Congratulations to Ken Wheeler and the students of his IDS 317: Town and Gown course in the fall of 2017, whose research on the racial integration of Reinhardt College in the late 1960s has been published in the most recent number of the Georgia Historical Quarterly, and which provided the cover illustration to boot:
On February 14, Associate Professor of History Anne Good and alumna Madeline Gray ’18 presented their research on “Mrs. Knight’s Receipt Book, 1740,” at the February Community Gathering. The Center for Engaged Teaching and Learning funded a trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library in November, where they examined Mrs. Knight’s book in person. It contained more than recipes for food – humorism was alive and well in the eighteenth century, and many home remedies based on this theory were also included. Attendees, however, were treated to gingerbread treats made according to the book.
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.
I’m pleased to announce that this year we have not one, but two work-study students. They are:
Josh Carver, a sophomore history major from Woodstock, Ga.
Brianna Arnold, a sophomore political science major from north Atlanta.
Reinhardt’s 131st commencement ceremony today included two history majors. Congratulations!
Chase Palmer. Photo: Anne Good.
Rickey Dover. Photo: JG
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.
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.
Four history majors walked across the stage yesterday, set up for the first time on Ken White football field. Congratulations, Cole, Ray, Hayden and Kyle!
Cole Gregory, cum laude, Phi Alpha Theta, History Program student of the year.
Ray Hodges.
Hayden Mills, magna cum laude, Phi Alpha Theta.
Kyle Walker, magna cum laude, Phi Alpha Theta, history program student of the year.
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.
Kyle Walker ’17 at the Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference, Mercer University, April 1, 2017.
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.
Alex Bryant ’15 and Kyle Walker ’17 flank a Mercer bear.
Congratulations to Reinhardt’s 2016 history major graduates:
Wyatt Dean, Phi Alpha Theta, History Program student of the year.
Chris Lester.
Max Smith, Phi Alpha Theta.