Digital Commons Network^™

Margaret Of Anjou: Passionate Mother, Carole Levin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Margaret of Anjou, who married Henry VI of England in 1445 when she was fifteen years old, was the mother of one son. This child became the most important factor in Margaret’s life. Born in 1430, Margaret’s parents were René, Duke of Anjou, and Isabelle, daughter and heir of Charles II, Duke of Lorraine. She was the niece of Charles VII of France’s wife, Marie of Anjou. Her father’s unsuccessful efforts to expand his holdings meant he was away for much of Margaret’s childhood. As a result, she spent much time with her mother Isabelle and her grandmother, the formidable …

Pioneers, Parricides, And The Spectre Of Violence In Settler-Colonial Homes And Histories, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.¹ Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in …

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pretrial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 …

Ambivalence To Things Armenian In Middle Eastern Studies And The War On Artsakh In 2020, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

For decades Armenian studies has been marginalized in Middle Eastern, Turkish, Iranian, and Ottoman studies for political and ideological reasons.1 Ignorance and reluctance to understand the field also have contributed to this marginalization. Some scholars viewed the field as an archaic one, remote from the above-mentioned fields. Whereas some only thought of Armenian studies as part of Caucasian studies, others did not want to be associated with Armenian studies due to its research focus on the Armenian Genocide, concerned that any such association might endanger their access to the Ottoman archives or be tainted as advocating an “Armenian point of …

The Oldest Post-Truth? The Rise Of Antisemitism In The United States And Beyond, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Antisemitism, the negative stereotyping and hatred of Jews, has overshadowed Western history for 2000 years. In the 20th century, antisemitism led to the Shoah, the systematic state-sponsored murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies. In recent decades, antisemitism diminished significantly in the Western world, and there was hope that this plague would soon be consigned to the past. On the contrary, the past few years have witnessed a drastic increase of antisemitism in Western societies, often paired with far-right activism, racism, and xenophobia. In 2017 in Charlottesville, there were hundreds of marchers giving Nazi salutes, waving …

Impunity, Lack Of Humanitarian Intervention, And International Apathy: The Blockade Of The Lachin Corridor In Historical Perspective, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

This article will analyze the existential threat facing by the Armenians of the beleaguered Republic of Artsakh in the context of three phases of mass violence inflicted on Armenians in the modern period: the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1896, the Adana Massacres of 1909, and the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923). Despite the teleological differences of these phases, there seems to be three key common denominators connecting all of them together: impunity, lack of humanitarian intervention, and international apathy. After dwelling on the history of impunity, the absence of humanitarian intervention, and international apathy, this article will concentrate on the disastrous repercussions of …

Introduction To Antisemitism On The Rise: The 1930s And Today, Ari Kohen, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

We live in uncertain and unsettling times. Tragically, today's global culture is rife with violent bigotry, nationalism, and antisemitism. The rhetoric is not new; it is grounded in attitudes and values from the 1930s and the 1940s in Europe and the United States. Antisemitism on the Rise is a collection of essays by some of the world's leading experts, including Joseph Bendersky, Jean Cahan, R. Amy Elman, Leonard Greenspoon, and Jurgen Matthaus, regarding two key moments in antisemitic history: the interwar period and today. Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher have collected important examples on this crucial topic to illustrate …

On The Difficulty Of Reckoning With Settler Colonialisms: Transnational And Comparative Perspectives, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Review essay on:

Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings By Penelope Edmonds. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization By Eva Mackey. Halifax; Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016.

The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage Edited by Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark and Ravi de Costa. New York: Springer, 2016.

