February 25th, 2009
Benedict Carton was selected in December 2008 as a national finalist by the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) for the Inspire Integrity Award. The NSCS Inspire Integrity Awards are the only national student-nominated faculty awards program. These awards are presented to full-time faculty who have, through their teaching and actions, made an impact on the lives of their students and instilled a high degree of personal and academic integrity. Carton was chosen as a national finalist out of the southern region of the United States, which includes colleges and universities in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. This month he received a monetary prize for representing the southern region.
February 2nd, 2009
On March 24-25, 2009, George Mason University will host the conference “1989: Looking Back, Looking Forward” featuring Mikhail Gorbachev as the keynote speaker. Gorbachev will also participate in a round table discussion with Lee Hamilton, President of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and former FBI Director William Webster. The conference was the brainchild of Professors Michael Chang and Mills Kelly in the Department of History and Art History, and includes a number of visiting scholars as well as Mason professors leading discussions with students and the community on the legacies of the end of the Cold War and what we might expect in the future.
February 2nd, 2009
Dr. Roger Mellen, assistant professor of journalism at New Mexico State University who received his PhD in History from GMU in August 2007, was awarded an honorable mention by the American Journalism Historians Association for his dissertation “A Culture of Dissidence: The Emergence of Liberty of the Press in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia” in the Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize for 2008. The AJHA’s Blanchard Prize is awarded annually for the best doctoral dissertations dealing with mass communication history.
February 2nd, 2009
Dr. Mike O’Malley’s book, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History (co-edited with James Cook and Lawrence Glickman), has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. A definitive account of one of the most dominant trends in recent historical writing, the volume takes stock of the field at the same time as it showcases exemplars of its practice. The first of this volume’s three distinct sections offers a comprehensive genealogy of American cultural history, tracing its multifaceted origins, defining debates, and intersections with adjacent fields. The second section comprises previously unpublished essays by a distinguished roster of contributors who illuminate the discipline’s rich potential by plumbing topics that range from nineteenth-century anxieties about greenback dollars to confidence games in 1920s Harlem, from Shirley Temple s career to the story of a Chicano community in San Diego that created a public park under a local freeway. Featuring an equally wide-ranging selection of pieces that meditate on the future of the field, the final section explores such subjects as the different strains of cultural history, its relationships with arenas from mass entertainment to public policy, and the ways it has been shaped by catastrophe. Taken together, these essays represent a watershed moment in the life of a discipline, harnessing its vitality to offer a glimpse of the shape it will take in years to come.
January 29th, 2009
ABC News Presidential Historian and George Mason University professor Richard Norton Smith has been busy speaking and writing about historical context for the presidential election and the inauguration. Along with his schedule of television commentary, he has written a number of articles offering historical insight into the current political scene. Here are two recent examples from Time magazine:
The Ghosts of ‘33 and The Official End of the Reagan Era