Letter from the Department Head
While spring semester 2020 ended without our usual pomp and circumstance, from a safe social distance we have reason to celebrate getting through this most challenging academic year. When the campus closed in mid-March, few of our faculty had much experience with online teaching, and perhaps fewer had any interest in moving class into the digital realm. But we did it, with much support from the university’s technology team and patience and flexibility from our students. Students learned about history, while we figured out how to stop Zoom bombers and how to upload a lecture to the cloud that hovers over us all.
Among the most valuable lessons we learned from this experience is affirmation of something we already knew—that there is no real substitute for face-to-face learning. Teaching is a full body exercise, and nothing replaces the way a talented professor can, over the course of a semester, turn a physical classroom into a community of learners. Certainly, students told us that, loud and clear, in their end of course evaluations. They want back on campus.
We want that, too, when it can be done safely. In the meantime, we can look back fondly on those days, not so long ago, when we huddled together in classrooms, so focused on sharing ideas that we never paused to worry about sharing our breath.
By chance, just before the shutdown we asked our favorite photographer, Kelli Guinn, to take pictures of some of our colleagues in action. I love how these images capture the value of embodied education, and the passion of teaching as a physical act. They serve as a wonderful reminder of a world we have lost, temporarily, and will not soon take for granted.
—Ernie Freeberg, Professor and Head, Department of History
Letter from the Department Head
Few individuals have impacted the history of North America as visibly as James K. Polk. As president (1845–49), this Tennessean oversaw the Mexican War and the US acquisition of California and the Southwest. His letters comprise a crucial collection of primary sources. For more than a century, using them required travel to numerous archives and scrutiny of barely legible handwriting. In 1958, Herbert Weaver began a project at Vanderbilt to locate and publish the letters. In 1987, the Polk Project moved to the UT Department of History, where it has been led consecutively by Wayne Cutler, Tom Chaffin, and Michael Cohen.
This fall, Cohen completed work on the 14th and final volume of the Correspondence of James K. Polk. Published by the University of Tennessee Press, the series features annotated transcriptions of more than 5,000 letters written by or to Polk between 1817 and 1849. Forty-three faculty, staff, and student editors have worked on the project. Contributors to volume 14 include our department’s alumni Bradley Nichols and Phillip Gaul and current graduate students Ryan Gesme and Alex Spanjer.
Now easily accessible, the letters serve scholars and students in diverse areas of US history. Polk’s correspondents range from Andrew Jackson to Brigham Young to a female textile worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a free African American who feared being sold into slavery. Topics range from Texas annexation and the Mexican War to technological innovation and Indian removal to the expansion of slavery and the rights of religious minorities. Letters include those from an enslaved blacksmith, owned by Polk, who had bet on his master’s election; from a teacher whose parents had “brought us up Politicians” in a society that largely excluded women from government; and from “The Devil”—clearly a detractor—who proclaimed Polk a “bloody hound of hell” and a “scorpion of the regions of the damned.”
On April 12–13 the department celebrated the project’s completion. Ninety scholars, students, and enthusiasts gathered at the East Tennessee Historical Society for James K. Polk and His Time: A Conference Finale to the Polk Project. Speakers and session chairs included our own Thomas Coens, Aaron Crawford, Daniel Feller, Lorraine Dias Herbon, and Laura-Eve Moss. They also included Oxford and UCLA’s Daniel Walker Howe, as well as Penn State’s Amy S. Greenberg, who delivered the keynote address on first lady Sarah Childress Polk. Charles Sellers, author of The Market Revolution and a Polk biography, sent enthusiastic remarks to be read. Cohen is editing a volume of selected conference papers. Broadcast on C-SPAN 3, conference sessions can be viewed at c-span.org.
Volume 14 covers the last year of Polk’s presidency and his brief retirement. One of few presidents who chose to serve only one term, he died of cholera three months after leaving the White House. UT Press will publish the volume in fall 2020. In the meantime, all earlier volumes are available both in print and, thanks to Newfound Press, online. You can find them, plus an early edition of volume 14—with most of the letters but without the annotation—through the Polk Project’s website, polkproject.utk.edu.
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The Department of History is honored to award Jack Neely the fourth annual Distinguished Alumnus Award. Neely (’81) is the executive director of the Knoxville History Project, but his love for history began before he could read. Tales of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Davy Crockett, combined with his father’s interest in world history, built the foundation for a lifelong passion.
Neely began his college career at UT studying journalism. He spent a few months as an undeclared English major interested in modern poetry until one day he realized, to his surprise, that he had more credits in history than English.
“I think I took every undergraduate class that Bruce Wheeler and Milton Klein taught,” Neely says. “I remember several other faculty I had for one class or so, and no two were at all alike. The worldviews they presented were so different that it was startling to see any of them together. To me, that was part of what made history, which is really a synonym for reality, so interesting.”
Neely credits his history degree for giving him the skills to investigate more or less everything.
Since graduating, Neely has combined his passion for history with his journalism experience to become one of the most distinguished journalists in Knoxville and its best known historian. For more than two decades, he was a staff writer, columnist, and associate editor of Metro Pulse. He then helped to found the Knoxville Mercury, for which he wrote a weekly history column and features pertaining to Knoxville history. At the same time, he founded the Knoxville History Project, whose mission is to research and promote the history of Knoxville. He has written a number of books on Knoxville history, gives many tours and lectures each year, and mentors UT undergraduates through his role in the department’s course on public history.
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By Meredith McGroarty
The ability to cut through the digital flotsam and connect with an audience, whether it is a group of corporate executives or a grandmother in Flatbush, is a skill as prized in the professional world as a head for numbers or a sharp working knowledge of digital branding strategies. Storytelling, the ability to synthesize and present information in a compelling way, however, is a skill that forms the bedrock of the study of history. Three graduates of our history program in three very different fields say this core skill set, honed in college, was the most vital to their career choices and achievements.
