Dr. Roy Domenico has been awarded the American Catholic Historical Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award. The award is presented to a college or university professor who has demonstrated a high commitment to teaching beyond the expected requirements of their position and through their influence and skill have promoted Catholic studies from one generation of scholars to another.
Dr. David Dzurec has published “Prisoners of War and American Self-Image During the American Revolution” in the November 2013 edition of the journal War in History. The article examines how accounts of the experiences of prisoners of war during the American Revolution helped those fighting for the cause of independence to create a definition of American liberty. In highlighting the ‘barbarous and cruel’ nature of British treatment of prisoners, these narratives allowed those who supported the patriot cause to highlight the difference between themselves and their former colonial masters. As prisoners’ accounts appeared in newspapers, broadsides, and individual volumes, the plight of captive Americans became a form of shorthand for the struggle of the entire nation as it tried to secure its independence from the ‘savage Britons’.
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The next meeting of the Royals Historical Society will be Thursday, October 10 at 8 pm in STT 312. All are welcome to attend.
The next meeting of the RHS will be in St. Thomas 312 on Thursday, September 26 at 8:00 p.m. All students are welcome to attend.
The first meeting of the Royals Historical Society for the Fall 2013 semester will be held Thursday, September 12, at 8 pm in Saint Thomas 312. Please contact Dr. Brennan with any questions.
Dr. Kennedy with Irish Poet Mary Guckian
Dr. Lawrence Kennedy recently presented “Patrick Collins: An Emigrant in the U.S. Congress and Boston City Hall” at the Third Annual International Famine Conference, sponsored by the Irish National Famine Museum and the Department of History, National University of Ireland at Maynooth. Dr. Kennedy’s presentation was based on his research for a new book about Patrick Collins.
In a recap of the most recent meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the blog The Junto, cited Dr. Adam Pratt, the department’s newest member, as one of the highlights of the conference:
Adam Pratt then gave one of the most intriguing papers I heard all weekend, looking at the Georgia gubernatorial election of 1831. The paper centered around the issue of whiteness, and how the campaign of George Gilmer attempted to impose a definition of whiteness that didn’t reflect the polyglot population moving into Cherokee land to mine for gold. This ended up costing him the election, losing to a more egalitarian campaign by Wilson Lumpkin that promised equal access to the resources of stolen Cherokee land. The twist came in policies followed after Lumpkin’s victory; Lumpkin would dilute his implied egalitarianism by insisting on excluding mixed-race individuals from the gold rush—even relying on the Georgia Guard, whose violence had led to disgust with Gilmer, to enforce the racial order. This highlighted what Pratt called ‘the malleable nature of whiteness’, and I’ll be fascinated to see how (or even whether) this malleability has broader national importance.
Checkout the full recap here.
Dr. David Dzurec talks a bit about the Declaration of Independence on local NBC affiliate WBRE:
