BASIC FACTS

Teaching Position: Professor of History, Brandeis University
Research Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2001-.
Area of Research: Russia in American life, including politics, culture, and foreign policy.
Education: Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, 1998
Major Publications: Engerman is the author of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. Oxford University Press, 2009. Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development. Harvard University Press, 2003. Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; Akira Iriye International History Book Award; One of best six books of the year in Eurasian Studies, Foreign Affairs; Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
Engerman is the co-editor and contributor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. University of Massachusetts Press, 2003, and The God That Failed: Six Studies of Communism. Columbia University Press, 2001. (Wrote foreword).
Engerman is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"The Price of Success: Economic Development, Sovietology, and the Costs of Interdisciplinarity," History of Political Economy 42 (forthcoming 2010);"Social Science in the Cold War," Isis 101:2 (June 2010), 393-400;"Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962," for Cambridge History of the Cold War. Ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010;"The Cold War," for Companion to Russian and Soviet History. Ed. Abbott Gleason. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009;"Towards a Global History of Modernization," Diplomatic History 33:3 (June 2009), 375-385; co-author with Corinna Unger. (Also co-editor of Forum in which this article appears.);"American Knowledge and Global Power," Diplomatic History 31:4 (September 2007), 599-622;"How Harvard Ruled Russia," Kritika 7:3 (Summer 2006), 689-702;"John Dewey and the Soviet Union: When Pragmatism Meets Revolution,” Modern Intellectual History 3:1 (April 2006), 33-63;"The Ironies of the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and the Development of Russian Studies in the United States," Cahiers du Monde russe 45:3/4 (July/December 2004), 465-496, reprinted in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion, 1945-1985. Ed. David Hollinger. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006;"The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War," Diplomatic History 28:1 (January 2004), 23-54;"Rethinking Cold War Universities," Journal of Cold War Studies 5:3 (Summer 2003), 80-95."Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development," American Historical Review 105:2 (April 2000), 383-416, reprinted in Not Worthy: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize. Ed. L. Luciuk. Toronto: Kashtan Press, 2004, translated and reprinted in 200 let rossiisko- amerikanskikh otnoshenii: nauka i obrazovanie. Ed. A.O. Chubar'ian and Blair Ruble. Moscow: OLMA, 2007, slated for reprint in Collective Degradation, ed. John Stauffer (Yale UP, in process)

Awards: Engerman is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2010);
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2006);
Named Stuart L. Bernath Lecturer, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2005);
Outstanding Academic Title for 2004, Choice Magazine (2005);
Akira Iriye International History Book Award (2004);
Scholarly Fellowship, Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, (2004);
Research Grant, Rockefeller Archive Center (2004);
Scholarly Fellowship, Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History (2004);
Short-Term Research Scholarship, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (2004);
Stuart Bernath Book Prize, Soviety for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2004);
Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2003 - 2004);
Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (declined) (2003 - 2004);
Charles Warren Center Fellowship, Harvard University (2000 - 2001);
Research Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University (2000 - 2007);
Olin Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined) (1999 - 2001);
Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship, Mellon Foundation (1997 - 1998);
John L. Simpson Fellowship in Comparative Studies, Institute for International Studies (1997 - 1998);
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, Berkeley Graduate Division (1997);
Winant Fellow, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (1995);
Packard Fellow, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (1994).
Additional Info:
Formerly: Visiting Scholar, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2007-2008; Chair, Graduate Program in History, Brandeis University, 2001-2003, 2009-10; Chair, International and Global Studies Program, Brandeis University, 2005-2007; Assistant Professor of History, Brandeis University, 1999-2005; Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2003-2004; Fellow, Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, Harvard University, 2000-2001; Lecturer in History, University of California-Berkeley, 1998-1999.

PERSONAL ANECDOTE

A bonus for historians studying the twentieth century is the chance to meet your historical subjects. I was lucky enough to meet George F. Kennan, a man who featured in both of my books.

I met Kennan as he approached his 97th birthday in winter 2001. I had been thinking a lot about him for the previous five years, ever since I had run across a 1932 memorandum by Kennan while reading through State Department microfilms in a desolate corner of the Berkeley library. Kennan's memo must have arrived at State Department headquarters on a bad day for filing clerks. His astute analysis of the Soviets' all-out push for industrialization was misfiled among travelers' reports, an error that explained why this remarkable document had never been cited in the large scholarly output on Kennan.

Kennan's memo contained a striking phrase:"the romance of economic development," which, he had written, inspired Soviet youth"to ignore all other questions in favor of economic progress." In language revealing as much about the writer as his subject, Kennan praised that romance for saving Soviet youth from the" curses of egotism, romanticism, daydreaming, introspection and perplexity" that befell their western counterparts. I loved Kennan's elegant prose, and also the way his description fit western observers, not just Soviet youth. Some American observers explained away a famine by saying the USSR was"starving itself great"; others were so compelled by Soviet industrialization that they trotted out the old canard about breaking eggs to make an omelet.

As I began revising my dissertation into a book a few years later, I wrote Kennan, attaching a copy of his 1932 memo and asking if he remembered anything about the sources for his ideas. A speedy reply from his secretary implied that Kennan was unavailable to assist other scholars' work while he had so many pressing projects of his own. The following year, I resent my inquiry through a colleague of Kennan's who had offered to act as intermediary. Kennan's urgent letter (and two phone messages) came just as quickly as his earlier rebuff. He wrote me that he had no recollection of the document (then nearly 70 years old), and then requested whatever contextual material I could provide. I worked up the nerve to ask if I might deliver the documents in person - and a week later I rang the doorbell at his stately but slightly run-down Princeton home. His physical frailty limited our time to an hour, but his intellectual acuity was very much present as we spoke about his training in Russian history and his experiences in the USSR. Kennan recounted the lessons he learned at the University of Berlin in 1929-31; his professors stressed study of the Realien of geography, national character, and national interests rather than epiphenomena like governments and ideologies. This helped me understand Kennan's views of the USSR and of the world, and why he was, in his words,"an expatriate in his own time." The conversation deepened my fascination with Kennan, a familiar enough infatuation among diplomatic historians. I overcame my awe just long enough to ask his wife to photograph us in our conversation.

I would have a chance to meet some of my other historical subjects, especially as I wrote about Kennan's heirs, Soviet experts of the Cold War. These interviews were all fascinating. I learned about their scholarly inspirations, their political investigations, and their experiences visiting a country so different and distant from their own. I even learned about a number of romances and the scandals that often ensued - but none matched the opportunity to learn about the"romance of economic development" from the man who coined the phrase.

