Campus Postcards: Old Main and Lampasas Hall
Dr. Margaret Menninger named Executive Director of the German Studies Association
Congratulations to Dr. Margaret Menninger, who as of January 1, 2021 has become the third Executive Director of the German Studies Association.
The German Studies Association is a multi- and interdisciplinary association of scholars in German, Austrian, and Swiss history, literature, culture studies, political science, and economics who live and work around the world. The GSA holds an annual conference and publishes a scholarly journal, the German Studies Review.
Membership is open to anyone.
Photo: Dr. Menninger with her predecessor, David Barclay (Professor Emeritus in History at Kalamazoo College), upon her appointment to Executive Director, Pittsburgh 2019.
Introducing Dr. Miranda Sachs
We welcome Dr. Miranda Sachs to Texas State this semester! Dr. Sachs specializes in European history, with a focus on France, women and gender, childhood and youth, and immigration.
I had one of the best campus jobs imaginable as an undergraduate. My university had a special library dedicated to rare children’s books. The shelves of old books shared the space with a unique children’s room. I was first hired to help organize programs for kids. My job included writing a quest with rhyming clues, telling jokes while dressed as a Victorian lady, and gluing plastic salamanders on visors for a Holes watching party. But later I got to help the librarians tasked with working with the books. The collection is amazing! They have scrapbooks created by Hans Christian Anderson, the man who wrote “The Little Mermaid.” They have some of the first children’s books. These books are the size of a deck of cards and are over three-hundred-years old. They have lithographic stones that were used to print toy theaters in the nineteenth century. The stones are about the size of a laptop, but so much heavier.
One day while I was helping shelve books, I noticed an ABC book on World War I. I was already excited about European history, but this book got me thinking. What if I did my senior research project on the history of children in World War I? I had never thought about children as a topic to study, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know. What was war like for the children who lived through it?.
Since then, I’ve studied and taught the histories of childhood and youth. My research looks at the experience of working-class children in nineteenth-century Paris. I am particularly interested in how childhood came to be a distinct stage of life. How and why did childhood become a time when young people are expected to be in school and dependent on their parents? I enjoy teaching about the history of childhood, because most students don’t expect children and childhood to have a history. We also don’t expect high school yearbooks or children’s drawings to be historical sources. If that sounds interesting, I will be teaching a class on “The Global Teenager” in the spring!
When I’m not studying history, I cheer on the San Francisco Giants and search for the best hot chocolate in the world. My favorites so far include Jacques Genin in Paris and City Bakery in New York, but I’m always looking for new recommendations!
Introducing Dr. Justin Randolph!
We are excited to welcome Dr. Justin Randolph to Texas State as our new Assistant Professor of Oral History this semester! Dr. Randolph specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social and political history.
I grew up in rural-rural Alabama, was the least athletic person to ever play baseball at my high school, and played the saxophone. You guessed it: I’m a nerd. But you know…a cool nerd. 😎
I’m coming to Texas State from my PhD program at Yale University. Whew. That was a strange experience. Did you know there are people whose grandparents AND parents got PhDs? I was the first person in my family to get an associate’s degree at community college, so I didn’t have much in common with most of my classmates. Luckily I met other first-generation/low-income (FGLI) students with whom I built community. We kept one another accountable and got through it together.
To get a PhD in history you must write the draft of a history book. We call this a dissertation. I wrote mine on the history of police and Black activists in a very rural part of Mississippi. I found this story by conducing oral history interviews with Black farmers—many of whom have owned land since the end of the Civil War. However, I also found that racist white sheriffs and police officers had threatened these families’ safety and security from the beginning. The book I’m now writing shows how states like Mississippi reformed their police forces to chase away the Ku Klux Klan but never fully thought about how the police adversely impacted Black communities.
At Texas State I teach the introductory class on twentieth-century American history (HIST 1320), an upper level course on American history from 1968 to now (HIST 4361), and a graduate seminar on oral history (HIST 5345D). In the next few years I hope to design new courses for Texas State history majors. First, I want to get undergraduates involved in oral history in and around campus. Then, I want to introduce students to the history of the police and criminal legal system—what historians call the “carceral state.”