In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the …

Book Review: Down With Traitors: Justice And Nationalism In Wartime China, By Yun Xia., Parks M. Coble

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Few Chinese phrases carry the emotional weight of the term hanjian (汉奸), mean- ing Chinese who were traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In this important new study, Yun Xia examines the concept primarily in regard to Japanese aggression during the War of Resistance and its aftermath following Japan’s surrender. The book goes far beyond the usual focus on well-known collaborators such as Wang Jingwei and Wang Kemin or the war crimes trials—though these are covered. Yun Xia’s expansive study examines popular attitudes toward collaborators, the political and economic aspects of holding individuals accountable, and the uses of …

From Student To Citizen: The Impact Of Personal Narratives In University-Level Genocide Education, Ari Kohen, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

What follows, then, are some of the lessons gleaned from the first ever long-term, multi-phase, interpretative case study conducted in higher education; a complete exploration and analysis of the data collected in the project is beyond the scope of this short essay. Using more than one thousand surveys, in-person interviews, and other evaluative materials gathered over the course of five years, our research team sought answers to the questions posed above and looked specifically at the ways in which certain types of instructional materials make impressions on students.

What is argued here is that narrative sources such as autobiographies, diaries, …

Review Of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences In A Revolutionary Age, Edited By Kate Fullagar And Michael A. Mcdonnell, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Few scholars have tried to write a history that gives authorship and agency to Indigenous peoples within and across imperial borders. Expanding and drawing on recent scholarship, Facing Empire bridges multiple histories of British imperialism in Australia, North America, West Africa, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, the Persian Gulf, and the Cape of Good Hope, to unravel the intricacies of Indigenous peoples’ contacts, interactions, and negotiations with neighbors and newcomers throughout the Age of Revolution, 1760–1840. At the book’s core, editors Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell recenter Indigenous agency as a vital analytic framework for understanding how and why …

Book Review: The Conceptual Foundations Of Transitional Justice, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Review of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice. By Colleen Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Over the past few decades, communities around the world have embarked on transitions from conflict, repression and historical injustice to the rule of law and respect for human rights. Societies have established legal institutions, such as truth-telling commissions and criminal trials to confront past abuses and attempt to transition into a new era of human dignity. Theorists have coined the term “transitional justice” to describe processes involved in confronting legacies of historical wrongdoings. Pressing questions raised in such contexts include: what does it mean …

Review Of Dust Bowls Of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, And The Injustice Of “Green” Capitalism, By Hannah Holleman, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Drawing on a rich multidisciplinary scholarship and extensive original literature, Dust Bowls of Empire resituates the local horror and human tragedy of the 1930s Dust Bowl into a global historical development of the modern world system. At its center are privatization, commodification, and erosion of land, soil, and nature. Holleman takes direct aim at the root causes of an imperial ideology— capitalism— which legislates, institutionalizes, and practices ecological injustices. She explains that the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains embodies an imperial instance of a global crisis of soil erosion that began in the 1870s and lasted through the first …

Review Of Raymond I. Orr. Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, And Intratribal Conflict, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Social research on American Indian internal politics has oft en been labeled sensitive and uncomfortable, and it tends to deter scholarly work. To Raymond I. Orr, from the University of Oklahoma, intratribal politics forms the core of decision- making processes inside and outside American Indian communities or Indian Country and should not be concealed from open debate. In Reservation Politics, he calls on social scientists and scholars to appraise the origins of intratribal politics and what informs their contemporary and future decisions. He explains that these decisions or motivational behaviors are not random; instead, they are informed by key variables, …

Baby Steps (On Chantal Kalisa), Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Maybe our problems seem insurmountable. Perhaps we have aspirations that cannot be achieved in a morning, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Maybe there are some mysteries we can never fully comprehend. Still, we stand up, we let go of the safe and familiar-if only for an instant-and we toddle forward. We might only take a few steps before we fall, but we eventually get up and walk again. Baby steps.

Book Review: Jewish Salonica: Between The Ottoman Empire And Modern Greece. By Devin E. Naar., Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Research on the transition of nondominant groups in the territories of the Ottoman Empire from empire to nation-state remains in its infancy. The book under review by Devin Naar is a masterly account of the ways in which the Jews of Salonica adapted themselves and negotiated their boundaries during and after the transition from the multicultural, multireligious, and multinational Ottoman Empire to the homogenizing nation-state of Greece.