Addressing potentially the widest audience is Bo Saulsbury (’86), senior R&D staff member in the energy and transportation science division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Saulsbury manages the division’s Fuel Economy Information Project, which aims to provide information to the public about fuel efficiency for various types of vehicles, including those using petroleum, electric, diesel, and other types of energy sources, as well as hybrid vehicles. Studying history helped Saulsbury develop two major skills necessary to his current work.
“The main thing history contributed is that there was a strong emphasis on critical and independent thinking in history class,” Saulsbury says. “The second thing that was valuable was learning how to communicate information through discussions, presentations, and debate topics where you have to defend your point of view.”
—Bo Saulsbury (’86)
Saulsbury noted that energy research ties in heavily with climate change, both on a technical level—hybrid vehicles perform differently in different climates—and on a larger, geopolitical one. Here, the specifics of history come into play, with past events serving as cautionary tales. He pointed to the 1970s when the fuel embargo caused wide-scale social disruption and provided a lesson on the dangers of relying on a single source—natural, political, or corporate—for one’s energy supply.
“Investment in alternative energy forms, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and fighting climate change are all vitally important,” Saulsbury says. “The only way to bring that about, however, will be through educating the public, conveying facts about energy sources and efficiency, as well as a sense of context about the wider issues we all face.”
Claire O’Neill (’08) also noted that her history degree helped her gain a sense of context which, along with the ability to present information in a compelling way, is a necessary skill in her profession – journalism.
O’Neill recently became creative director of the climate desk at the New York Times, a position created as part of the paper’s drive to expand its coverage of climate change. O’Neill, who had previously been a producer at NPR, said her history degree helped her learn how to draw from different disciplines to research and tell a story.
“Training in history – research, analysis, writing, and storytelling – means you’re better equipped to understand the complexity of an issue, situate it in historical context, and understand how that will inform what happens next,” O’Neill says.
Such training was useful for her NPR job where she had to move deftly from one topic to another, from medium to medium, as the situation demanded.
“One day I might be working with the science desk on a story about pollution; the next, I could be working with the politics team to analyze inauguration speeches; and the day after that, I could be recording a live performance with a musician,” she says. “I love the variety.”
—Claire O’Neill (’08)
Both O’Neill and Saulsbury said studying history helped them convey complex information clearly to a wider audience. Tailoring information to specific audiences, however, is exactly what Blake Renfro (’07) does for a living.
Currently a program manager for executive development at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Kenan-Flagler Business School, Renfro conducts management consulting and executive-level seminars with a variety of clients, many of whom are corporate executives or members of the military.
“Making intelligent, well-informed connections between ideas and conveying important information to different audiences are things I do on a daily basis,” Renfro says. “Being able to tell a compelling narrative and tailor a narrative to different audiences is one of the most powerful things you can do. I learned that as an undergrad at UT.”
—Blake Renfro (’07)
Whether addressing a general audience or a specific one, being able to have confidence in one’s ideas while being open to other perspectives is a valuable skill in the workforce and one that Renfro believes faculty in the UT history department do a good job conveying. Career-wise, being able to demonstrate how one can apply these critical thinking, analytical, and communication skills to a specific job will be key to obtaining employment, he added.
“There are a lot of employers who’d rather have people with a specialized business or accounting degree, but if you can demonstrate how your skills can be applied, you’ll be better off than other majors,” Renfro says. “Being able to demonstrate that the degree is useful and you do have the skills to do these jobs is key to getting them.”
The path to a dream job may not be linear; it may branch and loop back, but anyone who has studied history knows there are lessons and pleasures in the detours and side alleys. Applying the knowledge gained through history study often makes visible the hidden connections between topics, fields, and listeners. Life is a story; and history helps you write your own.
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Without apparent natural talent for writing, Haley worked diligently on his craft for decades and became enormously successful. Roots sold around six million copies and revised how the popular mind in America understood slavery.
In writing a biography of Alex Haley, I learned some surprising things about him and his career as a writer. Haley sold more books in one day in February 1977 than I have sold in my whole career of publishing. Both his two main works, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, sold in the neighborhood of six million books. Haley became a great celebrity, with all its pleasures and its pitfalls.
Haley had only a little college education before he went into the military in 1939, where he had a two-decade-long apprenticeship as a freelance writer. He was not a natural or even talented prose stylist, but he worked on his craft diligently for decades. He benefited from excellent editing from such magazines as Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, and Playboy. His agent and his editors at Doubleday guided his writing efforts for years. I was astonished at the sustained and detailed critiques they gave Haley over many long years.
Roots was published in September 1976 and the televised mini-series based on the book was viewed by 130 million people in January 1977. Fame of that magnitude sparked envy and criticism. A British journalist claimed that Haley had fabricated the African background of his ancestor Kunta Kinte, and two American genealogists insisted that he had gotten the Haley family lineage in the United States all wrong. Haley and his publisher made the mistake of promoting the book as nonfiction, rather than calling it a historical novel that
adhered as faithfully as possible to known facts. At the same time, two writers sued Haley claiming that he had plagiarized their books. One of the claims was specious, but the other proved that several passages of Roots were virtually identical to some in a novel called The African. Haley won the first suit and settled the second. Both brought negative publicity that undermined Haley’s heroic status to many Americans who had admired his work.
Still, Roots revised how the popular mind in America understood slavery, changing it from being the romanticized institution depicted in Gone with the Wind to a realistic understanding of its violent, inhumane nature. To me, Roots
remains the most important book on American slavery, and I think it should be recognized as that. For this reason, I wrote a biography of Alex Haley.
—Robert J. (Jeff) Norrell
