Congratulations to Dr. Edward Hatfield, alumnus of the graduate program in American history, for being named managing editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The publication, first launched in 2004, was the first state encyclopedia designed for the web. The project is run by the Georgia Humanities Council. Hatfield was an advisee of Dr. Joseph Crespino.
Category / Publications
Emory News Center Features Prof. Daniel LaChance’s Book ‘Executing Freedom’
Assistant Professor of History Daniel LaChance published Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States with the University of Chicago Press last year. LaChance’s book examines the role of the death penalty in American culture over a span of fifty years. The Emory News Center’s April Hunt recently published a feature about LaChance’s work, “‘Executing Freedom’ examines the evolving role of the death penalty.” Read an excerpt from the article below and check out the full piece here.
“I’ve long been interested in the place of punishment in our society,” says LaChance, who got his first glimpse of the criminal justice system by watching his father defend accused murderers in courtrooms in a state without the death penalty.
“Criminal trials, sentencing hearings and execution ceremonies are spectacles,” LaChance adds. “They are more than an outraged community’s response to crime. They are occasions where we reveal our deeply held beliefs about the relationship between the individual and the state.”
Dr. Carol Anderson Wins National Book Critics Circle Award
Congratulations to Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and a member of the History Department graduate faculty, for winning the Criticism Award from the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). The NBCC awarded Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Read more about the prize, including the other winning books from this year, here.
Alumnus Adam Goldstein (’16) Publishes Article in ‘Atlanta Studies’
Former undergraduate and history major Adam Goldstein (’16) recently published a piece in Atlanta Studies. Based on his undergraduate honors thesis (completed under the direction of Joe Crespino), the piece focuses on the East Lake neighborhood in Atlanta and is titled “A Purposely Built Community: Public Housing Redevelopment and Resident Replacement at East Lake Meadows.” Goldstein is now a Bobby Jones Scholar at the University of St. Andrews, where he is studying affordable housing policy. Atlanta Studies is an open access, digital publication based at Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship. Each piece undergoes review by a multi-institutional and -disciplinary editorial board. Read Goldstein’s full article.
History Department Welcomes New Faculty in Academic Year 2016-17
The History Department is excited to welcome two new faculty members in the academic year 2016-17: Adriana Chira and Tehila Sasson. Dr. Chira, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, is the Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History with specializations in the following geographic and thematic areas: Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; the African diaspora; and public history.Dr. Sasson comes to Emory from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian of modern Europe and international history, with particular interests in the history of ethics, sovereignty and the economy. Read more about the research interests, publications, and ongoing projects of Profs. Chira and Sasson on the Faculty section of the Department website.
Crespino on “This Complex American Moment” in ‘The New York Times’
Photo from Emory News Center
Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, was among fourteen contributors to a January 25 article in The New York Times, “How Do You View This Complex American Moment?” Read the full article and check out a copy of Crespino’s comments below.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen a president take office under these circumstances with this many unknowns, people on both sides with a sense that we’re in uncharted waters. We have to remember what kind of revolutionary period we’re living through. We’re really living through a digital revolution that I think has upended our economy, it’s upended our society and now we see it clearly revolutionizing our politics and creating all of these circumstances that are new to us, that as a democracy, we’re going to try to get a hold of. My inclination is that we’re in this kind of disarray — this kind of messiness is going to be the new normal — for the foreseeable future.”
Alumni Update: William S. Cossen (BA ’08)
William S. Cossen graduated from Emory University in 2008 with majors in political science and history. In December of 2016 he finished a PhD in history from Penn State University. His family, now including two children, is now back in the Atlanta area. Cossen is a faculty member of The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, and his spouse is a pediatric endocrinological fellow at Egleston Children’s Hospital at Emory. Gossen recently published the following article: “Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church and Immigration Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” U.S. Catholic Historian 34, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 1-23. He is currently revising his first book manuscript, The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind: Hegemony, Identity, and Catholic Nation Building in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Professor Tonio Andrade’s ‘The Gunpowder Age’ Wins Distinguished Book Award
Congratulations to Dr. Tonio Andrade, whose book The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton UP, 2016) won a Distinguished Book Award from The Society for Military History. Andrade is Professor of History at Emory University. The Gunpowder Age has received broad critical acclaim, including from the Wall Street Journal, which concluded: “The Gunpowder Age is a boldly argued, prodigiously researched and gracefully written work. This book has much to offer general readers, especially those with a passion for military history, as well as specialists.” Read more about the work and its reception on Andrade’s website.
Allen Tullos Featured in ‘New York Times’ Article on 1986 Voter Fraud Case Lost by Jeff Sessions
In a 1985 edition of Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council, Allen Tullos penned an article on the attempted prosecution of three civil rights activists for voter fraud in West Alabama. Tullos’s article, “Crackdown in the Black Belt,” was recently cited in a New York Times piece about the nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Sessions was the United States attorney in West Alabama who pursued and lost the case against the activists in 1986. Check out the excerpt below and read the full Times article, “The Voter Fraud Case Jeff Sessions Lost and Can’t Escape.” Dr. Tullos is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
In Perry County, the polls were only open for four hours in the afternoon, even though nearly one-third of adults worked outside the county and another 15 percent were over the age of 65. White voters used absentee balloting to keep their level of participation high among local residents and also to include some who had moved away. “Letters would go out from white elected officials to a list of people they knew who owned land locally but lived elsewhere: ‘Make sure you vote absentee,’” says Allen Tullos, a historian at Emory University who has written about the Turner case. “The white power structure felt under siege, so there was a sense of ‘We’ve got to call in our friends and families to roll this back.'”
Eric Goldstein in ‘The Atlantic’
Dr. Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, offered his expertise on questions of American and Jewish history and culture for an article in The Atlantic titled “Are Jews White?” The piece, written by Emma Green, explores how “Trump’s election has reopened questions that have long seemed settled in America—including the acceptability of open discrimination against minority groups.” Check out an excerpt from Goldstein’s contributions to the article below and read the full piece.
“Jewish identity in American is inherently paradoxical and contradictory,” said Eric Goldstein, an associate professor of history at Emory University. “What you have is a group that was historically considered, and considered itself, an outsider group, a persecuted minority. In the space of two generations, they’ve become one of the most successful, integrated groups in American society—by many accounts, part of the establishment. And there’s a lot of dissonance between those two positions.”