QUOTES

By David Engerman

The history of Soviet Studies offers contradictory lessons about the relationship between national security and intellectual life. The field was an intellectual success when government funds flowed because it attracted an especially wide range of scholars and because its founders conceived of their aims very broadly. Scholars-cum- consultants innocently but fervently believed that the various parts of their job fit together seamlessly. They worked with government officials at the same time that they produced their own scholarship and trained their academic progeny. Seams strained and innocence ended in the 1960s, leading some later scholars to denigrate the field solely on the basis of its ties to government. Amid the dual crises of the late 1960s, pioneers ... hoped to reinvigorate Soviet Studies by returning to interdisciplinary and applied research that had driven top-notch work in the field’s first decade. Yet the successes of Soviet Studies came thanks to unrepeatable historical circumstances: the intellectual mobilization during World War II, the postwar university boom, and the emergence of new sources of funding. These broad forces permitted Soviet Studies to serve both Mars and Minerva, or at least to try. There [is] no way ... to go back to the future. There was no way, after the divisions of the 1960s, to recapture the innocence of the postwar years, the notion that government agencies could only support, not distort, intellectual life. Coming from the small and isolated policy-oriented sector of Soviet Studies, secretaries [Robert] Gates and [Condoleezza] Rice celebrated themselves in claiming that new [government] initiatives incorporated the lessons of Soviet Studies. But new enemies, in new times, require new solutions. -- David Engerman in"Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts"

About David Engerman

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Visiting Associate Professor of History, Fordham University (2008-)
Area of Research: Environmental & agricultural history; geography, social ecology, and the political theory of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Education: Ph.D., Yale University, December 1994 (American History).
Dissertation:"The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Horticulture and the Industrial Countryside in California." (Awarded Distinction).
Major Publications: Stoll is the author of The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008; paper edition, 2009); U.S. Environmentalism Since 1945, A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, Bedford Series in History and Culture, 2006); Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002; paper edition, 2003); The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
Stoll is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Ground Truth: How Agriculture Shaped Society," in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford University Press, submitted);"Pattern Recognition," in Lapham's Quarterly 1 (Summer 2008);"Farm Against Forest," in Michael Lewis, ed., American Wilderness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);"The Smallholder's Dilemma," Journal of Technology and Culture 47 (October 2006);"Postmodern Farming, Quietly Flourishing," The Chronicle Review of The Chronicle of Higher Education (cover story, June 21, 2002);"Insects and Institutions: University Science and the Fruit Business in California," Agricultural History 69 (Spring 1995): 216-239.
Stoll has written reviews that have appeared in the following periodicals and scholarly journals:
American Historical Review, Environmental History, Harper’s, Journal of American History, Journal of Historical Geography, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of Technology and Culture, Pacific Historical Review, The American Scientist, The Atlantic, William and Mary Quarterly.
Awards: Stoll is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Finalist: The Mark Lynton History Prize, awarded by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Jurors David A. Bell, Michael Kazin, and Roy Rosenzweig chose Larding the Lean Earth as one of two finalists out of 229 entries. March 2003.
The Heyman Prize, for an outstanding manuscript on any subject in the humanities, for The Fruits of Natural Advantage, Yale University, July 1998.
W. Turrentine Jackson Award, presented by the American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch “to the author of the most outstanding dissertation on any aspect of the history of the American West in the twentieth century,” August 1995.
Phi Alpha Theta/Westerners International Award for the best doctoral dissertation in western history, August 1995.
Frederick W. Beinecke Prize, awarded by the Graduate School at Yale University"for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of Western American History," May 1995.
Additional Info:
Formerly Senior Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (2007-2008);
Associate Professor of History, Yale University (2002-2007);
Assistant Professor of History, Yale University (1996-2002);
Lecturer in History (full-time), Yale University (1994-96).
Stoll was a member of a panel of historians chosen to create"California: A Thematic History." KCET, Los Angeles. Worked with the script writer and consulted on the project’s grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (2001).

Personal Anecdote

I study the ways people think about resources, capital, and how what we call The Economy functions within the larger economy of Earth. I call myself an environmental historian, but my work is related to geography, social ecology, and the political theory of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Most of my work concerns agrarian society in the United States because I have found that agriculture offers the ideal vantage from which to observe the intersection of ideas and practices, economies and landscapes. Students and friends sometimes ask me why I think about these things and when I started. If I had to nail down an early influence without which I might be doing something else with my time, I would blame everything on a childhood spent roaming around the Long Beach Harbor. My dad had a marine supply store in the Harbor, and he gave me more liberty in that marginal landscape than perhaps he should have. I dodged the trucks crossing Anaheim Street in order to climb into boxcars on the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad. I trespassed to peer into the weird churning of oil refineries. A netherworld stretched out behind the store into a forlorn industrial landscape--burning vapors from flame-tipped towers, makeshift slaughterhouses, giant piles of yellow sulfur, feral dogs, weedy lots piled with rusted chain link each the size of economy cars. There were also broken, rootless men who showed up looking for work after getting out of jail--once in the Navy, once a longshoreman, once a foreman in the tuna canneries. When Southern California boomed in the 1980s, the Harbor remained underdeveloped as a mirror image of the wealth it made possible for others, a kind of third world of unpaved streets and unsolved murders. The Harbor showed me the underside of"progress" before I knew anything about economic growth or capitalism. It gave me so much to think about because none of its pieces fit together in my mind. I started writing about agriculture after feeling puzzled by another forlorn industrial landscape, another location of furious capitalist activity and environmental sacrifice--the San Joaquin Valley of California--subject of my dissertation and first book.

I am still trying to understand what we mean when we talk about progress and what progress has to do with the way people live around the world. I noticed that English speakers, in particular, have vague and negative words for grow their own food. We call them subsistence farmers, people who practice slash and burn cultivation, use with primitive tools, and live in economic isolation. I became curious. The book I'm working on, Outliers and Savages is a history of the agrarian household, defined as any group of related people who live under the same roof, work together, and eat from the same pot. Feudal lords, nation-states, and multinational corporations have tried to extort from the household, manipulate it, tax it, or destroy it. I want to know when and where it thrived, how it has survived, and why we should care. The Southern Mountains of the United States between the 1790s and the 1930s forms the book's principle historical subject in an overall narrative that places the backwoods of western Pennsylvania and the hollows of West Virginia in a world context. By considering smallholders in Appalachia, Haiti, and Mexico, I hope to present the likeness between the distillers who resisted the Whiskey Tax in 1794 and the campesinos who protested NAFTA in 1994. In both cases agrarians complained that policies intended to coerce them into more encompassing market relations undermined their ability to endure as households.

