A newsletter for majors and minors in History at Eastern Michigan University
July 2007
We hope that summer is going well for all of you. While we are enjoying the slower pace of summer semester on campus, we are also looking forward to the upcoming academic year, and we hope that you are as well. If you haven’t registered yet and need some advice as you choose your courses for the fall, please call the Department at 487-1018 to make an appointment with a History undergraduate advisor.
Victorio, Apache Warrior and Chief by Professor Kathleen Chamberlain is a biography of the last leader of the Warm Springs Apaches of New Mexico. The rapid influx of white ranchers, farmers, and miners into the Southwest after the Civil War threatened Victorio's land and way of life. Americans demanded that Apaches be exterminated, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora paid bounties for Apache scalps. In response, the U.S. government adopted a weak reservation policy that crammed Victorio's people onto a too-small piece of rattlesnake-infested land in Arizona that the army dubbed "Hell's Forty Acres." He and his people bolted and were pursued by U.S. and Mexican forces, miltias, and Texas Rangers for an entire year before facing slaughter in October 1880. This biography places Victorio at the center of his story and focuses primarily on Apache culture and Apache responses to U.S. policy.
Although there is little documentation of Victorio’s life outside military records, Chamberlain draws on ethnographic sources to surmise his childhood and adolescence and to depict traditional Warm Springs Apache social, religious, and economic life. Reconstructing Victorio’s life beyond the military conflicts that have since come to define him, she interprets his character and actions not only as whites viewed them but also as the logical outcome of his upbringing and worldview.
Victorio will be published this October by the University of Oklahoma Press. Professor Chamberlain is also the author of Under Sacred Ground: A History of Navajo Oil, 1922–1982.
For Hitler and the German military, 1942 was a key turning point of World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant victories and huge territorial gains with stalemates and strategic retreats. In Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942, Professor Robert Citino shows that the German army’s emerging woes were rooted as much in its addiction to the “war of movement”—attempts to smash the enemy in “short and lively” campaigns—as they were in Hitler’s deeply flawed management of the war.
From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler’s expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a military geared to quick and decisive victories coped when the tide turned against it.
Death of the Wehrmacht will be published in October by the University Press of Kansas. Dr. Citino's previously published books include The German Way of War: from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich and Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare.
Women at Work in Preindustrial France by Professor Emerita Daryl Hafter draws upon substantial archival research in Rouen, Lyon, and Paris to show that while the vast majority of working women in eighteenth-century France labored at unskilled, low-paying jobs, it was not at all unusual for women to be actively engaged in economic activities as workers, managers, and merchants. Some even developed vertically integrated wholesale and retail businesses, while others became indispensable to manufacturers through their technical skill. In fact, Hafter documents how certain women guild masters were able to exploit the legal system to achieve considerable economic independence, power, wealth, and legal parity with male masters. She also shows how gender politics complicated the day-to-day experience of these working women.
"This is the first full-length study of women in all-female and mixed guilds in Old Regime France. ... Hafter contributes a great deal to our understanding of gender and the gendering of work, of the function of women’s work in patriarchal society, of the agency women held in early modern France to control their work, of the ways this control brought women into the public sphere of the old regime, and of the ways ideas about gender and work changed over the eighteenth century and into the revolution.” —Clare H. Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Women at Work was published in May by Pennsylvania State University Press. Dr. Hafter is also the editor of European Women and Preindustrial Craft.
This fall we will welcome to the History faculty our new historian of the Middle East, John Knight. A graduate of the Universities of London and Oxford, John is currently completing his PhD at Oxford, where he is writing a dissertation on Palestine during the British period (1917-1948). In the fall term, John will be teaching a section of HIST 110: World History from 1500 (10:00-10:50, MWF) and a section of HIST 341: History of the Middle East, 1798-Present (1:00-1:50, MWF). In the winter, he will be teaching HIST 339: The Arab-Israeli Conflict. John has a website and a blog and is keen to develop online resources on the Middle East.
John is English and is married to Tatiana who is from Berkeley, California. They have lived in Thailand, Jordan and Turkey and have traveled extensively in the Middle East and Asia. John reports that he is very excited about moving to EMU and working with the students at EMU to explore the history of the Middle East .
A great complement to a major in an academic discipline like history is an interdisciplinary minor that approaches some topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The Area Studies minors allow students to explore a geographical and cultural region through coursework in several different disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, geography, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and sociology, as well as language study. The History Section offers Area Studies concentrations in five regions: Asia-Far East, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Russia and Eastern Europe. The minors in Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies enable students to develop a critical and cross-cultural perspective on an important aspect of human experience. Religious Studies considers religious ideas and institutions and their place in human history and culture, while Women's and Gender Studies seeks a better understanding of women's lives and of gender as a basic category for interpreting human experience. Students in both programs create a program of study by taking courses in several humanities and social science disciplines, including anthropology, art history, classics, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Interested students should discuss minoring in Area Studies or Religious Studies with a History undergraduate advisor; students interested in Women's and Gender Studies should contact the Women's and Gender Studies program office.
The History Section is offering four special topics courses this fall (HIST 379 and 479). Special topics courses present an opportunity to study a topic of particular interest to the instructor and students. Marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first successful English settlement in the New World, Professor McCurdy will uncover the beginnings of America in the class Jamestown, 1607-2007. Professor Citino will trace the development of warfare in the 20th century in Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm. In Early Judaism, Professor Schmitz and his students will examine the history and literature of Judaism during the formative period of 550 BCE to about 200 CE. Finally, Professor Moss will explore the intellectual and political Background to the Russian Revolution from Decembrist revolt of 1825 to the 1917 revolution. If you are interested in one of these classes but cannot take it this term, contact the instructor to find out if and when it will be offered again.
This year the History Section introduces two new classes on the history of Asian religions: HIST 306: Hinduism and HIST 307: Buddhism. Professor Egge plans to offer Hinduism every fall semester and Buddhism every winter. These classes replace 301: Religions of South and East Asia, which will not be offered on campus on a regular basis. The History Section made this change to allow for study of these two major religious traditions in greater depth. Students interested in Confucianism, Daoism, and other Chinese traditions should consider taking PHIL 291 Introduction to Asian Philosophy and PHIL 391 The Philosophy of Early China, both offered by Professor Bruya in the Philosophy Section.
The Department of History and Philosophy is currently hiring student workers. At this time, we can only hire students eligible for Work Study. Interested students should contact Claudia Cullin at 487-1018.
There's still time to register for fall semester, but classes are beginning to fill. Click to see the catalog description of each course.
HIST 100 - The Comparative Study of Religion