Three historians open a bar…. Soon afterwards the place receives regulatory approval as a treatment for insomnia. HOLD ON! Let this delightful lecture dispel that old saw. Retired Kalamazoo College history professors John Wickstrom, David Barclay, and David Strauss show how everything (how liberal arts is that!) has a history (informed by a multitude of sources), including, for example: politics, art, country music, the invasion of Ukraine, Mars, a forged biography of a medieval saint (pertinent, all these centuries later, to ongoing denial of the results of the 2022 U.S. presidential election), Julia Child, Kalamazoo College Faculty Council meeting minutes of the 1970s, “faith knowledge” and Czar Nicolas I, Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and the uses of fiction to understand fact and change. And the list goes on. The careers of these three teachers and scholars total more than a century. How they responded to the challenge of incorporating into their 10-week courses the tsunamis of new content and approaches to teaching and research in history is a story of inspiration told by master storytellers. How wonderful was the opportunity to respond to that challenge at a college that encouraged its learning community to try new things. Why do history? Fundamentally, because it’s fun to open new windows to the past.
History
Paralympics Pioneer
Japan has been the (unlikely) prime mover in the development of the Paralympics movement, says Professor Dennis Frost, which is a surprising fact given the country’s nearly total inexperience with disability sports in the early 1960s, when it made the monumental decision to host the 1964 Paralympics in Tokyo. Since that time Japan has provided foundational contributions to the expansion of the Paralympics, including: stronger links to the Olympics; expansion of participation from a single category (spinal cord injury) to multiple categories of disability; growth in the number of largescale regional and international events; the evolution of Paralympic focus from rehabilitation to elite competition; exponential growth in media coverage; and the movement’s effect on social changes, including barrier free environments and inclusion more generally. Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences. The Paralympics movement in Japan (and the world), he says, is a complicated and imperfect success story (still being written) about the effect of large events like the Paralympic Games and (even more so) of people on the course of durable changes to society. His K-Talk is based on his recent book: More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan.
Europe Shrugs Off U.S. Influence in Wake of ‘America’s Berlin’
U.S. influence is on the wane in Europe. But Professor Emeritus David Barclay notes that this wasn’t always the case. From 1948 through the mid-1960s, the United States enormously influenced West Berlin, causing many historians to describe the western half of the city as “America’s Berlin.” Barclay, who retired from K as the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies, focuses on the buildings and personalities that shaped “America’s Berlin,” from Lucius Clay to Eleanor Lansing Dulles, in a special K-Talk. He also briefly considers what happened to U.S. influence after the mid-1960s. Hear from Barclay after President Jorge G. Gonzalez unveils the David E. Barclay Endowed Scholarship in History, which benefits K students who demonstrate exemplary capacity for and commitment to scholarly work in the history department.
Bumping Up Against Ukraine
Russian historian Dr. Lewis H. Siegelbaum had an epiphany when he was considering his subject for Kalamazoo College’s annual Edward Moritz Lecture, which was this: a lifetime of research into the history of Russia and the Soviet Union does indeed provide qualification to deliver a lecture on Ukraine. Siegelbaum had, in fact, “bumped up” often against the latter in his explorations of the former. And, at the time Siegelbaum was invited to give the Moritz Lecture (December, 2019, during the first impeachment hearings of then President Donald Trump) Ukraine was very much in the news. In the informative and wide-ranging lecture that resulted from his epiphany Siegelbaum touches on the historical effects of Ukraine’s crossroads geographical location between the tides of eastern and western empires; on the Soviet Union’s 1954 “gifting” of Crimea to Ukraine and, 60 years later, the Russian Federation’s annexation of it back; on the history of Ukraine’s Jews; on the vast migrations (forced or otherwise) of Soviet peoples throughout 15 Soviet Socialist republics during the era of the USSR, and on Ukraine as a “laboratory,” so to speak, for the study of national identity formation with respect to both “other” and “self.” Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University where he taught Russian and European history from 1983 until 2018. The College’s History Department’s annual Edward Moritz Lecture pays tribute to the late professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at Kalamazoo College from 1955 to 1988. The lecture celebrates excellence in teaching and research in the field of history. The full title of Siegelbaum’s lecture was: “Bumping Up Against Ukraine as an Historian of Russia.”
What Was Burr Up To?
That is the question. Except, contends Professor of History James Lewis, it isn’t. There’s insufficient material for historians (or novelists and playwrights) to ever know the minds and motives of the principals in the so-called Burr Conspiracy. On the other hand, there is something that is knowable: the way Americans of the time used stories to make sense of the event. In 1807 Aaron Burr was tried (and acquitted) for supposedly trying to divide the United States into two countries. His actions in the run-up to his arrest and trial are shrouded in impenetrable mystery. “Just what was he up to?” has been the question for decades. Because it’s unknowable it uncovers much less about the early years of a fledgling republic than does a new set of questions posed by Lewis in his recent book, specifically: Why were so many Americans so worried? How did they arrive at the certainty that they knew his guilt, or innocence? In what ways are the crisis and the certainty related? Lewis’s painstaking exploration of contemporary source materials provide answers to these better questions. The way Americans of the time used stories about the conspiracy story says much about their hopes and anxieties, particularly about the very means of “American.” Could Americans be a unified people living together under this nascent republic? Lewis’s book is titled “The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis.” Note the nuance: not uncovering the crisis; instead uncovering the stories told to make sense of contemporary fears, both conscious and subconscious.
LISTEN to a podcast on The Burr Conspiracy featuring James. E Lewis, Jr.
The Traitor’s Wife: An Innocent? or a Co-Conspirator?
That question is crucial, says Professor of History Charlene Boyer-Lewis ’87, to a deeper understanding of the American revolutionary war era, a time of instability for much more than politics. Exactly what role did Margaret Shippen Arnold—wife of notorious traitor Benedict Arnold—play in the plot to deliver West Point to the British Army? Turns out a very active one, notwithstanding the many decades of her presumed innocence. A role active enough to be worthy of a post-war annuity of 500 pounds—for espionage services rendered at great personal risk. Boyer-Lewis contends that a revision of Margaret’s role from the margin of this spy story to its center more accurately illuminates the cultural upheaval that was part of the revolutionary era, a tumult that included a fluidity of identity that was eroding the rigidity and constraint of weakening gender roles. Like Margaret, many women of the era were strong actors who made political choices separate of their husbands. Margaret’s story shows the war transpired in households as much as on battlefields. The spy plot’s crisis of exposure reveals a capable woman who, in a “performance without faking,” exploits a gendered thinking that her leading role in the story is in the very process of revolutionizing.
WATCH the Smithsonian Channel’s episode of American Hidden Stories: Mrs. Benedict Arnold, featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.
LISTEN to the podcast: Another Badly Behaving Woman featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.