Quotes

By Steven Stoll

"Things came together. An older metaphysical progress married a burgeoning productive capacity, creating a powerful ideology of growth—driven by the myth of human perfection and grounded in the precise observation of economic reality. [John Adolphus] Etzler is a nexus for the complex of ideas that boiled and simmered into a full- fledged conception of material progress ... There is something deeply pragmatic about Etzler’s schemes and something fundamentally utopian about economic growth, and vice versa. They share the same qualities, and Etzler illuminates them and almost every important materialist idea during the time in which he lived ... For as much as we tend to dismiss utopia for the way it wishes away greed and poverty, we would do well to consider the ways that the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mall of America, and the Williams-Sonoma catalog partake of the very same expectations of salvation. What happens when we read plenty into environments that have the same kinds of limits our own bodies do? What does it mean that wealth in capitalist societies must be thought of as endless if the system is to avoid contradictions that might destroy it? What was Etzler trying to create with the Satellite and a colony in Venezuela that shows us a picture of ourselves?" -- Steven Stoll in"The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth" (2008)

About Steven Stoll

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, July, 2009-present.
Area of Research: Native American history, Southern history, 19th and 20th century U.S. History
Education: Ph.D., History, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, May, 2005.
Dissertation:"Native American Identity in the Segregated South: The Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, 1872-1956."
Major Publications: Lowery is the author of Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, March 2010. Lowery is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Telling Our Own Stories: Writing Lumbee History In the Shadow of the BAR," American Indian Quarterly 33 (Fall 2009): 499-522;"Indians, Southerners, and Americans: Race, Tribe, and Nation During Jim Crow," James A. Hutchins Lecture at UNC- Chapel Hill, 26 February 2009, Native South 2 (2009): 1-22;"Practicing Sovereignty: Lumbee Identity, Tribal Factionalism, and Federal Recognition, 1932-1934." Foundations of First Peoples' Sovereignty: History, Culture and Education. Edited by Ulrike Wiethaus. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 57-95;"Finding Wisdom in Places: Lumbee Family History." Indigenous Diasporas: Unsettling Western Fixations. Edited by Graham Harvey and Charles D. Thompson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2005. 153-68;"People and Place: Croatan Indians in Jim Crow Georgia, 1890-1920." American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 21 (Spring 2005): 37-64;"Making Christianity Sing: The Origins and Experience of Lumbee Indian and African-American Church Music." Confounding the Color Line: Indian-Black Relations in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Edited by James Brooks. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 321-45;"Indians Got Rhythm, Too: Lumbee Indian and African-American Church Music." North Dakota Quarterly 67 (Summer/Fall 2000): 72-91;"The Cowboys Always Win: The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934." History in Dispute, Vol. III: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress. Edited by Robert J. Allison. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 142-6.
Filmography: Co-Producer, In the Light of Reverence - Video, 73 minutes (2001) National Broadcast: P.O.V., Public Broadcasting Service, August 14, 2001: Awarded Henry Hampton Award for Social Change Documentary; Best Documentary Feature, American Indian Film Festival; Eagle Award, Taos Talking Picture Film Festival; CINE Golden Eagle; Jury Award, MountainFilm
Producer/Director/Editor, Sounds of Faith - Video, 14 minutes (1997): Screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Smithsonian Institution, New York Native American Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival
Producer/Director/Editor, Real Indian - 16mm, 7 minutes (1996): Awarded Best Short Documentary, South by Southwest Film Festival; Best Indian-Produced Short Documentary, Red Earth Film Festival. Screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival
Awards: Lowery is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Center for Public Service Engaged Faculty Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill, for over two years to incorporate community engagement into scholarship;
Uelstchi Service-Learning Course Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, for over three years for Lumbee History course;
Junior Faculty Research Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, Spring 2010;
Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant, Center for Faculty Excellence, UNC-Chapel Hill, Digitization of Southern Historical Association Documents, Fall 2009;
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2008-2009;
Role Model of the Year, Native Americans at Harvard College, April, 2007;
Stanford University Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame Inductee, 2006;
Clark Fund Research Award, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2006;
Ford Foundation, Dissertation Fellowship, 2004-2005;
Archie K. Davis Fellowship, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina, January-May, 2004;
Johnson Center for Undergraduate Excellence Intellectual Life Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2002;
Southern Research Circle Summer Stipend, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, May 2001;
Rockefeller Foundation, Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, 2001-2002;
Royster Society Fellowship, The Graduate School, University of North Carolina, 2000-2005;
Multicultural Producer Scholarship, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1998-1999;
Native Initiative Fellowship, Sundance Institute, 1998;
Folklife Documentary Grant, North Carolina Arts Council, 1997;
Younger Scholar Summer Research Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1994;
Research Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1993.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, Harvard University. July, 2005-June, 2009;
Adjunct Faculty, Department of History, North Carolina State University. January-May 2005;
Adjunct Faculty, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. January-May 2002;
Lecturer, Department of American Indian Studies, San Francisco State University. January 1997-December 1998.
Lowery has a master's degree in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University and has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning"In the Light of Reverence" (2001), which showed on PBS in 2001 to over three million people. Her two previous films,"Real Indian" (1996) and"Sounds of Faith (1997)," both concern Lumbee identity and culture.

Personal Anecdote

LUMBEE INDIANS IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH has been living with me for over fifteen years, since I first wrote my undergraduate thesis on Henry Berry Lowrie, an important Recomstruction-era figure in Lumbee history. After that I took a big break from history to become a documentary film producer, but film only intensified my desires to use academic history as a storytelling medium that transcends the boundaries between the academy and the community. When I went back to get my PhD, I remained involved in documentary film, became a part-time theater producer, and began to think visually about historical storytelling, both in terms of narrative as well as argument. Oral tradition and artistic production, of course, has always been a tremendous part of Lumbee culture, so I could not ignore that, especially since I was writing about a relatively recent time period and many people who remember the people and events are still living. There were also plenty of compelling photographs, taken by both insiders and outsiders, that prompted fundamental questions about the documentary record. As I revised my dissertation into a book, I felt comfortable taking a few risks with voice and images to explicate questions of interest to academic historians but also to animate the narrative and give readers an insider look at the Lumbees.

I am extremely grateful to all my mentors, in filmmaking, in graduate school, at UNC Press, and at the First Peoples/New Directions publishing initiative for encouraging me on this path. But I have to give my greatest thanks to my family. Like my sister says,"the woman who taught me to read is a dangerous woman!" My mother, an English professor who taught everything from freshman composition to advanced grammar to world lit, taught me to read and remains my first and best writing teacher. My father, political radical in his own way (he would say"because I didn't know any better"), has always nurtured my iconoclastic tendencies while giving me a hefty dose of"respect your elders" training. Finally, my husband is a brilliant Lumbee musician and artist who lacks a formal education. He is not only a moral compass in my responsibilities to my community, but he gives me vital inspiration every day. He once said something which has become a kind of mantra for me in explaining Native attitudes towards history. A student interviewing him asked,"how did you learn Lumbee history?" He simply said,"I lived it."

The relevance of history to contemporary life is immediately obvious in the Lumbee case, since the categories of knowledge scholars have used to describe us have often been inadequate at best, and damaging at worst. For example, our 122-year struggle for federal recognition, and the political factionalism it has engendered, has been one of the layers of our identity but it is not the only facet of it. Some believe (and many scholars promote this idea) that Lumbee recognition is a struggle for identity, as if we don't know or don't understand our identities as an Indigenous People. This argument stems from a recognition of the several times our People have been subject to legislation which alters our tribal name. My book argues that this legislation, and the whole debate about the definition of"Indian," was motivated by the prerogatives of white supremacy and Indians' ambivalent relationship to it. But scholars (and more importantly, policy makers) have not looked to this explanation of the name changes, instead selectively revising our history to then justify our exclusion from the ranks of tribes who have government- to-government relationships with the United States. The Lumbee struggle is not for identity, but for sovereignty.

