The Augustana History Update

Hello history folks!

J-term has just wrapped up on campus. It was cold, snowy, and, at least in the classrooms, rather exciting. Students in Dr. Calder’s J-term “Reel History” course have been analyzing war films, while those in Dr. Ellis’s French Revolution course have been re-enacting the French Revolution through a Reacting to the Past game. (For those who don’t know, Reacting to the Past is an active pedagogy of role-playing games, where students are assigned different roles in a situation from the past–a technique originally developed at Barnard College but now spread across the U.S.)

The winter also brought back many of my favorite winter traditions, including campus snow sculptures, holiday concerts, ridiculous sweaters, and delicious treats. Drawing on those cozy traditions, a new book, Feasts and Festivals: The Story of Winter Traditions at Augustana College was just released a couple of months ago. The book is a joint publication by East Hall Press, a teaching press at the college, and the Augustana Historical Society. The book’s design was crafted by students in a Book Design course, taught by the English Department’s Brett Biebel, while most of the contributions were written by students (now alumni) in an oral history course I taught just before the pandemic. (Some of you will also be excited to know that the book also features winter poetry by legendary English professor Dorothy Parkander.) Feasts and Festivals covers the college's cultural traditions, some of which are rooted in its Swedish American past, like Sankta Lucia and the Christmas Smörgåsbord, and others of which came to campus as the student body grew more diverse, like Kwanzaa, Día De La Virgen, and the Lunar New Year.

This past fall, History Department faculty Jane Simonsen and Liza Lawrence contributed courses to the Augustana College Prison Education Program (APEP). The grant-funded program operates inside the East Moline Correctional Center, which is now an accredited second campus of Augustana College. Dr. Lawrence taught her popular January-Term course Parade of Nations: History of the Modern Olympic Games. Aided by student research assistant (and history major) Neleigh Rush, students conducted independent research–all without the Internet or direct access to library resources. Topics included the Tlatelolco Massacre preceding the 1968 Mexico City Games, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and its connection to women’s professional sports in the US, and boxer Oscar De La Hoya and Latino representation in the Olympic Games. Dr. Simonsen taught the first iteration of Introduction to American Studies, the gateway course to a new major designed with APEP students in mind. The course focused on methods of cultural analysis, including physical spaces, visual texts, performances, and literature. Dr. Calder has previously taught HIST131: Problems in U.S. History, 1877-present at EMCC.

Back on the main Rock Island campus, our history department’s seniors finished their impressive Senior Inquiry projects and then presented their capstone work in December. Students took a variety of approaches–focusing in particular on social life, business, and politics. Topics ranged from a history of sports scapegoating (by Oliver Michalak) and a history of the Chicago Bears’ brand (by Alec Ogarek) to the Quad Cities’ Chapter of the National Organization of Women (Elena Haffner), attempts at welfare reform by Presidents Nixon and Clinton (Utah Keehner), the amazing success of Nintendo (Samuel Rabideau), and what happened to troops from Great Britain’s Light Brigade after they returned from the Crimean War (Jon Hutton). 

Faculty continue to engage in their own scholarly activities too. In conference news, Dr. David Ellis will be chairing a panel at the upcoming Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Conference this February. Our department has been a longtime member of this important consortium. In early January, Dr. Lendol Calder attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco to give a talk titled "Teaching History in the Age of Trump." Dr. Calder recalled early mistakes he made after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, including mocking Trump in class. When students complained, Dr. Calder modified his introductory American history course, "Rethinking American History Since Reconstruction," to feature two debates, one examining whether the 1619 Project or the 1776 Project should be taught in the nation's schools, and the other addressing the question of whether the American experiment is a failure. Calder calls his new approach to teaching history in polarized times "teaching sideways." Why "sidewise"? Because instead of addressing contemporary political issues directly, he now approaches our fraught political moment indirectly, from the side, asking students to think about assumptions and values that underlie their political commitments. Some of these subterranean assumptions are directly relevant to an introductory history course, such as, what is the nature of historical knowledge? And, what is the story of American history?

Other history faculty recently published new scholarship. After presenting at the Oral History Association’s conference this fall, Dr. Elizabeth Lawrence’s "The Modular Fiction of Ken Liu" came out in the Open Access journal Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies (Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction). Dr. Jane Simonsen recently published an essay, "Looking for Margaret Davenport," in American Studies.  Some of her research comes from Augustana’s Special Collections! I also had a couple of articles come out, including "Canary in a Coal Mine: From Mine Safety Technique to Animal Metaphor" in Comparative American Studies and "Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup" in Middle West Review. The latter project began as part of the Sustainable Working Landscapes Initiative, run through Augustana’s Upper Mississippi Center, during which my oral history students conducted interviews with former corn refinery workers in Clinton, Iowa. Those interviews and student’s short documentaries are still available via the Clinton Public Library. 

I’d also like to thank two history department alumni–Jordyn Strange (‘21), now at the Putnam Museum, and Atticus Garrison (‘17), now at Black Hawk Community College, for joining with Professor Emeritus of Geography (himself an Augie alum) Norm Moline, on a panel to evaluate my public history students’ pitches this past fall.

Finally, a quick historical note. Norm Moline recently received a gift from a history alum that he then re-gifted to the department for our own archives: materials from the history department’s 1946 “Illinois History Tour.” This rather fabulous-looking, wide-ranging trip around Illinois was hosted by the chair of the department, Dr. O. Fritiof Ander, and the Quad Cities’ preeminent local historian, John Henry Hauberg. Here you can see Ander’s letter to participants, noting all of the overnight stops they would make along the way. He also mentions the possibility of “dramatising a historical event”--which whets my appetite to learn more about the tour. Indeed, I have in the past run across more materials about this trip in Augustana’s Special Collections. I’ll clearly need to set aside time this month to investigate further. 

Perhaps we’ll need to plan our own Illinois history tour in the near future? That’s all for now. Stay tuned for a new Augustana History Update when the weather warms up this Spring. Let me know if you have updates, including ones I could (or should) share on your behalf!

All the best,

Brian Leech
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History