Hobbies? When my health holds out I enjoy running. And when the global pandemic is over, I might once again enjoy recreational softball and tennis.
What am I reading? Fiction and non-fiction. Fiction: Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). She wrote it before age twenty-three. (What have I done with my life?!) Such amazing character development plus clear thinking on disability, racism, and radicalism. Go read this classic: I beg you! And nonfiction: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019). I know Cottom’s writing on the university and the future of work. Now, though, I’m turning to this MacArthur fellow’s memoir-style analysis of American and academic culture.
Introducing Dr. Ruby Oram!
We are excited to welcome Dr. Ruby Oram to Texas State this semester! Dr. Oram is a social historian of American women and gender, labor, education, and urban reform movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a public historian, Dr. Oram’s work centers on addressing issues of diversity and representation in historic preservation and local history.
I’m thrilled to join the History Department at Texas State University this year and contribute to the growing Public History Program! I have eight years of experience working as a public historian in the fields of museum education, collections management, public programs, and historic preservation. I earned my PhD from the U.S. and Public History Program at Loyola University Chicago in 2020, where I studied women’s and gender history, urban history, labor history, and the history of education in twentieth-century America. My current research examines a group of women who created vocational programs and schools for girls in progressive-era Chicago, and explores how their reform efforts reinforced class and racial inequalities between female students in the city’s public high schools. I’m also in the process of nominating a group of public vocational schools in Chicago to the National Register of Historic Places.
I’m excited to teach “Introduction to Public History” this semester, which provides a rare opportunity for undergraduate students to study the presentation of history to public audiences through museums, historic sites, digital projects, and more. Texas State University is one of the few universities in the state (maybe the only?) offering an undergraduate public history course, and I look forward to teaching it regularly! I also look forward to teaching “Local and Community History” for our graduate students in the spring. I hope to eventually teach courses in my research areas including U.S. women’s labor history and urban history, as well as additional public history courses on museums and material culture.
When I’m not thinking about history, I am often exploring the parks and trails around my home in South Austin or listening to music with my tuxedo cat, Gus. I have a firm conviction that Motown and Atlantic Records released the best American music between 1959 and 1967. Lastly, I never outgrew my teenage obsession with thrifting for vintage clothes on the weekends. I face a current crisis of where to store my vintage winter coat collection now that I’m a Texan.
Introducing Dr. Louis Porter!
We are excited to welcome Dr. Louis Porter to Texas State this semester! He studies studies Russian and Eastern European history.
After getting my PhD in Russian History at the University of North Carolina, I am stoked to be joining the Texas State University Department of History to teach Russian and East European History.
I am often asked why I study Russia and never have a pithy answer. However, my background provides a couple of reasons. In…. West Philadelphia (“born and raised”), I grew up living in a bunch of different worlds, kind of like the Fresh Prince. My parents split so I went to school in the suburbs where my mother lived while visiting my Dad in Philly on the weekends. With a Black father from the Cleveland projects and a white mother from a working-class family in West Virginia, I had to negotiate a range of racial and class settings from as far back as I can remember. This made me eager to learn how hierarchies of class and race structure history and how various people have struggled to overcome these hierarchies.
But, as a bit of a cynic, I decided to study the greatest failed experiment in overcoming these hierarchies––the Soviet Union. I am fascinated by Marxism (in theory and practice) and its historical contexts. I am also passionate about recruiting students of all backgrounds to join me in studying Russian and European history. When not in the classroom, I am writing a book that examines how Soviet citizens reacted to the idea of international organizations.
My courses at Texas State will cover a range of topics in Russian and East European history. If you want to learn about medieval Ukraine, the Russian Revolution, or why Putin…is the way he is, I got you covered! For now, I am teaching surveys of Russian history (HIST 4333 in the Spring and 4334 in the Fall) as well as Western Civ. But I hope in the future to teach classes on the Russian Revolution, Marx and Marxism, and the Cold War.
In my free time, I chase a skedaddling nine-month old, LJ, around my house with my wife. Apart from that, I love swimming, running, hiking with my dog, canoeing, watching basketball (Sixers or whatever team Lebron is on), and listening to music (everything from DaBaby to My Bloody Valentine to Bruce Springsteen). My favorite movie is Disney’s Robin Hood.
