history of Knoxville; he was an engaging and innovative teacher beloved by a generation of UT students; and he generously contributed his time to help improve history education in East Tennessee public schools. During his long career, he was recognized with numerous teaching awards, and served as the head of the University’s Honors Program before his retirement in 2003.

As Aaron Purcell, one of his last doctoral students, noted, “Wheeler made a difference in the lives of countless students and I’m proud to say that I was one of them.”


Professor Jeff Norrell Retires

Professor Jeff Norrell retired in January 2024 after holding the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence since joining the department in 1998. He is the author of more than a dozen books, primarily on American race relations and Southern history.

These include Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation (2015), which covers Haley’s rise to national celebrity and great literary influence in the mid-20th century. In 2009, the Washington Post called his revisionist biography, Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington, one of the best books published that year, “in all respects an exemplary book, scrupulously fair to its subject and thus to the reader as well.”

His 1985 book, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for outstanding work on human rights and social justice. In addition to his many works of history, he published Eden Rise (2012), a novel about the civil rights movement.

In addition to courses on Southern history, Norrell taught undergraduate and graduate classes on environmental history, the history of the American West, and American foreign policy. He recently published How History Was Used in the Wars of the Twentieth Century: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Lexington, 2023).

In 2010 he was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Germany, and in 2015 the College of Arts and Sciences presented him with a Senior Research Award.


Emma Snowden Wins Research Fellowship

Emma Snowden headshot photo

Emma Snowden has been awarded a Kingdon Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she will be in the 2024–20255 academic year. On the UT history faculty since 2023, Snowden researches the history of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on Iberia and North Africa. She is currently working on her first monograph, Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean. This book project draws on Arabic, Latin, and Romance chronicles from the eighth through the 14th centuries to examine how Muslims and Christians narrated political and religious conflict, exploring the extent to which writers across the Strait of Gibraltar viewed their history as a shared one and wrote within a common historical framework.


Yıldırım Book Project Supported Through Fellowship

Duygu Yildirim headshot photo with white flowers in the background

Assistant Professor Duygu Yıldırım was awarded a 2023 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in support of her book project, Uncertain Knowledge: The Making of Slow Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe.

The ACLS Fellowship Program supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond the awardees’ fields. Yıldırım is one of 60 early-career scholars from around the country who were selected through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants.

Yıldırım’s work explores the role of uncertainty during the globalization of scientific and medical knowledge in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Her book project will show how the rhetoric of uncertainty became a new mode of inquiry and a highly productive new strategy to accommodate emerging anxieties about human diversity, confessional and inter-religious conflict, and the fragmentary knowledge of newly circulated medicinal substances and plants.


Public History Class at Baker Center

Four students post for a photo with Bill Haslam

Distinguished Lecturer Pat Rutenberg’s HIUS 484 class produced an exhibit for the official opening of the Baker School for Public Policy and Public Affairs titled “Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., The Great Conciliator.”

Undergraduate students in our upper-level course on public history recently curated an exhibition for the dedication ceremony at the new Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs. Rutenberg’s public history course addresses recent scholarly and public conversations about memory and monuments, provides supervised internships for each student at local historical sites and organizations, and engages students in group capstone projects.

For the Baker School exhibition, students conducted research in the Howard Baker Archives and UT Special Collections, identified photographs and documents depicting significant moments in the public life of Senator Baker, and wrote detailed exhibition labels. At the dedication ceremony, the students were pleased to have their picture taken with former Governor Bill Haslam.


History Students Pursue Honors Research

A student presents a research poster
A student presents a research poster

Trying to understand contemporary politics? Trying to source supplies for the next great widget? Trying to mitigate traffic in Knoxville? It all requires research, and our History Honors Concentration students are becoming experts at it, learning the craft of research as they explore historical events, issues, and problems about which they are deeply passionate. 

History Honors students take two intensive honors courses in history and then cap off their experience with a two-course thesis writing sequence in which they conceive, plan, and execute a 50-page (or more) original research project.

This year, Aiden Ponder is diving deep into the gangs of New Rome (Constantinople). These were chariot racing fans who organized themselves into something like politic pressure groups who could even influence emperors.

James Singhel tackles the gangs of New York, Irish immigrant gangs and groups who in the nineteenth century worked to find a place in US society.

Joseph Espinal investigates the invention of stringed keyboard instruments like the piano and the accompanying music and social changes during the Renaissance.

Thomas Hyde examines the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when conservative women leaders led various cultural and political fights against what they saw as dangerous encroachment of evil in American life.

Olivia Kapinos digs into nineteenth century women textile workers in Massachusetts who bravely struggled for better working conditions and better pay.

Cole Fritts takes up a trio of pro-Union reverends from East Tennessee who resisted the Confederacy by word and even by deed, sabotaging a new railway line.

Samantha Konsavage sifts through the impressions of southern soldiers abroad in World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters of war, drawing upon an incredible archive of letters from abroad housed here at Special Collections in Hodges Library.

Alexander O’Connor confronts the efforts by Catholics in Germany to recover their political power after collaboration with the Nazi regime, eventually leading to the most successful political party in post-war Germany.

History Honors students get to work on topics they love, while they develop skills that will serve them well whatever they do after graduating.

Undergraduate Update: A Vibrant History Club

Students at a History table on pedestrian walkway

by Keeley Wade, History Club President

This year the UT History Club completed its first full year as a registered student organization. Students brought the club back to life in the spring of 2023, hoping to promote community within the history department, create a space for the discussion of historical topics, and connect students with professionals and faculty. 

