Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Africa’S Tepid Response To Ukraine War Highlights Shortcomings Of U.S. Diplomacy, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Three years ago, at the Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised African leaders that Russo-African relations would be based on respect of territorial and national sovereignty. After the summit, both sides signed military and other agreements, something that would be beneficial to Russia in the future.

A case in point has been Africa’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Africans And African-Americans Would Honour Martin Luther King By Rekindling Their Bonds, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

During an official visit to Washington DC in 1962, Cameroon’s founding President Ahmadou Ahidjo informed President John F. Kennedy of his displeasure over anti-black racism in the US. Ahidjo met and praised the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest African American civil rights organisation, for its willingness to unite with Africa “in a world-wide movement to fight against the evils of racial discrimination, injustice, racial prejudices, and hatred”.

He later wrote, "Each time a black man [and woman] is humiliated anywhere in the world, all Negroes the world over are hurt." President …

Equality, Non-Interference, And Sovereignty: President Ahmadou Ahidjo And The Making Of Cameroon-U.S. Relations, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Scholars often dismiss the importance of local archives in the reconstruction of postcolonial African history, stating that they are superficial, unorganized, and unreliable. Amin challenges that notion and argues that those archives are central to the study of African diplomatic history. Based on extensive and previously unused documents, he argues that Cameroon’s Ahmadou Ahidjo leveraged his U.S. policy to develop his country and protect its sovereignty while maintaining a firm grip on power. This reappraisal of Ahidjo’s actions engages debates about the contours of U.S.-African foreign policy and the challenges new nations face as they navigate external relations.

An Entire Generation Of Americans Has No Idea How Easy Air Travel Used To Be, Janet R. Bednarek

History Faculty Publications

As someone who has studied the history of airports in the United States – and someone old enough to remember air travel before 9/11 – I find it striking, on the one hand, how reluctant the federal government, the airlines, and airports were to adopt early security measures.

On the other hand, it’s been jarring to watch how abruptly the sprawling Transportation Security Agency system was created – and how quickly American air travelers came to accept those security measures as both normal and seemingly permanent features of all U.S. airports.

Cameroon's Biya Is Africa's Oldest President: Assessing His 38 Years In Power, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Cameroon’s President Paul Biya celebrated his 88th birthday recently, making him the oldest president in Africa. He has been in power for 38 years. Birthday celebrations held across the country were met with protest by the opposition, demanding that he step down. So, how has he acquitted himself in office, and what has been his legacy for Cameroon?

How Some People Can End Up Living At Airports For Months – Even Years – At A Time, Janet R. Bednarek

History Faculty Publications

In January, local authorities arrested a 36-year-old man named Aditya Singh after he had spent three months living at Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport. Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. It wasn’t until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up.

Singh, however, is far from the first to pull off an extended stay. After more than two decades studying the history of airports, I’ve come across stories about …

President Paul Biya And Cameroon’S Anglophone Crisis: A Catalog Of Miscalculations, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

The historical literature on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis traces its origin to the failure to implement the Foumban Constitutional Agreement. The current study adds a new perspective: Based on extensive field work in Cameroon and a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis, which began in October 2016, degenerated into violence because of a catalogue of miscalculations made by President Paul Biya’s regime. It also argues that the crisis has had a devastating impact on the way of life in the Anglophone region. This paper concludes with recommendations on what needs to be done to …

Cameroon’S Relations Toward Nigeria: A Foreign Policy Of Pragmatism, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Existing literature argues that the tactics of Cameroon foreign policy have been conservative, weak and timid. This study refutes that perspective. Based on extensive and previously unused primary sources obtained from Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations and from the nation’s archives in Buea and Yaoundé, this study argues that Cameroon’s foreign policy was neither timid nor makeshift. Its strategy was one of pragmatism. By examining the nation’s policy toward Nigeria in the reunification of Cameroon, the Nigerian civil war, the Bakassi Peninsula crisis and Boko Haram, the study maintains that, while the nation’s policy was cautious, its leaders focused on …

India’S Plan To Identify ‘Illegal Immigrants’ Could Get Some Muslims Declared ‘Foreign’, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The Indian government will soon ask its 870 million voting-age citizens for documentation that they are legal citizens with ancestral ties to India.

On Nov. 20, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announced a plan to expand the National Registry of Citizens, a four-year documentation effort that recently concluded in India’s northeastern state of Assam, to the entire country. Shah claims that the effort will help identify illegal immigrants in a “nondiscriminatory” fashion.