Another question about Lumbee history consistently involves our"origins." This is the question I get most often from the general public, and it also sums up the doubt expressed by anti-Indian interests in Congress and people who comment on websites and create Wikipedia entries on us. The argument goes that we're not real Indians and don't deserve federal recognition because we can't prove descent from a"historic" tribe, or that we don't look"Indian." While my book doesn't delve into this research extensively, it is plain that the Lumbees descend from a kin network of extended families, some of whom have had long-standing attachments to our current homeland in Robeson County, and some of whom migrated there in the 18th century. It is the relationship of people and place, and the development and maintenance of a coherent political and social organization, that makes us real Indians. Of course some of our ancestors are non-Indian; nearly every member of every tribe has non-Indian ancestors; it was a fact of colonization. And if you look at the so-called"historic" tribes (i.e. the ones you've heard of: Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Navajos, Sioux, etc.), each one of them has a time in which they were called something else than what they are called now. To pretend that there is some kind of universal definition of a"historic" tribe against which Lumbees should be measured is to deny that Indian people can legitimately change and that colonization itself happened. It's a notion that hurts all of us as Indigenous people, and one that we can refute--to powerful effect on international Indigenous affairs--if we are all on the same epistemological page.

Quotes

By Malinda Maynor Lowery

"This American nation is home to other Indigenous nations which were formed around different values, strategies, and under different circumstances than the American nation. If we are to understand or define the American people, we must also understand the Native peoples whose nations share the land. For Native history is linked in the most intimate ways with that of America-the land, the people, and the nation. They are linked by kinship, culture, and economy, but also by race, class, gender, and inequality. Whether the inequalities tied to citizenship in the American nation can be rectified depends largely on how we know ourselves and each other. Do we wrestle with categories of knowledge that are different from our own, and assign them equal standing with our own categories? Or do we decide that some categories are more real, truthful, or scientific than others?" -- Malinda Maynor Lowery in"Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation"

About Malinda Maynor Lowery

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia, 2007- present
Area of Research: American political, cultural, and intellectual history
Education: Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, History, 2005
Major Publications: Burns is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press 2009), an intellectual biography of the controversial novelist and philosopher. Based on exclusive access to Rand's personal papers, Goddess of the Market is the only book to draw upon Rand's unedited letters and journals. Burns is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:"O Libertarian, Where is Thy Sting?" Journal of Policy History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007: 453-471;"Liberalism and The Conservative Imagination," in Liberalism for a New Century, Eds. Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (University of California Press, 2007);"In Retrospect: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," Reviews in American History, 32 (September 2004): 447-462;"Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement," Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (November 2004): 1-27. Reprinted in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in Twentieth Century America, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Awards: Burns is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, 2010-2013;
University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Fellowship, 2010-2011;
University of Virginia Bankard Fund for Political Economy, 2010-2011, 2009;
University of Virginia Summer Research Grant, 2009;
University of Virginia Excellence in Diversity Fellow, 2008-2009;
University of Virginia Professors as Writers Fellow, 2008-2009;
Campbell National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2007-2008;
National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2007;
James H. Kettner Graduate Prize for best dissertation, 2006, Berkeley History Department;
Library Prize for Undergraduate Research, UC Berkeley. Mentor of prizewinners, 2006 and 2003;
Research Fellow, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, 2006;
Grantee, F.A. Hayek Fund for Scholars, Institute for Humane Studies, 2006, 2007;
University of California, Berkeley, History Department Block Grant Fellowship, 2004, 2000;
University of California, Berkeley, Dean's Competitive Fellowship, 2002;
Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction for excellence in teaching, Harvard University, 2000;

Additional Info:
Burns has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, C-Span’s Book TV, NPR's Weekend America, and Here & Now. She has also contributed articles to Harvard Magazine, Foreign Policy, the Christian Science Monitor, and several academic journals.
Burns has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Columbia Business School, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Rice University, and the Cato Institute.
Jennifer Burns personal website www.jenniferburns.org

Personal Anecdote

In 2006 I was starting my first job as a lecturer at UC Berkeley when the technology office phoned up and asked if I would like to podcast my course"Introduction to United States History Since 1865." I didn't even have an iPod, but I said"yes" without thinking much about it, thus launching the most unexpected and rewarding aspect of my career as a historian. Six months later, my lectures were up on iTunes and had been downloaded nearly 300,000 times. My inbox was bursting with emails from enthusiastic history students around the world. Accustomed to the private sanctuary of my books and my study, I panicked. It felt as though I had lost some cherished measure of privacy, and I wanted the lectures taken down immediately.

But then I paused and began to reflect on my goals and values as a historian. I had spent years of advanced study gathering knowledge - was this now to be shared only with specialists in my field? I had always believed historians should seek a broader audience, and now I was living that vision. As a Ph.D. student I had benefited from the intellectual vitality and openness of a public university, and my lectures were one small way to further the Berkeley legacy.

Instead of taking the lectures down, I decided to create a website for podcasters and began corresponding regularly with my listeners. Since then, the sense of speaking to a larger audience has shaped and strengthened all of my scholarship. Podcasting helped me craft my first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, so that it appealed to both academics and general readers. Engaging with the public has deepened my commitment to educational equity and convinced me that there need not be a firewall between professional and popular history. I have learned that even from the ivory tower, our profession can still foster and connect with the ongoing human search for meaning, story, and a shared past. Though I may be an accidental podcaster, I have become and hope to remain a deliberate historian.

Quotes

By Jennifer Burns

Writing my first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, was like being a detective at the heart of an intellectual mystery story. Though Rand's legend was well established among both her fans and enemies, there was little scholarly work about her life and career. I was the first historian to work in her personal papers, and thus it was essential to document her life with archival evidence. Then came the challenge of fitting Rand into the evolving ideological landscape of the American right, which historians were just beginning to chart. The final step was crafting an analytic narrative that would demystify Rand yet retain the tension and sense of discovery that animated my years of detective work. -- Jennifer Burns about"Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right"

