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Celebrating New Faculty New Books
Posted: September 5, 2006
The University of Houston Department of History is pleased to announce the most recent publications of three of its faculty members. The department extends its congratulations to Professors Horne, Martin, and Vaughn.
Gerald Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, is the author of The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (University of California Press). Horne offers a masterful biography of the talented screenwriter, historian and drama theorist, who also was the leader of the Communist Part in Holly wood and, thus, became the foil of two future U.S. presidents, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald W. Reagan. Paul Buhle, author of Radical Hollywood, observes: "This extraordinary treatment of one of the most interesting and controversial figures in Hollywood scene of the 1930s-40s demonstrates superior, indeed prodigious, scholarship." The release date for this book is September 15, 2006, but it can be ordered immediately from the publisher.
James Kirby Martin, the Distinguished University Professor of History, has co-authored Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang) with former UH professor Joseph T. Glatthaar. Tribal, violent, riven with fierce and competing loyalties, the American Revolution as told through the Oneida Indians, the only Iroquois Nation to side with the rebels, shatters the old story of a contest of ideas punctuated by premodern set-piece warfare pitting patriotic colonists against British Redcoats. With new detail and historical sweep, Martin and Glatthaar offer a vivid account of the Revolution's forgotten heroes, the allies who risked their land, their culture, and their lives to join in a war that gave birth to a new nation at the expense of their own. Forgotten Allies also provides insights into Oneida culture and how it was shaped, changed, and molded throughout many years of contact with the American colonists. Above all else, it depicts the valor and determination of an Indian nation that fought with all the resolve of the rebels only to be erased from America's collective memory. Thomas Fleming, author of Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, writes: "This is a book that will surprise and delight anyone interested in American history. It reveals in vivid scrupulously researched detail a hitherto unknown side of the War for Independence." The release of the book will coincide with a reception at Mount Vernon, George Washington s Virginia estate, on October 14, 2006.
Sally N. Vaughn, UH Professor of European History, has joined Jay Rubenstein in editing Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000-1200, a collection of essays that focus not on texts but on people, specifically on teachers and their students, beginning with the late Carolingian era and continuing through the creation of monastic and secular schools in the centuries before the first universities. Central to the articles in this volume are the schools and communities of Northern France and England, including Reims, Bec, Soissons, and Canterbury, whose patterns of thought and learning gave shape to intellectual endeavours throughout medieval Europe. In addition to some of the most prominent personalities of the day (among them Gerbert of Reims, Lanfranc and Anselm of Bec, Ivo of Chartres, and John of Salisbury), the contributors examine those teachers and students who worked in the shadows: figures like the biblical exegete Richard of Préaux and the musical innovator Theinred of Dover. The focus throughout the volume is on personalities and personal relationships, thus recreating the human connections that lay behind medieval humanism and the Twelfth Century Renaissance. Taken together, the essays here create a coherent and compelling picture of the tumultuous time before the universities came to organize and take control of teaching and learning - a seminal period when teaching methods and curricula grew out of the particular experience of specific teachers and their interactions with their students. Publication is scheduled for Autumn 2006 with Brepols Publishers (ISBN2-503-51419-7).
Eric H. Walther, Professor of History, recently published the first scholarly biography of one of the most important figures of the Civil War era, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Yancey (1814-63) was born in the South but raised in the northeast by an abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally distant and unstable mother. By the time Yancey was a young adult, he believed that abolitionists were meddling, cruel, and hypocritical. For years Yancey sought a sort of surrogate father. His quest first led him to South Carolina Unionist Benjamin F. Perry, whose cause Yancey embraced, complete with condemnation of men such as John C. Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett. After Yancey's acquisition of slaves and move to the Alabama frontier, his penchant for inflammatory rhetoric and for violent behavior quickly led him into the extreme states' rights camp. By the 1850s, Yancey had eclipsed Calhoun's radicalism and stood by Rhett as the champions of secession, in order to preserve slavery. Yancey defied Northern Democrats in their 1860 national convention, splitting the party and paving the way for the election of Abraham Lincoln. Yancey's efforts helped convince Confederates to locate their first capital in Montgomery, Alabama--Yancey's home--and to select Yancey to offer the official introduction of president-elect Jefferson Davis. Yancey then led the first Confederate diplomatic commission to England and France, then returned to the South as a Confederate senator, before his death in 1863, shortly before his forty-ninth birthday. Walther's biography not only chronicles the life of a critical figure in American history, it also offers a careful reexamination of Southern honor, violence, and concepts of manhood in the nineteenth century. The Wall Street Journal (July 8-9, 2006) calls the work "authoritative."
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