With a reputation as a place of Jewish refuge, Salonica has been one of the most important centers of Sephardic Jewry since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. This once proud …

Book Review: Blood Will Tell: Native Americans And Assimilation Policy By Katherine Ellinghaus, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

During the allotment process (1887–1934), the United States established commissions and agencies nationwide to categorize Native American individuals as “full blood,” “mixed-blood,” or of any fractional part of African American ancestry, and determine who was (in)eligible for tribal enrollment and allotment. In Blood Will Tell, Katherine Ellinghaus sees this process as “troubling” and places its uneven practices at the core of the American settler colonial project (xv). Although the discourse of blood was almost never explicitly propounded as a deliberate and clear policy of the U.S. government, explains Ellinghaus, its implications diminished the number of Indigenous peoples, revoked official …

Review Of The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, And The Settler State, By Miranda Johnson, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

On the basis of extensive archival research into legal case files, government policy debates, newspaper reports, and interviews with key participants in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Miranda Johnson of the University of Sydney has written a well-crafted transnational history of indigenous activism, land, and indigeneity. From the early 1970s through to the mid-1990s, Indigenous activists in these three Commonwealth countries used groundbreaking legal strategies to reclaim unkept promises in aboriginal and treaty rights and seek justice owed to them. In concert with white judges, lawyers, and expert anthropologists, among others, these activists brought forth the importance of the umbilical …

Compte-Rendu De Lecture De Michel Jouard, De La Domination Coloniale Au Rejet Des Migrants: De L'Indigène À L'Immigré, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Le 2 septembre 2015, le monde a été boulversé par l'image d'Aylan Kurdi, l’enfant syrien de trois ans qui a été trouvé corps sans vie alongé sur une plage près d’une station balnéaire turque de Bodrum. Aylan était un parmi des milliers de migrants et de réfugiés de guerre, y compris 300 enfants, qui sont morts noyés dans la Méditerranée en essayant d'atteindre l'Europe. Pour beaucoup, son histoire tragique a symbolisé la guerre horrible laissée en Syrie et l'échec de la communauté internationale à mettre fin à l'effusion de sang. Pour d'autres, c’etait une conséquence de l'absence de meilleures réglementations …

Review: Michel Jouard, De La Domination Coloniale Au Rejet Des Migrants: De L'Indigène À L'Immigré, Essais Politiques [From Colonial Domination To The Rejection Of Migrants. From The Native To The Immigrant. Political Essays], Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

On September 2, 2015, the world was racked by the picture of the 3- year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi who was found lying face down on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. Aylan was among thousands of migrants and war refugees, including 300 toddlers, who drowned in the Mediterranean attempting to reach Europe that year. To many, his tragic story came to symbolise the gruesome war left behind in Syria and the failure of the international community to end the bloodshed; to others, it is tied to the absence or lack of better European regulations to treat these …

Into The Void, Or The Musings And Confessions Of A Redheaded Stepchild Lost In Western Legal History And Found In The Legal Borderlands Of The North American West, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

At my first American Society for Legal History conference in 2014, I listened with rapt attention as keynote speaker Patty Limerick asked: "Is western history legal history ?" Limerick answered in the affirmative, citing the many ways in which law had defined the North American West. Those of us who teach Western history courses can count the legal acts Limerick recited on our fingers and toes: the 1784 Land Ordinance, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the 1790 Trade & Intercourse Act, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and every treaty between American Indians and the federal government on one hand; the Missouri Compromises …

Queenship At The Renaissance Courts Of Britain: Catherine Of Aragon And Margaret Tudor, 1503- 1533, Courtney Herber

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Much ink has been spilled in service of Henry VIII and his veritable parade of wives, but not nearly as much has been spent to examine the choices and experiences of those queens and the influence they held over his court. Queens consort in early modern Britain were the most public of housewives, their domestic skills and marriages on constant display for their subjects and contemporaries to see and judge. To navigate the fraught political realities associated with being married to a sovereign, queens needed to quickly learn how to network and did so through various means, not the least …

Anna Of Denmark And Henrietta Maria: Virgins, Witches, And Catholic Queens, Courtney Herber