About Jennifer Burns

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Colorado, Denver, Fall, 2007-present
Area of Research: The social and environmental history of the Rocky Mountain West
Education: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States History, May, 2003; Dissertation:"The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization in Southern Colorado, 1870-1915"
Major Publications: Andrews is the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008, winner of the 2009 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History; 2009 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University; 2009 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; 2009 Colorado Book Award, History Category; 2009 Spence Award, Mining History Association; Honorable Mention, 2009 Hundley Prize, The Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association; Finalist, 2009 Clements Prize, Southwest History category, Clements Center at SMU; Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Firestone Library; 2009 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, Denver Public Library.
Andrews is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:"Contemplating Animal Histories: Politics and Pedagogy across Borders," Radical History Review 107 (Spring, 2010): 139-165;"Making Meat: Efficiency and Exploitation in Progressive Chicago." Organization of American Historians Magazine 24 (January, 2010): 37-40; Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews,"The Five Cs of History: Putting the Elements of Historical Thinking into Practice in Teacher Education." Pp. 151-167 in History Education 101: The Past, Present, and Future of Teacher Preparation, eds. Wilson J. Warren and D. Antonio Cantu. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing, 2008;"What Does It Mean to Think Historically?" Perspectives: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (January, 2007): 32-35l;"'Made by Toile'? Tourism, Landscape, and Labor in Colorado, 1858-1917." Journal of American History 92 (December, 2005): 837-863;"Turning the Tables on Assimilation: Oglala Lakotas and the Pine Ridge Day Schools, 1889-1920s." Western Historical Quarterly 33 (Winter, 2002): 407-430;"Tata Atanasio Trujillo's Unlikely Tale of Utes, Nuevo Mexicanos, and the Settling of Colorado's San Luis Valley." New Mexico Historical Review 75 (January, 2000): 4-41.
Andrews is currently working on An Animals' History of the United States. Under contract with Harvard University Press, and"An Environmental History of the Kawuneeche Valley, Rocky Mountain National Park." Book-length National Park Service contract report
Awards: Andrews is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
W. P. Whitsett Lecturer in Western History, California State University-Northridge, 2010;
Bancroft Prize, Columbia University, 2009;
George Perkins Marsh Award, American Society for Environmental History, 2009;
Vincent DeSantis Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2009;
Caroline Bancroft Prize, Denver Public Library Western History Department, 2009;
Colorado Book Award, History, 2009;
Clark Spence Award, Mining History Association, 2009;
Honorable Mention, Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2009;
Honorable Mention, Hundley Book Award, Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association, 2009;
Alice Hamilton Article Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2007;
Ray Allen Billington Article Prize, Western History Association, 2006;
Polished Apple Teaching Award, California State University-Northridge, 2005;
Rachel Carson Dissertation Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2004;
Arrell M. Gibson Article Prize, Western History Association, 2003;
John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Faculty Fellowship, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 2004-5, 2009-10;
CRISP Grant, UC-Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2009;
American Council for Learned Societies Contemplative Practice Fellowship, 2007-8;
Bill Lane Center for the North American West, Stanford University, Short-Term Fellow, 2007-8;
W. M. Keck Young Scholars Award, Huntington Library, 2005-6;
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on"The Redemptive West," Huntington Library, 2005;
Research Grants (2), Rockefeller Archive Center, 2000-2001 and 2002-3;
U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship, 1999-2002.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, California State University, Northridge, Fall, 2003-Spring, 2007.

Personal Anecdote

In less than a week, I was set to give my first-ever conference paper, before the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History. A very generous friend who was already out of graduate school and teaching had made room for me on a panel devoted to exploring the implications of Richard White's important 1994 essay,"'Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?'" The conference organizers had slated the session for a room that sat at least a hundred, not because anyone wanted to hear a Ph.D. candidate from Wisconsin blather on about coal-mine explosions, but instead because my fellow panelists were fast making names for themselves. More important still, Richard White had kindly agreed to comment on the papers.

White's"Are You an Environmentalist" had grabbed me the first time I read it (it has yet to let me go). I found myself deeply persuaded by White's central claim: that environmental historians can learn a lot by taking seriously work and those who perform it. The piece taught me the best kind of truth--a simple truth of seemingly boundless explanatory power: Labor, White reminds us, has always encompassed many of the core practices through which human beings have arrived at a knowledge of nature.

I don't know what they put in the Koolaid that I imbibed in seminar at Wisconsin, but like most graduate students there and elsewhere, my way of paying homage to the profound influence White's essay had had upon me (and, for that matter, the impact that his whole corpus of scholarship had made upon me since I first encountered The Middle Ground as an undergraduate) was to lash out with that peculiar brand of Oedipal rage that combines the worst aspects of adolescent impudence and twenty-something earnestness. In the months leading up to the ASEH, I must have read"Are You an Environmentalist" at least six times, each time slicing and dicing the essay with my critical knives sharpened to a razor's edge. My near-compulsive re-reading had filled me with unwarranted confidence. I told myself that I had found every weakness, every contradiction, every leap of logic, every hole in White's argument.

I could not wait to tell the assembled lights of my discipline about all the things White had gotten wrong. I envisioned myself delivering a devastating critique; I imagined the verbal combat that would ensue as White, one of the greatest historians of his generation in my estimation (a conviction that I hold even more strongly today) devoted his comment to parrying my attack.

Those who have seen Richard White engage in debate will understand why this thought was not entirely comforting. At the first historical conference I had ever attended, in fact, I had watched White pretty much eviscerate two junior scholars when they tried a stunt very similar to the one I was plotting. I attempted with little success to maintain my confidence. I told myself that I was smarter than the pair I had seen White tear up. Besides, my critique was as persuasive and elegant as theirs had been tendentious and awkward.

Doubt, thank goodness, remained. I sent my advisor, Bill Cronon, a draft of the diatribe I had assembled. Bill gave me very clear and direct advice: Don't be an idiot. File the paper away and write a new one that focused instead on presenting my own research findings.

Part of me evidently had a death wish and welcomed the heady risk of committing career suicide at such an early stage. That part of me felt censored by Bill and frustrated at the ways in which professionalism seemed to constrain intellectual exchange within the academy.

But overwhelming the compulsions seeking to push me to the edge were cooler, more cautious impulses. And so I pulled back to deliver an altogether safer paper. Bill had averted my juvenile plan. In the process, he spared Richard White the trouble of deciding whether to give me the dressing-down that I deserved, or to look graciously away from my impertinence.

If one of my own students were to concoct a similar stunt, I would undoubtedly provide the same advice. For all this, though, I can't help feeling a little uncomfortable with the hard lessons this incident imparted-that our profession is inextricably hierarchical in nature, that some historians are simply smarter and more highly-skilled than others, that what I can do and how I can do it depends at least to some extent on how well I know and keep to my place.

With apologies to Borges, I had always imagined academe as a sort of paradise. This was an unusually outrageous delusion on my part; as an academic brat, tales of departmental infighting, administrative folly, and student futility were nightly topics of conversation at the family dinner table. Choosing to hold my fire against Richard White turned out to be a critical first step in my discovery that the historical discipline can offer no real place of grace, no true escape, from the world as it is--not a happy discovery, I know, but perhaps a necessary one.