The news was met with some dismay. After Assam finished tallying its 30.5 million people in August, about 1.9 million were declared “foreign.” Some were Bangladeshi immigrants living …

Review: 'Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals And Global Aid', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

As I write, the city of Dayton is digging out from the devastating impact of fifteen tornadoes – four of which carried winds of 150-200 mph -- that struck the city and its environs on Memorial Day night. The American Red Cross (ARC) is spearheading community relief efforts, which, on the face of it, is no great surprise. But in Holy Humanitarians Heather Curtis makes clear that not only did the ARC (founded in 1881) not enjoy benevolence presumption in the first few decades of its existence, its fiercest competitor was the evangelical periodical, the Christian Herald.

In this …

Fundamentalism Turns 100, A Landmark For The Christian Right, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

These days, the term “fundamentalism” is often associated with a militant form of Islam.

But the original fundamentalist movement was actually Christian. And it was born in the United States a century ago this year.

Protestant fundamentalism is still very much alive. And, as Susan Trollinger and I discuss in our 2016 book, it has fueled today’s culture war over gender, sexual orientation, science and American religious identity.

Review: 'Notre Dame Vs. The Klan: How The Fighting Irish Defied The Kkk,' By Todd Tucker, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Todd Tucker’s book is an easy and enjoyable read. And the author has a great story to tell, about the three days in May 1924 when Notre Dame students clashed with members of the Ku Klux Klan on the streets of South Bend. Notre Dame alumni will particularly enjoy it, as Tucker (a 1990 graduate) has written what is in effect a love letter to his alma mater, replete with details about the author’s experience as a student (as well as additional autobiographical information).

President Paul Biya And Cameroon’S Anglophone Crisis: Now Is The Time For Bold Action, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

President Paul Biya of Cameroon has been silent for long in relation to the ongoing unrest in the country's English-speaking region. His silence has made matters worse, and it is time he took decisive measures to resolve that crisis if he wants history to remember him after his nearly 40 years in power.

Trump’S Insult Is Fed By Deep Ignorance About Africa Among Americans, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Americans woke up during the second week of 2018 to another of United States President Donald Trump’s tirades. He dismissed Africa and its people as those living in “shithole” countries. He had singled out Haiti and Nigeria a few weeks earlier.

There was an immediate global uproar. How dare you, people asked? The African Union, for the first time ever, publicly rebuked the American president. US ambassadors in African countries rushed to find ways to minimise the impact of Trump’s comments. And people in African nations went online telling Trump where exactly to get off.

Trump’s outburst was part of …

Review: 'God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, And The Religious Right', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

America is Doomed. God Hates Obama. Fags Doom Nations. Thank God for Dead Soldiers. All these are signs held up at military funerals by members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. In God Hates sociologist Rebecca Barrett-Fox gives us the first full-scale examination of Westboro, and it makes for fascinating and horrifying reading. She begins her study with an ethnography of the church, including a biography of founding pastor Fred Phelps, that makes use of interviews with church members to delineate Westboro’s hyper-Calvinist theology and its understanding of the connection between individual sin (particularly, homosexuality) and national …

No Easy Walk To Freedom: Mlk’S Anti-Racism Crusade Needs To Be Renewed In Today’S World, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Schools, streets and children are named in his honor in Africa. In America, he is honored with a public holiday.

All over the world, King is known as someone who fought for human causes. At a time when racial violence and arrogance in the United States and elsewhere is experiencing a rapid resurgence, King’s holiday is a reminder that much needs to be done to create a more inclusive global community.

In America, the past two years have been tumultuous and each day the racial crises multiply. …

Martin Luther King's Teachings Offer A Guide For Modern U.S.-Africa Relations, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Schools, streets and children are named in his honor in Africa. In America, he is honored with a public holiday.

All over the world, King is known as someone who fought for human causes. At a time when racial violence and arrogance in the United States and elsewhere is experiencing a rapid resurgence, King’s holiday is a reminder that much needs to be done to create a more inclusive global community.

In America, the past two years have been tumultuous and each day the racial crises multiply. …

Response: Are American Christians Persecuted?, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern world that often …

America’S Legendary Ignorance About Africa Persists, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

In an increasingly interconnected and technological global environment, ignorance of Africa is no longer acceptable. This, especially from major political leaders. Yet, examples of such ignorance are evident in the current American presidential campaign. Neither the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump nor the democratic nominee Hillary R. Clinton has articulated any concrete vision for an African policy.