A Note from the Chair on the Fall 2020 Semester
Every semester begins with a sense of possibility, bringing both anxiety and excitement for what will come. This year, our anticipation mixes dramatically with an experience of rupture, a loss of the kind of certainty about habits and continuity that generally provide us with a foundation on which we bring some order to our semesters. This year, then, we are all working harder. We—as students, as teachers, as workers who keep our classrooms and offices running—face exponentially more difficult challenges as we get back to work. Nonetheless, I return this fall confirmed in my belief that the people in this department face disruption head-on and forge new paths out of difficult days.
Teaching and learning in the contemporary university are always challenging. Limited resources—along with inequities, injustices, anti-intellectualism, and divisions in the society at large—impinge on the classroom. We always have to work to build and maintain the space where we can come together to study. Yet we do create that space.
We all have known those moments when the university fulfills its promise. We see it in the light of realization in a student’s eyes, we hear it in the laughter of people working together to solve a problem, we can sense it in the air when professors and students are locked in mutual concentration on a difficult question. These satisfactions, and our memories of them, are what make the return to school such a time of promise.
This year, the obstacles in our path can seem nearly insurmountable. Much of the extra labor we are doing can feel incomplete, frustrating, and even at times distractingly prosaic. A global pandemic, an economic calamity, the exhausting work of anti-racism in a time of surging bigotry and violence—these crises have revealed with painful clarity the structural inequities and divisions that threaten our communities. These challenges also threaten the energy and opportunity to engage in the study of history—even as that work has never seemed more important.
To help our students enter into the study of history, the department is building on its recent growth. Four new faculty members add to the great energy in our public history and European history offerings. Students can choose from several new courses, including African American and Mexican American history surveys, which count toward core curriculum requirements; a course on creating podcasts that lift up unsung voices in history; the history of 20th-century social movements in the U.S.; and the history of childhood in Europe. Students can also visit the new library guide for researching #BlackLivesMatter, developed by Dr. Casey Nichols and subject librarian Margaret Vaverek. The department will be collaborating on public programs and courses with people across campus, including the history faculty leading the Center for Texas Music History, the Center for Texas Public History, the Center for the Study of the Southwest, and the Center for International Studies. The TXST chapter of Phi Alpha Theta and the student-led History Club (open to all Bobcats) are organizing regular events—from film screenings to an academic conference—that will provide opportunities to connect and outlets for graduate and undergraduate student research. There is so much going on…follow it all on the department’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds.
To move through tribulation in a way that seeks not just the familiar but the possible requires persistent support for each other and our students. Writing in the shadows of Nazism on the rise, the historian Walter Benjamin declared that the struggle for a just world “is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.” This phrase has been ringing in my ears as I have been working with the faculty, staff, and students in the history department to make Zoom work, to welcome our new faculty and students, to learn how to foster group discussions that are simultaneously in–person and virtual…and to figure out how to clear the algae from the fountain in our courtyard and order the coffee that will keep the department running. It can make for days that sometimes seem distressingly fragmented. Yet it is in working with the people in this department that I am reminded of the other half of Benjamin’s point: that the “spiritual things” we win out of the struggle come not as “spoils,” but “as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.”
Dr. Jeff Helgeson
Chair and Associate Professor
Department of History
Texas State University
Congrats to the 2020-21 Awardees of the Margerison Graduate Fellowship in History!
The Texas State University Department of History is proud to announce this year’s awardees of the Kenneth and Patricia Margerison Graduate Research Fellowship in History. The Fellowship provides support to full-time graduate students enrolled in the master’s degree program in history. Recipients are awarded funds to fully cover graduate tuition and fees for the spring and fall semesters as well as research support—qualifying for in-state tuition. The Graduate Studies Committee considers all first-year students as well as continuing students who demonstrate great promise as historians. In addition to the fellowship, students may also be offered a graduate Instructional Assistantship (IA), which includes a monthly salary.
Please visit the History Department Scholarships website for specific details and requirements.
Learn more about Railey Tassin (top photo) and Madison Otte (bottom photo), this year’s recipients of this prestigious fellowship:
Railey Tassin is a first-year Texas State graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Public History. Railey graduated summa cum laude from Texas Christian University in May 2020 with a B.A. in History, minor in French, and emphasis in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. She has experience interning at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and studying abroad in Toulouse, France. After completing her degree, Railey would love to work in a museum dedicated to documenting diversity and engaging the general public with the history of underrepresented groups.
