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Dr. Schaefer Wins Forkosch Prize
Assistant Professor Richard Schaefer won the prestigious Selma V. Forkosch prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas . The prize is awarded for the best article published in the journal during the calendar year. Schaefer's "Infallibiltiy and Intentionality: Franz Brentano's Diagnosis of German Catholicism" appeared in July 2007 (volume 68, number 3).
Dr. Kroll Honored
Associate Professor Gary Kroll was recently awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Faculty Service. The award goes to faculty members who have demonstrated a strong commitment to students, department, college, and the wider Plattsburgh community. Dr. Kroll has been especially active in working with the Education Department towards improving the social studies education majors, and played an important role in fostering the campus’ instructional technology services. In addition, he has helped shape curricular and infrastructural matters pertaining to environmental citizenship. As reported in the college publication Focus , President John Ettling said Dr. Kroll’s record of service “is truly exceptional for someone who has been at SUNY Plattsburgh for only the last seven years…In all three areas of teaching, scholarship and service, Dr. Kroll had already created an enviable resume.”
Distinguished Visiting Alumnus David Nicandri
On April 15-16, 2008, the History Department welcomed its former student David Nicandri back to campus through the college's Distinguished Visiting Alumni
program. Presently the Executive Director of the Washington State Historical Society, Dave enjoyed speaking to four different History classes on how he still puts his Plattsburgh History degree to work. Among other topics, he described editing Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History
, serving on a National Park Service team that is evaluating the nuclear site at Hanford, Washington, for designation as a historic landmark, and researching and writing about the early Canadian explorer Alexander Mackenzie for publication and exhibit purposes. Dave also spoke to the campus community about his Plattsburgh years and the many lessons he learned in -- and outside of -- the classroom. In his freer moments, Dave also delighted in seeing his old college haunts from 1966-70, including Macdonough Hall, the student housing on Brinkerhoff Street, and the Monopole downtown. Evidently impressed, he thought that the college still felt like a second home to him. Our students felt equally impressed by Dave’s amusing, but insightful, look back on the years that made him the successful historian that he is. His two-day visit was a grand time for all.
Photo: Three mentors and their student: Dave Nicandri (2d from left) joins his former professors, Drs. David Glaser (left), Adnan Abu Ghazaleh (2d from right) and Jack Myers (right)
For more on Dave Nicandri's visit, see the story on our alumni page: http://web.plattsburgh.edu/academics/history/alumni/nacandrivisit.php
Dr. Kroll Publishes Major Work on The History of Science, Exploration, and The Sea
In April 2008, Associate Professor Gary Kroll's monograph, America's Ocean Wilderness
, was published by The University Press of Kansas
. America's Ocean Wilderness
is a cultural history of America's exploration of the ocean and the first book to critically analyze the legacies of seven marine explorers. Assessing work that often straddles professional science and popular culture, Gary Kroll examines the different perspectives a handful of scientists and naturalists--Jacques Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl, Roy Chapman Andrews, Robert Cushman Murphy, Eugenie Clark, Rachel Carson, and William Beebe--have offered on what the ocean means and how their views helped shape the way many Americans relate to the seas. Kroll argues that to truly know the ocean we first need to understand our own western frontier, showing how easily our popular infatuation with the continental wilderness--in the spirit of manifest destiny and its problematic legacy of conquest--has been transferred to the watery world. Indeed, the twentieth-century American imagination was quick to imbue the ocean with frontier characteristics, whether as a trove of inexhaustible resources, an ecosystem in need of stewardship, or a place of recreation.
Exploring the phenomenon of Americans' fascination with wild and inaccessible places, Kroll shows how these seven explorers helped create and perpetuate the idea of an ocean wilderness by applying terrestrial logic to the seas. And he demonstrates that their own appeal and accomplishments were abetted by the willingness of Americans to understand other new frontiers in terms of the West. As the ocean gradually became an extension of the nineteenth century conception of wilderness--an attitude not without ecological consequences--many of the sea's environmental problems were linked to the way we think about it as a frontier space, Kroll argues. With poisoned waters, depleted fisheries, and dying coral reefs, the seas are endangered by the same kinds of forces that threatened and ravaged America's terrestrial wilderness. America's Ocean Wilderness offers a new perspective on this last earthly frontier, encouraging readers to realize that the way they view the ocean may well seal its fate.
Dr. Neuhaus Awarded Research Grants
Assistant Professor Jessamyn Neuhaus, who’s working on a book about housework and housewives in American advertising, received a SUNY Plattsburgh Presidential Research Grant to travel to the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, this summer. She was also awarded a Travel Grant from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University and will be presenting a paper based on her research there at the Great Lakes History Conference this fall. Her paper is entitled “The only nice way to clean a toilet:’ Race, Class and the Housewife in U.S. Advertising.”
History Department Faculty Presenting at Conferences and Events
Our department faculty pride themselves on being active teacher-scholars, and many of us will be presenting papers or participating in panels at scholarly conferences or speaking at other events this year. Professor Jim Rice will present "Climate, Culture, and Power: The Little Ice Age and the Transformation of Society in Two American Indian Nations" (with Lisa Loria, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia), at the Common Ground, Converging Gazes: Integrating the Social and Environmental in History. This conference will take place in September at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Dr. Rice will also present "'Naked Indians' and 'Popish Plots': Anti-Catholicism and the Conquest of the Southern Backcountry,1673-1697” at “Anti-Popery: The Transatlantic Experience, 1530-1850,” sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Philadelphia in September. Assistant Professor Jessamyn Neuhaus will be the guest speaker at the Chapman Historical Museum’s annual Ladies’ Luncheon in September. Her talk is entitled: “Who’s Laughing? Housewife Humor and Fan Mail to Shirley Jackson, 1953-1963.” Assistant Professor Richard Schafer will present a paper entitled "The Catholic Revolutions of 1848?" at The New York State Association of European Historians' annual meeting at LeMoyne College in Syracuse.
Questions, Comments, Suggestions?
For more information about the History program at SUNY Plattsburgh, please contact
Wendy Gordon, Chair
History Department
Champlain Valley Hall
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
Phone: (518) 564-2213
Fax: (518) 564-2212
E-mail: gordonwm@plattsburgh.edu