Review: 'Recasting The Region: Language, Culture And Islam In Colonial Bengal', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The origins and growth of Bengali Muslim identity have been the center of several studies till date. Most have concentrated on the politics of Muslim separatism in the 1930s with the politicization of the eastern Bengal’s peasantry and subsequent support for the Pakistan Movement. Neilesh Bose, in his Recasting the Region: Language Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal shifts focus from politics to the Bengali literary sphere where Bengali Muslim intellectuals created a particular regional identity distinct from both mainstream Urdu Muslim and Hindu Bengali culture. This particular Bengali Muslim identity, Bose argues, was produced and established through writings of …

Review: 'Hindu Muslim Riots', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

Communal violence in India, especially between Hindus and Muslims, have for long been the center of scholarly research. From the 1990s, historians, and anthropologists have innovatively analyzed colonial and Partition related riots to understand why and how they happened and the contextual development of communal identities. Political scientists have put forth thought-provoking paradigms of urban communal rioting in the wake of the Hindu Muslim riots of 1992 and 2002. All, it would seem, owe an intellectual debt to sociologist Richard Lambert’s much-cited dissertation of 1951, now published six decades later. Given that the publication is mostly an unchanged version of …

Review: 'What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books And Everyday Life In Twentieth-Century America', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In this interesting book Erin Smith analyzes popular religious books since the late nineteenth century with an eye toward understanding why – despite the scorn heaped on them by intellectuals -- they have been so beloved by their readers. Rather than being a comprehensive survey, What Would Jesus Read? consists of five case studies: the Social Gospel novels (1880s-1910s), Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), post-World War II religious self-help books, Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and books for “the seeker” from the past twenty-five years. Smith’s focus is on white Protestant readers; working against the …

The Legal Construction Of Whiteness And Citizenship In Maryland, 1780–1820, Patricia A. Reid

History Faculty Publications

In the years before the Missouri Compromise, petitioners who won their freedom suits based upon their ancestral links to white women, with land, could participate in thebody politic. However, as Maryland legislators began to identify with the plantation south, they invented a legal understanding that would deny ambiguously freed blacks freedom, and justices would re-invent proslavery jurispudence, using the attachment clause, which would remand the previously freed into a status worse than before they had petitioned the court. Those who were freed and could claim citizenship in the years immediately after the American Revolution, by 1810, case law …

Review: 'Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Motoring West is the first in a projected series that will examine the place of the motorcar in Trans-Mississippi America to 1940. Edited by Peter J. Blodgett, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library, the work brings together explanatory historical material that sets a critical and analytical context with a diverse collection of primary sources. The result is an interesting mix of readings that takes us well beyond Dayton Duncan’s Horatio’s Drive and the Ken Burns film sequel.

Review: 'Ellis Island Nation: Immigration Policy And American Identity In The Twentieth Century', Caroline Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Ellis Island Nation develops new arguments about belonging, citizenship, and the social construction of American identity between 1924 and 1965. The book is a political and intellectual history that interweaves discussions of policy debates, public discourse, and educational curriculum to analyze changes in immigration law, societal reactions to immigrants and ethnics, and notions of pluralism. The author's conceptualization of “contributionism” melds two positions that have been at the heart of immigration debates for 200 years. Contributionism, as Fleeglar defines it, “emphasized that the cultural and economic assets of immigrants enriched America by celebrating the unique benefits of immigrants’ native cultures …

Review: 'Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, And The Making Of Modern Evangelicalism', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It is a fine time to be a historian of fundamentalism/conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Over the past few years a number of outstanding works have appeared, many of which take seriously politics and economics. The best of this scholarship includes: Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt (2011); Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God (2015); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (2009); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse (2014); and, Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason (2014).

Now we can add to this list Timothy E. W. Gloege’s Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of …

Review: 'Flights Of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design', Janet R. Bednarek

History Faculty Publications

The advent of powered flight in the early part of the twentieth century brought profound changes to society and culture globally. In her work Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, Sonja Dümpelmann explores how it influenced the perspective and work of architects, landscape architects, and urban planners and designers, primarily in the United States and Europe. Specifically, the book “deals with those moments during the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries when these professionals developed an aerial imagination and an epistemology based upon aerial vision, and when they realized the opportunities that the new technology offered them in shaping the …

Keynote Address: University Of Dayton's Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Julius A. Amin, professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Dayton, offered this keynote address at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. luncheon Jan. 19, 2016, at the University of Dayton.

Why Martin Luther King’S Anti-Racism Crusade Needs To Be Renewed, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Schools, streets and children are named in his honor in Africa. In America, he is honored with a public holiday.

All over the world, King is known as someone who fought for human causes. At a time when racial violence and arrogance in the US and elsewhere is experiencing a rapid resurgence, King’s holiday is a reminder that much needs to be done to create a more inclusive global community.

Ordered Eating: Food And Social Structures, Bobbi Sutherland

History Faculty Publications

Article is a review essay of Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table by Massimo Montanari and Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640: Eating to Impress by Paul S. Lloyd.

In the last few decades, food history has gone from being an unusual side-study viewed as outside the realm of academic history proper to one of the most popular sub-fields of social, economic, and cultural history – if not a field in its own right. Pre-modern historians have welcomed this development as one that expands our limited sources by opening new ones to us and providing us another method for …