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In 1604, Anna of Denmark performed as the virgin goddess Pallas Athena in the Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, her first royal English masque. She did so wearing a plumed helmet and a costume fashioned from an old gown from the wardrobe of the late Queen Elizabeth, hemmed to show her legs. Years later, in 1638, the daughter-in-law she would never meet, Henrietta Maria, impersonated an Amazon in the final royal masque of the Caroline period, Salmacida Spolia. Both women had a fondness for masquing, and would utilize the performance genre as a means of establishing a dynastic mythology—with themselves …

Book Review: Charles E. Mcclelland. Berlin, The Mother Of All Research Universities, 1860–1918., David Cahan

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Charles McClelland has long been one of the leading scholars of German universities and professionalism in Germany. His State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge, 1980), for example, is a fundamental introductory work for anyone wishing to understand the structure, growth, and development of the German universities during this period.

To help celebrate its bicentennial (2010), the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (to use the University of Berlin’s official name since 1949) commissioned a six-volume history, of which McClelland was the co-author of Volume 1, running from 1810 to 1918 and published in German. The work under review is an augmented, …

Review Of Margaret Jacobs. White Mother To A Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, And The Removal Of Indigenous Children In The American West And Australia, 1880–1940, Baligh Ben Taleb

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Settler colonialism is a winner-take-all project, where the colonizer comes to stay, occupies the land permanently, and accepts nothing less than the removal of indigenous nations. Australia and the United States are two salient cases of settler colonies that became settler nations, where settlers used various tactics to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land. One of these brutal methods of colonization, according to Margaret Jacobs’ White Mother to a Dark Race, was the removal of indigenous children from their families and the breaking of the affective bonds that tied indigenous peoples together. Australia’s “protection” policies and the U.S. government’s “assimilation” …

New Directions In Indigenous Women’S History, Susana D. Geliga, Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Review Essay:

Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 240. IBSN: 978-1-101- 56025-9.

Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), pp. 538. ISBN: 978-0- 8032-3825-1.

Andrae M.Marak and Laura Tuennerman, At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), pp. 232. ISBN: 978-0-8165-2115-9.

Mary Jane McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), pp. 336. ISBN: 978-0-88755-738-5.

Sarah Deer, The Beginning …

Book Review: Lindsey R. Swindall, The Path To The Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights And Anticolonialism, Samantha Bryant

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Lindsey R. Swindall’s The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World situates the social activism of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) within the historical context of the radical social justice campaigns in the U.S. South and the global anticolonial struggles. The book’s title derives from W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1946 speech “Behold the Land” at the SNYC meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, where the eminent scholar-activist argued that the equal rights campaigns in the U.S. South should not be viewed in isolation from movements taking place in the West Indies and …

Book Review: Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights And The Making Of The Modern American State., Samantha Bryant

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Political scientist Megan Ming Francis’s Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State fills a gap in historical literature on the campaigns for African American rights in the late-19th and early-20th centuries by examining the relationship between modern state building and the NAACP’s political and legal battles against mob violence and lynching. Previous scholarship on lynching and Jim Crow legislation has concentrated on the social and economic implications of mob violence, particularly its impact on daily lives, grassroots mobilization, and southern black migration to cities in the North and West. Francis challenges the way scholars have discussed the …

Review Of The Armenian Genocide: Evidence From The German Office Archives, 1915–1916, Edited By Wolfgang Gust, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

This edited volume should be considered as an significant contribution to the history of the Armenian Genocide. Gust has rendered an important service to scholarship by reviving for the first time in English the voices of the German diplomats and their informants who became eyewitnesses to one of the first genocides of the twentieth century. Almost all of the German observers, be they diplomats or missionaries from the period, agreed on the fact that what happened to the Armenians was an act of genocide. Now that Gust has furnished historians with a plethora of vital documents, it is the task …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Family Histories From The Strait Salish Borderlands, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919. While some of these choices obscured individual family members from historical records, reading their lives in tandem with other family members’ histories reveals remarkable persistence in the midst of dramatic racial and political transformation. Focused primarily on San Juan Island residents, this article suggests that indigenous and interracial family histories of the Pacific Northwest and other borderland regions in …