Phi Alpha Theta Induction 2021

Congratulations to the newest members of Reinhardt’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the honor society for students of history: Annabelle Forrester, Addyson Huneke, Jessica Landers, Marissa Liguori, and Gianna Sanders. This year’s ceremony took place this afternoon in the Community Room of Hill Freeman Library.

Left to right: Gianna Sanders, Jessica Landers, Marissa Liguori, Annabelle Forrester, Valerie Coleman, Jonathan Good, Addyson Huneke. Photo: Ken Wheeler.

Our guest speaker was Valerie Coleman, curator of the Noble Hill Wheeler Memorial Center in Cassville, Georgia, who spoke of the center’s history and legacy. As noted earlier on this blog, the center is in the building of the former Noble Hill School, which was constructed in 1923 with a matching grant from the Rosenwald fund, which had been established by Julius Rosenwald, president of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. It closed in 1955 with the construction of Bartow Elementary School, an amalgamated Black school for Bartow County, and fell into a dilapidated state. Through the initiative of Susie Weems Wheeler, it was resurrected and restored as a museum and cultural center in 1987. The Center has recently acquired the former St. James AME church building in Cassville and hopes to restore that as well. 

Our thanks to Ms. Coleman and our congratulations to all new members of Phi Alpha Theta!

Phi Alpha Theta 2020

Allen Fromherz, Josh Belden, Orbelin Pineda-Espino, Fredrick Harp, Tyler Leon, Tripp Wickard, Jamie Rhinehart, and Jonathan Good. Photo: Anne Good.

Congratulations to our newest members of Phi Alpha Theta at Reinhardt, who were inducted this afternoon in a ceremony in the Community Room of Hill Freeman Library. These are:

Josh Belden
Fredrick Harp
Tyler Leon
Orbelin Pineda-Espino
Jamie Rhinehart
Tripp Wickard

Our guest speaker was the entertaining Allen Fromherz of Georgia State University, who spoke on the social aspects of history and how studying history changes the historian himself.

Georgia Regional PAT Conference 2019

On Friday, March 30, Reinhardt students Jessie Fanczi and Grant Ashton traveled to the University of West Georgia in Carrollton to participate in this year’s Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference. There were four concurrent sessions of three panels each over the course of the day, and the overall quality of the papers was very good. Jessie presented a paper on Stanley Porter, one of the pioneers of racial integration at Reinhardt College in the late-1960s, while Grant gave a paper on the Gaelic Revival of late nineteenth century Ireland.

Grant Ashton and Jessie Fanczi, UWG, March 30, 2019.

There was no keynote speaker for this conference, but a poster session, a novelty for me. I especially liked one by Lesley Jones of the University of North Georgia on women and the occult in the nineteenth century, complete with Edward Gorey-style original illustrations:

Other interesting papers I heard addressed the Astor Place Riot, the German Student Movement of 1968, NBA star Allen Iverson as a hip-hop icon, US Senator and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Presidents James Madison and John Adams, and Baptist minister John Leland. A session that I chaired featured papers on Catherine the Great, the policy of “salutary neglect” toward the American Colonies in the eighteenth century, and the Spanish Civil War as represented in the Daily Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

I repeat that the quality of these papers was very high. The swag was good, too! It was kind of the nursing school to lend us their beautiful new building for this conference. Thanks to Colleen Vasconcellos and Stephanie Challifoux of UWG’s History Department for organizing such a great event.

Phi Alpha Theta, 2019

L-R: Levi Cochran, Guest Speaker Dr. Richard Utz, Zoe Roberts, Madelyn Montgomery, Abigail Merchant, Dr. Jonathan Good, Aliyah Reeves, Josh Carver, Luke Hayes, Grant Ashton, McKayla Parmele, Jessie Fanczi, Madison Little. Photo: Jordan Beach.

Very pleased to have been able to induct no fewer than thirteen new members of Reinhardt’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the honor society for students of history:

Grant Ashton
Josh Carver
Levi Cochran
Jessie Fanczi
Luke Hayes
Madison Little
Abigail Merchant
Carlos Molina

Madelyn Montgomery
Augie Oberkrom
McKayla Parmele
Aliyah Reeves
Zoe Roberts

The ceremony took place on Thursday, February 21, 2019 in the Glass House. Our guest speaker was Richard Utz of Georgia Tech, whose talk was entitled “What About Those Middle Ages?” The Middle Ages are always popular in certain circles, and people refer to them for reasons that we can call good (Anglo-American law and government, the university, or ideas of chivalry and romantic love) but also for reasons we find bad (nationalism and crusading). It is up to historians to “choose the right,” in this case – especially through public outreach, like editing Wikipedia, which is far more influential than any professional scholarly publication.

Congratulations to all our new members! And heartfelt thanks to President Mallard and Provost Roberts for their support.

Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference, 2018

The 2018 Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference took place on Saturday, April 7 at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Carla Gerona and Daniel Amsterdam were the main organizers. Thirty students representing ten Georgia universities presented papers over the course of the day. I was impressed by the overall quality of these presentations.

Reinhardt was represented by the talented Madeline Gray, shown here seated between Jake Schenberg (UGA) and Carolyn Wood (Georgia State), participants in a session on local Georgia history. Mr. Schenberg spoke about the people displaced by the construction of the Buford Dam, which created Lake Lanier, while Ms. Wood addressed the integration of the Atlanta Police Department, which was made difficult by all the Klansmen who were members of it. (Something I did not know about: the Columbians, “the nation’s first neo-Nazi political organization,” formed in the summer of 1946.)

Ms. Gray presented her paper on the racial integration of Reinhardt College in the 1960s. Written as part of Ken Wheeler’s Town and Gown IDS course last fall, it featured interviews with some of the still-living participants, and primary source research in the Reinhardt newspaper, yearbooks, and trustees’ minutes. President James Burgess deserves much of the credit for ensuring that this process ran as smoothly as possible.

I’m pleased to say that Ms. Gray’s paper won an honorable mention award at the closing ceremonies! Well done! (The photo shows her between Profs. Amsterdam and Gerona.)

The keynote was a very interesting presentation by Douglas Flamming, professor of history at Georgia Tech. Entitled “Red, ‘Pink Gold,’ and Blue: Southern Shrimpers and Soviet Shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico, 1945-1975,” it took as its starting point an incident that occurred in March of 1963, some five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The shrimper Ala, out of Fort Myers, Florida, had been fishing for several day on the Tortugas Banks off Key West when it lost power and started drifting eastwards through the Straits of Florida – a little too close to Cuba for Cuban comfort, apparently, which sent three Soviet MiG fighter jets to intercept it, one of which actually fired on it. (The Ala’s difficulties may have been deliberate, as the Americans had just installed a radar station on Key West whose signal was impossible to fly under, and they may have wanted to test it – the MiGs were chased off in under five minutes.) This incident served to open up an investigation into the application of technology developed during World War II (e.g. diesel engines and sonar) to shrimping, which entered a golden age in the mid-twentieth century (this is the era when breaded shrimp appeared in TV dinners, and the shrimp cocktail was an emblem of sophistication). The Soviets, for their part, in a search for more protein to feed their people, sent out massive fishing expeditions, organized like a naval battle fleet and complete with processing factories on the flagship. (As you can imagine, fishing in international waters produced a classic “tragedy of the commons” situation, and Gulf shrimping is largely moribund these days – the shrimp that most Americans consume today is farmed in southeast Asia.)

I had been to Georgia Tech before, but hadn’t really had the opportunity to see the campus. The parking lot was quite a ways from the Hall Building, so I was interested to discover such details as the Tech Walkway, the Tech Green…

the Kessler Campanile (reproduced on the logo above)…

and this engineering-themed sculpture in Tech colors.

Phi Alpha Theta, 2018

Reinhardt’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society, inducted three new members yesterday: Paige Oglesby, Hannah Hale, and Madeleine Gray. Congratulations!

Paige Oglesby, Hannah Hale, Madeleine Gray, Jonathan Good, Sasha Volokh. Photo: Jeff Reed.

Sasha Volokh of Emory Law School was our guest speaker, and he gave a very interesting talk about the importance of historical research as it relates to the practice of law, particularly what words were understood to mean at the time that the laws were composed. One audience member remarked that it was the most edifying speech by a lawyer that he’s ever heard – and even more pleased that it didn’t cost him anything.

Georgia Regional PAT Conference 2017

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On Saturday, April 1, Reinhardt student Kyle Walker, alumnus Alex Bryant, and Prof. Jonathan Good traveled to Macon to participate in this year’s Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference. Many thanks to Abby Dowling and John Thomas Scott for their hard work in putting together a good one. Mercer last hosted this conference in 2011, and it was a pleasure to return, as the Mercer campus is gorgeous, especially in the spring. The papers I heard were all very good – especially Kyle’s, who spoke of how the domino theory of Communist expansion in southeast Asia was applicable to Indochina only, largely on account of all parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos all having been part of the French empire. Communism did not spread beyond these places because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, etc. had different histories (i.e., communism and nationalism did not converge there, as it did in Indochina). Plus, the US commitment to containing communism entailed a great deal of support for the non-communist governments of these countries, which helped to protect them from that particular ideology. This was the silver lining of the Viet Nam war – it didn’t prevent the North from taking over the South, and from backing the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge as they took power, but it did prevent the spread of communism beyond Indochina.

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Kyle Walker ’17 at the Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference, Mercer University, April 1, 2017.