Quotes

By Thomas G. Andrews

Almost a century later, evocations of Ludlow still hew to the same story lines established as the fighting unfolded. The view of the Colorado coalfield war that has become the consensus is that workers were striking simply to achieve basic freedoms. Even though the miners suffered a crushing defeat, the blood sacrifices of Ludlow's martyrs prompted Rockefeller and his fellow capitalists to mend their ways and set American business on the path toward today's more enlightened labor relations. A Works Project Administration guidebook summarized this interpretation. Ludlow, New Deal authors argued,"aroused public opinion and brought about improvement of working conditions and civil liberties in the coal camps." Like most tales of the bad old days, such stories chart a narrative of progress. From this starting point, it becomes simply a matter of emphasis and tone to elicit either complacence or alarm or lest we go back to the dark ages when big business reigned supreme and government forces served as the mailed fist of concentrated capital. -- Thomas Andrews in"Killing for Coal America's Deadliest Labor War"

About Thomas G. Andrews

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and the History of Christianity Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, 2010-2011
Area of Research: History of capitalism, the twentieth-century cultural and religious history of the United States, and transnational history
Education: Ph.D. 2006, (M.A., M. Phil.) U.S. History, Yale University
Dissertation:"The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," under the direction of Glenda E. Gilmore.
Major Publications: Moreton is the author of Book: To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, May 2009). Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, April, 2010.
Moreton is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
"Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?" Journal of Southern History 75th anniversary issue, v. 75, no. 3 (August, 2009);"Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture as Youth Culture," in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008);"The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," Enterprise & Society 8:4 (December, 2007);"The Soul of Neoliberalism," Social Text v. 25, no. 3 92 (Fall 2007), pp. 103-123; co-authored with Pamela Voekel:"Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the Americas," History Compass, Summer 2007;"It Came from Bentonville: The Agrarian Origins of Wal-Mart Culture" in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New Press, 2005).
Moreton is currently working on the tentively titled manuscript"Spiritual Development: Neoliberalism and Transnational Religion".
Awards: Moreton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Emerging Scholar's Prize Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, April, 2009;
Junior Faculty Fellowship Willson Center for the Humanities, University of Georgia, for fall semester 2009;
Visiting Scholar Fellowship American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006-2007;
Charlotte F. Newcombe Fellowship Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2005-2006;
Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of American Religion Louisville Institute, 2004-2005;
Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2004;
Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2003;
Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship Award Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003;
Dissertation Research Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003;
Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Summer Travel Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003;
Mellon Research Seminar Fellowship in Women's and Gender History Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, 2002.

Personal Anecdote

My first act of research for To Serve God and Wal-Mart was shoveling fossilized chicken droppings out of a defunct coop on a goat farm in Northwest Arkansas. The farm's owners, friends of my favorite agrarian Jim Scott, evidently took my willingness to pick up a shovel as a character reference, and lost no time making me feel at home in Wal-Mart's backyard. Since we have no Freedom of Information Act for the state-supported institutions we somewhat inaccurately call private corporations, the research could only go so far by relying on formal archives. It was only through the generosity of my hosts in the Ozarks-the original Wal-Mart Country--that I was able to learn to explore how"Wal-Martism" might fill the conceptual hole in the middle of"post-Fordism." If the Detroit auto industry had set the pattern for the first half of the twentieth century-in spatial organization, labor arrangements, finance, family formation, ideology, immigration, art-then surely its successor was a likely site for understanding major developments of the post-war years.

When Wal-Mart beat out Exxon-Mobil to become the world's largest company in 2002, what we knew that the first service company to make it to the top of the Fortune 400 was what astute business journalists like Bob Ortega had been telling us since the early 1990s: Wal-Mart had remade retail by achieving such market dominance that it could dictate its terms to the suppliers rather than the other way around. At the fringes of this narrative were the voices of historic preservationists and organized labor, finally roused by the Arkansas company's disruptive penetration of Vermont, Chicago, and Southern California. The reigning questions about the new top multinational were often variations on"Wow--how did Wal-Mart do it?" or"Is Wal-Mart good for America?"

While my 2002 dissertation prospectus referenced this literature, though, it also included chapter proposals that ultimately allowed me to explore a question I found much more interesting, the one that Thomas Frank revived from the original Populist mobilization:"What's the matter with Kansas?" -understood now as"Why have Americans on the losing end of the deregulated, off-shored service economy enabled it politically for more than a generation?" To Serve God and Wal-Mart is therefore not so much a book about Wal-Mart as an account of the anointing of free enterprise, the unlikely legitimation of neoliberal economics through evangelical religion. It tells this story through the twinned biographies of the world's largest company and the ideological apparatus it nurtured. It argues that this specific experience of mass service work transformed economic common sense and infused it with evangelical values at precisely the moment that federal redistribution catapulted the Sun Belt to its position of decisive influence within the nation. That moment of waxing power for the old agricultural periphery coincided with American-led economic integration, so that the ethos of Christian free enterprise-the odd pairing of Jerry Falwell and Milton Friedman, so to speak-gave late twentieth-century globalization some of its most distinctive characteristics. Ultimately I join writers like Janet Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Lisa Duggan, Tanya Erzen, and Linda Kintz in arguing that the Left's frustration with the" culture wars" misreads the necessary connection between conservative sexual mores and the post-1973 economy that Wal-Mart ultimately dominated.

That I got to learn about this complex relationship while living in the Ozarks, knee-deep in chicken droppings, was my good fortune.

Quotes

By Bethany Moreton

"For the emerging Wal-Mart constituency, faith in God and faith in the market grew in tandem, aided by a generous government and an organized, corporate-funded grassroots movement for Christian free enterprise. Ultimately, they helped shape American-led globalization itself. The postindustrial society grew from a specific regional history an the heritage of Populism. It was built in the aisles and break rooms of Southern discount stores, in small-group Bible study and vast Sunday-morning worship services. It spread through the marketing classes and mission trips of Christian colleges, through student business clubs and service projects. Although free-market economic theories captured the hearts and minds of elite policymakers in the later twentieth century, the animatig spirit of Christian free enterprise shaped the outcome. The Wal-Mart Moms understood better than their critics: Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it." -- Bethany Moreton in"To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

