Professor Bruce Laurie appointed OAH Distinguished Lecturer (May 2012)
Bruce Laurie is one of twenty-five speakers joining the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lectureship Program this year. OAH Lecturers serve 3-year, renewable terms during which they speak to diverse audiences across the country and are hosted by college campuses, conferences, historical societies, libraries, museums, and teacher workshops.
Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, a new book by José Angel Hernández, is published this month by Cambridge University Press (May 2012):
"This study is a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Mexican American history, examining Mexico's struggle to secure its northern border with repatriates from the United States, following a war that resulted in the loss of half Mexico's territory. Responding to past interpretations, José Angel Hernández suggests that these resettlement schemes centred on developments within the frontier region, the modernisation of the country with loyal Mexican American settlers, and blocking the tide of migrations to the United States to prevent the depopulation of its fractured northern border."
Undergraduate Thesis Presentations (April 2012)
Congratulations to all 2012 seniors who completed History theses this semester: Jacob Adams, Daniel McDonald, Annika Mitchell, Joshua Pitt, Samantha Ryan, and Thamyris Tavares de Almeida.
Tony Horwitz visits as the UMass Amherst Department of History 2012 Writer-in-Residence (March 2012)
Tony visited UMass courses in the History, Afro-American Studies, and Journalism departments, as well as meeting with the undergraduate History Club and graduate Public History students. He gave a public lecture on the subject of his new book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. (At right: Tony Horwitz with the UMass History Club)
8th Annual GHA Conference (March 2012)
Students from across the nation joined UMass History graduate M.A. and Ph.D. students in this year's Graduate History Association conference. This year's theme was "Networks, Connections, and Exchange," and featured a keynote address by Charles C. Mann titled "Drilling Through the Silo."
Stephen Platt's book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, is published this year by Alfred A. Knopf. (February 2012)
Henry Kissinger writes: "Stephen Platt brings to vivid life a pivotal chapter in China's history that has been all but forgotten: the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, which cost one of the greatest losses of life of any war in history. It had far-reaching consequences that still reverberate in contemporary China."