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Participants in the “Eastern Front” session: chair Joshua van Lieu (LaGrange College), MiKaylee Smith (LaGrange), Daniel Garrett (LaGrange), Kyle Walker (Reinhardt).

The plenary session at lunch featured a very interesting presentation by Maurice Hobson of Georgia State University, professor of history and African-American studies, whose book The Legend of the Black Mecca: Myth, Maxim and the Making of an Olympic City is about to be released by UNC Press. Dr. Hobson’s talk, entitled “Using Hip Hop as History: From the Black New South to the Dirty South,” referenced W.E.B. Dubois, Atlanta’s first black mayor Maynard Jackson, the 1996 Summer Olympics, artists like OutKast and Goodie Mob, the Atlanta Child Murders, and Hobson’s own personal history, to demonstrate how not all African-Americans were uplifted by Jackson’s post-segregation New South.

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Alex Bryant ’15 and Kyle Walker ’17 flank a Mercer bear.

Phi Alpha Theta Induction 2017

It is with pleasure that the Reinhardt history program announces the induction of four new members to our chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the honor society for students of history.

PAT

Dr. Jonathan Good, Ivonne Ramirez-Perez, Luke Madden, Hayden Mills, guest speaker Dr. Mary Rolinson. Not pictured: Chap Lindstrom. Photo: Jeff Reed.

The ceremony took place in the Glass House on Thursday, March 23. Mary Rolinson of Georgia State was our guest speaker, and spoke of her current research into the career of Mabel Murphy Smythe, an African-American academic who was an expert on Africa, a teacher in Japan and a pioneer of multicultural education, and an ambassador to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea in the 1970s.

Phi Alpha Theta Georgia Regional Conference

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Spelman College in Atlanta yesterday hosted the Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta conference (the same one hosted by Reinhardt last year). Thanks to Charissa Threat for organizing such a good one. 

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In addition to several excellent student papers (there were thirty-five all told, from students at nine different schools), attendees also enjoyed a tour of Spelman’s Museum of Fine Art by Mora Beachamp-Byrd, visiting scholar of art and art history at Spelman.

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Mora Beauchamp-Byrd and Charissa Threat outside Spelman’s Museum of Fine Art.

The current exhibit, Black Chronicles II, explores the black presence in late nineteenth century Victorian Britain through studio portraiture, including some thirty portraits of The African Choir, which toured Britain between 1891 and 1893, and a selection of popular cartes-de-visite. (One of these made me smile: a Zulu warrior from “Farini’s Friendly Zulus.” “The Great Farini,” né William Leonard Hunt, hails from my hometown of Port Hope, Ontario. He first gained fame as a tightrope walker and later became an African explorer and entertainment promoter. Shane Peacock’s book about him has more detail.)

The keynote address, entitled “Women and Violence in the Grassroots Anti-Abortion Movement in the United States,” was delivered by Karissa Haugeberg of Tulane University. Based on her forthcoming book, it was a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of 1980s-era pro-life activism and the women who participated in it. (We’ve been conditioned to think of abortion opponents as men trying to keep women down, but according to Haugeberg women have always made up a majority of the movement, often for feminist reasons – widespread abortion, they believe, frees men from their responsibilities to the women they impregnate. This fundamental divide over the significance of the sexual revolution – is it empowering, or degrading? – is still not resolved, as one can see in the debate over hook-up culture on campus today.)

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Karissa Haugeberg.

Reinhardt was represented by recent graduate Alex Bryant, whose paper “The New American Revolution: A Brief History of the Internet” sparked quite a bit of discussion afterwards.

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Alexander Bryant.

This is the seventh PAT annual conference I’ve been to. It is always fun, and this one was one of the best.

Phi Alpha Theta 2016

The History Program is pleased to announce that nine new members of the Reinhardt chapter of Phi Alpha Theta were inducted yesterday in the Glass House. They are in the photograph below, wearing their new honor cords, blood red and sky blue, the colors of PAT.

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Left to right: Cole Gregory, Joseph Wheeler, Max Smith, Kyle Walker, Melissa Martinez, Grant Patrick, Katie Hale, Brent Blackwell, Faculty Advisor Jonathan Good. Photo: Jeff Reed. Not pictured: Chase Palmer.

A highlight of the ceremony was guest speaker David Parker of Kennesaw State University, who spoke about “Rearing Rebels: Confederate Textbooks and Confederate Nationalism.”

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Prof. David Parker. Photo: Jeff Reed.

Prof. Parker has researched school textbooks published and used in the Confederate States of America, and furnished us with some amusing examples of math problems (such as “if one Confederate soldier can kill seven Yankees, how many Yankees can nine Confederate soldiers kill?”) along with other embarrassing moral lessons about the benefits of slavery. But he warned us about arrogance: what things do we believe that might look ridiculous to our posterity?