About Bethany Moreton

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara and Co-Director of Indigenous Studies Minor
Area of Research: U.S. History, Borderlands, Native American History
Education: Ph.D. in History, University of Helsinki, 2001
Major Publications: Hämäläinen is the author of The Comanche Empire, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Paperback in 2009. Awarded the Recognition of Excellence, Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University. Winner of Bancroft Prize, Merle Curti Award, Caughey Western History Association Prize, Norris and Carol Hundley Award, William P. Clements Prize, Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit, and Kate Broocks Bates Award. ForeWord Magazine's History Book of the Year. An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Book-of-the-Month Club 2, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. El imperio comanche. Translation of The Comanche Empire by Ricardo García. Peninsula Press, forthcoming 2010. He is currently working on The Shapes of Power: Frontiers, Borderlands, Middle Grounds, and Empires of North America, 1600-1900. Under contract with Yale University Press.
Hämäläinen is the editor of When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turnings Points, ed. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press,2006, and currently working on Major Problems in North American Borderlands History, ed. with Benjamin H. Johnson. Under contract with Houghton Mifflin Company.
Hämäläinen is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:"Into the Mainstream: The Rise of a New Texas Indian History," in Beyond Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations, ed. Walter Buenger and Arnoldo DeLeon. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, forthcoming;"The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands," William and Mary Quarterly 67 (April 2010), 173-208. Reprinted in Major Problems in North American Borderlands History, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, forthcoming;"Pathogens, Peoples, and the Paths of History," in When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turnings Points, 1-16, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2006;"The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures," Journal of American History 90 (Dec. 2003), 833- 862. Winner of Arrell Morgan Gibson Award. Reprinted in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, 361-92, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell. New York: Routledge, 2006; and The American Indian: Past and Present, 6th ed., 53-77, ed. Roger L. Nichols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008;"The First Phase of Destruction: Killing the Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840," Great Plains Quarterly 21 (Spring 2001), 101-114;"Beyond the Ideology of Victimization: New Trends in the Study of Native American-Euroamerican Relations," Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 26 (Oct. 2001), 45-49;"Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays," with John R. Wunder, American Historical Review 104 (Oct. 1999), 1229-1234; The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System," Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 485-513. Winner of Bert M. Fireman Prize. Reprinted in Major Problems in American Indian History, 238-257, ed. Albert Hurtado and Peter Iverson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001;"Hevosen leviäminen ja sen vaikutukset Pohjois-Amerikan tasangoilla sekä Länsi-Afrikan savanneilla" [The Spread and Influence of the Horse on the North American Great Plains and the Western African Savanna], with Pekka Masonen, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 21 (1996), 31-41.
Awards: Hämäläinen is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2010-2012 (declined);
Institut d'Etudes Avancées in Nantes, 2010-2011;
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 2009-2010;
Turku Institute for Advanced Study, University of Turku, 2009-12 (declined);
Recognition of Excellence, Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University, 2009;
Bancroft Prize in American History, the Trustees of Columbia University, 2009;
Merle Curti Award for the best book on social and/or intellectual history, the Organization of American Historians, 2009;
Caughey Western History Association Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West, the Western History Association, 2009;
Norris and Carol Hundley Award for the most distinguished book on any historical subject, the American Historical Association Pacific Branch, 2009;
The William P. Clements Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America, the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, 2008;
Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center for Great Plains Studies, 2009;
Award of Merit for the best fiction or non-fiction book on Texas, the Philosophical Society of Texas, 2009;
Kate Broocks Bates Award for the best book on Texas history prior to 1900, the Texas State Historical Association, 2008;
History Book of the Year, ForeWord Magazine, 2009;
Silver Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards in History, 2009;
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award in U.S. History and Biography/Autobiography, Association of American Publishers, 2009;
Finalist for Carr P. Collins Award for the best book of non-fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters, 2009;
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, 2009;
Arrell Morgan Gibson Award for the best essay on Native American history, the Western History Association, 2004;
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2003-2005;
Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year (all disciplines), the University of Helsinki, 2002;
William P. Clements Center in Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2001-2002;
Bert M. Fireman Prize for the best student essay published in the Western Historical Quarterly, the Western History Association, 1999;
Fulbright Fellowship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1995-1996.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University, 2002-2004.

Personal Anecdote

This happened many times in 2006 and 2007:

It is 2 AM, and I'm suddenly wide awake. I've had less than an hour of sleep, but the adrenaline jolt has eliminated any chance of getting more. I know the cause of my unwelcome alertness: panic. The writing is too slow, the tenure deadline is too soon, my kids are growing up too fast, and my insomnia is worse than ever. I suppress the urge to howl in frustration, and instead get dressed and leave the house. I walk the half-mile to the office, convinced that the night is ruined-as is the following day, which will find me exhausted and unable to think or write. I cling to the idea that if I get down just one half-decent sentence tonight, surely it must be better than nothing.

I ended up staying in the office for twenty hours, writing more than I had managed in weeks. I couldn't count on this pattern, but it happened often enough for me to finish the book and become a professional historian. I found writing my first book-a book that I knew would be controversial-a dreadful and debilitating task, and I don't think I would have made it without those moments when expectations and self-criticism were temporarily suspended. Most of the thinking and conceptualizing happened while I was busy with other things. They still do. I sleep better these nights, but getting anything worthwhile on paper still requires mind tricks; insights only come when I'm preoccupied with things-running, hanging out with the kids, cleaning the house-that seemingly have nothing to do with the job.

This, of course, is commonplace. Anyone who has tried to write on a sustained basis knows the workings of the subconscious. And they know that for mind tricks to work, they must catch one by surprise; they must be-or at least feel-thoroughly accidental. One can't force them, or even be aware of them. One can only appreciate them in hindsight.

Like almost all my friends in academia, I wrote my first book slightly scared and enormously annoyed, thinking that there was little in the way of method to my madness. I'm glad that I didn't realize at the time that I did have a method, all along.

Quotes

By Pekka Hämäläinen

To understand the particular nature of Comanche imperialism, it is necessary to understand how Comanche ascendancy intertwined with other imperial expansions-New Spain's tenacious if erratic northward thrust from central Mexico, New France's endeavor to absorb the interior grasslands into its commercial realm, and the United States' quest for a transcontinental empire. Comanches, to simplify a complex multistage process, developed aggressive power policies in reaction to Euro-American invasions that had threatened their safety and autonomy from the moment they had entered the southern plains. Indeed, the fact that Comanche territory, Comanchería, was encircled throughout its existence by Euro-American settler colonies makes the Comanches an unlikely candidate for achieving regional primacy. But as the Comanches grew in numbers and power, that geopolitical layout became the very foundation of their dominance. Their overwhelming military force, so evident in their terror-inspiring mounted guerrilla attacks, would have allowed them to destroy many New Mexico and Texas settlements and drive most of the colonists out of their borders. Yet they never adopted such a policy of expulsion, preferring instead to have their borders lined with formally autonomous but economically subservient and dependent outposts that served as economic access points into the vast resources of the Spanish empire.
The Comanches, then, were an imperial power with a difference: their aim was not to conquer and colonize, but to coexist, control, and exploit. Whereas more traditional imperial powers ruled by making things rigid and predictable, Comanches ruled by keeping them fluid and malleable. This informal, almost ambiguous nature of Comanches' politics not only makes their empire difficult to define; it sometimes makes it difficult to see. New Mexico and Texas existed side by side with Comanchería throughout the colonial era, and though often suffering under Comanche pressure, the twin colonies endured, allowing Spain to claim sweeping imperial command over the Southwest. Yet when examined closely, Spain's uncompromised imperial presence in the Southwest becomes a fiction that existed only in Spanish minds and on European maps, for Comanches controlled a large portion of those material things that could be controlled in New Mexico and Texas. The idea of land as a form of private, revenue-producing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property. This basic observation has enormous repercussions on how we should see the relationship between the Comanches and colonists. When Comanches subjected Texas and New Mexico to systematic raiding of horses, mules, and captives, draining wide sectors of those productive resources, they in effect turned the colonies into imperial possessions. That Spanish Texas and New Mexico remained unconquered by Comanches is not a historical fact; it is a matter of perspective. -- Pekka Hamalainen in"The Comanche Empire" pp. 4-5.