The club has reached a significant number of undergraduate students from a variety of majors, and its five officers strive to create unique and engaging meetings each week. The club hosts faculty members from across departments, including history, classics, and theatre, who have shared their research and professional advice with students.

These faculty visits are not limited to traditional lectures. Students were particularly excited to play a Reacting to the Past game, led by the history lecturer Marina Maccari-Clayton. The club also gives students the opportunity to present their own ideas, including class projects, independent research, and advice for fellow students. Occasionally, the club hosts trivia nights with questions written by members and catered to the interests of the group.

Outdoor group photo of the history club

A few times a semester, the club ventures outside of the classroom. In the fall, a group of club members had a great time at the Tennessee Medieval Faire in Harriman. More recently, members saw the Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of The Giver, followed by a discussion with Gina Di Salvo, the show’s dramaturg.

One of our most popular events, though, is the annual Department Social, which gives students a chance to meet fellow undergraduates, plus faculty members and grad students of the department.

It’s been a packed year for this club, and officers hope to continue to grow in numbers and offer a wider selection of events and resources to members. Members are thankful to the department for supporting us financially and to all the faculty and staff at the university who have provided their time, expertise, and passion for history with this group of undergraduates.

Graduate Program Notes

The excellent work of our program’s graduate students, present and former, continues to be recognized with competitive research fellowships and success in a challenging job market. 

Current Students

Kaitlin Simpson headshot photo

PhD candidate Kaitlin Simpson accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of US history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette starting in August 2024. She will be defending her dissertation, “The Flowers of El Dorado,” on the transnational history of the cut flower trade in the US and Colombia during the 20th century, in the early summer.


Thomas Maurer defended his PhD dissertation in June 2023, and not long thereafter, took a position as assistant professor of History at Ave Maria University in Florida. Maurer was also a finalist for a Fulbright to Italy.

Kyle Vratarich was recently awarded a fellowship from the White House Historical Society to undertake dissertation research. He will spend two months in Washington, DC, searching through repositories such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Kiplinger Research Library to develop his research on Orville Babcock’s role in the Grant Administration, the scandals in which he was involved, and his work to develop the physical landscape of the nation’s capital.

Roraig Finney was awarded a one-week Filson Fellowship at the Filson Historical Society, the primary historical archive and library of the state of Kentucky. Finney will travel to Louisville to conduct research for his dissertation on the politics of immigration in the US South in the latter half of the 19th century. He also received a Special Collections Research Travel Grant from the Louisiana State University Libraries, which will allow him to pursue dissertation research.

Ashley Cornell, current premodernist master’s degree student, received a competitive grant from the College of Arts and Sciences to research AI literacy and its utility in the humanities classroom. This was part of the College’s recent AI Educational Campaign. I’m very excited to see the results of Ashley’s work!

Alumni

2018 doctoral graduate Allen York’s first book, Our People are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization, will be published in November by the University of Tennessee Press.

2021 doctoral graduate Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra started a position as academic program manager and course instructor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

2014 doctoral graduate Jordan Kuck, now an associate professor of history at Brevard College, was selected to serve as the keynote speaker of the World Affairs Conference’s national conference in Washington, DC. Kuck will be speaking on “How the War in Ukraine Melted Frozen Conflicts in the Baltic States.”

Grad Student Stacie Beach Lobbies for the Humanities in DC

During the 2024 spring break, history PhD candidate Stacie Beach traveled to Washington, DC, to attend the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Annual Meeting and Advocacy Day. The NHA works with humanities faculty, institutions, and advocates to bolster humanities enrollments, promote public engagement with the humanities, and increase funding for the humanities. During the annual Humanities Advocacy Day, Beach joined others in meeting the state’s Congressional leaders to discuss and promote the humanities and funding programs that support work in the humanities.

The primary focus for the Tennessee delegation, with members from the University of Tennessee, Eastern Tennessee State University, and Vanderbilt University, was to advocate for Congressional support for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). While the NEH provides research grants to university faculty in the humanities, most of the money the NEH receives from the government is dispersed through local history councils to help support museums and public outreach across the country.

Bauer Research Earns Awards

Brooke Bauer teaching in class

Brooke Bauer, assistant professor of Native American history, was recognized at the college’s spring awards ceremony for Excellence in Research/Creative Achievement. This caps off a remarkable string of recognition for her 2022 book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation Building, 1500-1940. Bauer’s work investigates Catawba women as central characters in the history of the Catawba people, examining their vital roles as women, mothers, providers, and protectors to reveal how they created and maintained an identity for their people and helped build a nation.

Becoming Catawba has received book awards from three different disciplinary organizations—the American Society of Ethnohistory, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the South Carolina Historical Society.

Bauer’s colleagues in the history department also recognized her this spring with the annual Leroy Graf Award. The award committee noted that, “In just a few years, she has made a profoundly positive impact on our department, our university, and our community. As a scholar of early American, Native American, and women’s and gender history, Bauer has established herself as a leading scholar whose work makes powerful interventions in multiple fields. Using an innovative set of sources to illuminate processes of nation-building, cultural resilience, and historical continuity that previous scholars have missed, Bauer demonstrates the central importance of women in the formation and preservation of the Catawba Nation in modern-day South Carolina.”

Bauer is currently co-authoring a book that explores how the histories of tribal nations are represented (and misrepresented) in museums and historical sites.