How do you see this Margerison Fellowship helping you in your studies?
Railey: The financial aid provided by the Margerison Fellowship guarantees that I will be able to begin my graduate education completely focused on excelling in my personal studies and my duties as an Instructional Assistant. As a first-generation student, I strongly recognize the significance of generous financial support in helping students reach their highest potential. Receiving this fellowship has ensured that I feel supported and valued as a student at Texas State even before having officially entered.
As an undergraduate at Texas Christian University, you studied History, and French with an emphasis in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, can you tell us more about your research interests, and what got you interested in it in the first place?
Railey: Since a young age, I have been fascinated by studying the actions and words of those who came before us as a way to better understand the present. I began studying French in high school to feel a closer connection to my ancestry, and I loved the idea of having a wider range of writings/sources available to me in college by knowing a second language. Taking CRES classes gave me additional knowledge in analyzing race and ethnicity and inspired me to focus my historical research on traditionally marginalized/underrepresented groups. My senior History thesis focused on the works of three Black women, Paulette Nardal, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett, whose France-inspired writings contributed to a rise in race consciousness across the African diaspora throughout the twentieth century. This project allowed me to combine theories learned from CRES, French primary sources, and my historical research interests.
What are you looking forward to the most about your graduate studies at Texas State?
Railey: I am most looking forward to making meaningful connections with professors and fellow students – all of us dedicated to continuous learning and working together to adapt during this abnormal semester. I can already sense that the Texas State community will be fully encouraging and helpful in all of my endeavors and will strive to make each student feel supported. I believe the study of history is meant to be shared with others, and I am eager to have the opportunity to engage in collaborative efforts to do so during my time at Texas State.
Madison Otte is a first-year graduate student, but is not new to the Texas State campus. Madison received her bachelor’s degree in History from Texas State University with a minor in Spanish and single-field teaching certification in History for grades 7-12. Madison is working towards her master’s degree in History, and plans to write a thesis about Early Modern Spanish and Colonial History. Madison is also an Instructional Assistant, and looks forward to merging her love of History and teaching to help students this semester. After finishing her degree, Madison hopes to continue her education and one day become a professor at the university level.
How do you see this Margerison Fellowship helping you in your studies?
Madison: The recognition of my hard work through the Margerison Fellowship makes me feel even more strongly motivated to succeed in my endeavors in graduate school. I am very thankful to be able to focus on my thesis wholeheartedly, without the stress of an extra job to juggle with my courses and research.
You are interested in Early Modern Spanish and Colonial History, can you tell us more about your research interests, and what got you interested in it in the first place?
Madison: I am interested in researching the changes that occurred in the Spanish colonies in Latin America after the start of the Counter-Reformation. I am especially interested in the way this changed interactions between Spanish missionaries and the Native people they wished to convert to Catholicism. I have always been interested in Colonial History because the effects the has Old World on the New World that can still be seen today are fascinating to me. I became particularly interested in the religious effects on colonialism in the Americas during my undergraduate studies here at Texas State.
What are you looking forward to the most about your graduate studies at Texas State?
Madison: I am most looking forward to growing more as a writer as I construct my thesis. I also look forward to working with the professors in the History Department both on my research and as an Instructional Assistant. I really enjoy working with other students and using the skills I gained in my undergraduate degree as a candidate for teaching certification.
A Postcard from Cheyenne Izaguirre
If you would like to learn more about the Pathways Internship program at the Department of State please visit: https://careers.state.gov/intern/pathways/
History Faculty Recognized by College of Liberal Arts
Congratulations to our History faculty members who have been recognized by the College of Liberal Arts!
Scholarly/Creative Activity
Dr. José Carlos de la Puente (Achievement Award)
Dr. Louie Dean Valencia-García (Golden Apple)
Service
Dr. Nancy Berlage (Achievement Award)
Dr. Shannon Duffy (Golden Apple)
Teaching
Dr. Sara Damiano (Golden Apple)
Dr. Jeff Helgeson (Achievement Award)