About Pekka Hämäläinen

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government.
Area of Research: Modern transatlantic history, with an emphasis on 20th century political cultures in the US and Europe, the United States in the World
Education: Ph.D. History, Columbia University, 2007
Major Publications: Temkin is the author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Yale University Press, 2009), an international history of one of the major legal and political episodes of the twentieth century, selected for the long list of the 2009 Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University.
Temkin is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:"Internationalism and the Limits of Political Tolerance: Malcolm X in Europe, 1964-1965" (article manuscript in preparation);"Cold War Culture and the Lingering Myth of Sacco and Vanzetti", in Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, eds., The Cold War in Pieces: Explorations of a Model for Postwar American History (forthcoming, OUP);"Culture vs. Kultur: The First World War, American Intellectuals, and the Clash of Civilizations" (article under revision);"'Avec un certain malaise': The Paxtonian Trauma in France, 1973-74," Journal of Contemporary History (April 2003). His current research interests include the death penalty in transatlantic perspective, Malcolm X's career and politics in global context, and internationalism and border control in the twentieth century."
Awards: Temkin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Finalist, Cundill International Prize and Lecture in History, for The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (2009);
Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship, the New School University and the New-York Historical Society, 2007-2008 (declined);
Finalist, Bancroft Dissertation Award, 2008-2009;
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall, Paris, 2006-2007;
Visiting Fellow, Centre d'Études Nord-Américains, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Spring 2007; Visiting Fellow, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 2004-2005;
History Department Teaching Fellow, Columbia University, 2001-2003;
Gerson Cohen Memorial Fellow in History, Columbia University, 2003l;
Visiting Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, Summer 2002;
Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies Fellow, Columbia University, 2000-2007.
Additional Info:
Affiliated with both the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Temkin previously taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at Columbia University.
With Alex Keyssar, convenes the Harvard Seminar on History and Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.
Temkin has written articles for The Nation, Haaretz, and the Journal of Contemporary History, and was a founder of The Israel Forum of New York, which organized public discussions of Middle East politics and history, particularly the role of the United States.

Personal Anecdote

When I read or hear other people's accounts of how they wrote their dissertation or their first book-the sojourns in dusty but marvelous out-of-the-way archives, the fateful chance meetings with ousted despots in abandoned mineshafts, the luggage mistakenly switched with that of the shady foreign operative-I can't help but think of the recurring Seinfeld joke about"Rochelle, Rochelle", the film-turned-Broadway musical about"a young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk." In reality, at least in my experience, there's very little glamour or romance involved in getting a PhD in history. Yes, there is often a lot of travel involved, and anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time in airports and hotels is bound to have more than her share of misadventures. I am no exception. But the process of the PhD is in some ways nasty, brutish, and long-sometimes strange, yes, but not necessarily in a good way, and in any case rarely erotic. Still, I like to think I'm not a masochist, so it's reasonable to ask why I wound up walking that road. It wasn't at all obvious, and I can't claim to be following a calling I felt since I was a child. History was one of my worst subjects, my inability to memorize names and dates surpassed perhaps only by my inability to comprehend the most simple geometric axioms. I still recall the big day of the matriculation exam in history-as dictated by the high school curriculum in the frenetic Middle Eastern country where I spent most of my boyhood, we were tested on our knowledge of Second Temple-era Judea, and I bravely chose to answer the question about the differences in religious practices and beliefs between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. I wrote my response with some pride, pleased that I was actually able to remember all the priestly minutiae. It was only later that day that I realized in horror-though not with total surprise-that I had been absolutely correct about all the religious practices and beliefs, but had attributed those of the Pharisees to the Sadducees, and vice versa. I hoped against hope that the exam would be graded by an understanding soul who could appreciate that I had included all the relevant information, just the other way around, but no such luck was forthcoming.

In all the time that's passed since then I'm still not sure I've mastered the elusive art of memorization, and I've certainly forgotten most of what I knew about Judea in 70AD. It wasn't until over a decade later that I decided on an academic career (long story), and even after I embarked on the road to becoming a professional historian I was sorely tempted on a few occasions to opt for alternate paths: during one lull in graduate school I considered returning to my previous life as a journalist, and during another-this one more sustained, a probable side effect of the distractions of living in New York and then Paris-I seriously contemplated diving headlong into the world of music. What kept me going in the discipline is, I think, something that I first grasped in college, listening to a talk by wizened scholar of medieval France, and to which I have returned in such moments of doubt: that history should not, cannot, be treated as a"subject", something separate from other domains of life, to be learned in isolation. Eric Hobsbawm was on to something (though maybe not for the right reasons) when he demanded that history not be treated as"merely one damned thing after another." What I try to convey to students as they begin to delve into the past is that history, contrary to what they may have thought or heard, is not a body of knowledge to be absorbed, but"a way of thinking", as Marc Bloch put it, about the world they live in. That may sound banal to those of us professionalized in the discipline, but I wish I realized that twenty years ago. I think that's where I (and my teachers, for that matter) went wrong in high school. Armed with that insight, I might have enjoyed history much more even then, been somewhat more adept with names and dates (though probably still not with those geometric axioms) and maybe even remembered-correctly!-what it was exactly that those pesky Pharisees and Sadducees did differently from each other.

Quotes

By Moshik Temkin

"Sacco and Vanzetti left a number of odd legacies. A lot of people in the United States, Europe, and Latin America still recognize their names. I've seen or heard them mentioned in The Sopranos and Sports Illustrated, in novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Phillip Roth, in random conversations. The largest pencil-producing factory in Russia was named after them, and generations of Russian children associated the names Sacco and Vanzetti with the pencils and crayons they used. There was a film in Italy, a tango in Argentina, a song by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone, a punk band in Germany, a brand of cigarettes in Uruguay. There are streets named after them in Italy and France. They often come up when people give examples of past injustices, or more facetiously, when people want to denote famous duos, as in Abbott and Costello, Jagger and Richards, Siegfried and Roy, Sacco and Vanzetti.

I think all this reflects an uncertainty in how they are remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti do not have a clear place in our civic life or historical record. Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that we still don't know-and never will know-whether they"did it."

But in many ways, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair is still with us. Certainly the issues that animated it are very much alive. Americans today still do battle over the issue of immigration, and intolerance toward foreigners is still widespread, sometimes virulent, especially when times are hard. Europeans, Latin Americans, and other non-Americans are still concerned over, and in some cases outright hostile to, America's presence in the world, and the way Americans handle international politics. And then as now, Americans are still divided over what was called, in Sacco and Vanzetti's day,"foreign interference" in American affairs.

Whether it is the death penalty, or the health care system, or how to deal with terrorism suspects, or even who should be elected U.S. president, non-Americans have and will continue to have opinions, because the United States is so powerful and what it does domestically reverberates externally. Many Americans bristle at this but many others welcome this. It depends on whether they see the United States as an entity separated in principle from the rest of the world, or as a genuine part of the world-a world in which Americans have a stake in the lives of non-Americans, and vice versa.

This issue divided Americans when Sacco and Vanzetti were what one magazine called"the two most famous prisoners in the world," and it still divides Americans today. This, I believe, is the context in which the Sacco-Vanzetti affair took place. My book is not an attempt to end the discussion about Sacco and Vanzetti, or to provide a definitive account. My aim was to start a new conversation, one that would not be about guilt or innocence but rather about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair-its significance and place in history." -- -- Moshik Temkin in an interview with"Rorotoko" about his book"The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial"

About Moshik Temkin