SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Faculty in the History Program
RICHARD AQUILA, Ph.D., Ohio State University
Director, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
and Professor of History and American Studies
Teaching and Research Interests : U.S. social and cultural history (especially recent U.S. history, the American West, American Indians, and popular culture/mass media)
Books:
- The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier
- Home Front Soldier: The Story of an Italian-American and His Family During World War II
- Wanted Dead of Alive: The American West and Popular Culture
- That Old Time Rock & Roll: A Chronicle of an Era
Articles : My articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West, Journal of Popular Culture, Indiana Magazine of History, NPR Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, The History Teacher, and American Indian Quarterly.
Public Humanities Projects : I have written, hosted, and produced numerous public humanities documentaries for National Public Radio. My weekly series, Rock & Roll America , which was syndicated on NPR and NPR Worldwide, was nominated for a Peabody Award.
LEIGH-ANN BEDAL, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Lecturer in Anthropology, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2000.
Teaching interests include archaeology, Old World civilizations, human prehistory (cultural and biological evolution), and cultural anthropology. Research interests include the archaeology of the Near East and Mediterranean, urbanization, and garden archaeology.
Dr. Bedal directs the archaeological excavations of the Petra Garden & Pool Complex located in the royal complex of the Nabataean capital at Petra, Jordan. http://www.homestead.com/petragarden/poolcomplex.html http://www.doaks.org/PetraNew/petraHOME.html
Major Publications:
- (with J. Schryver) “Nabataean Landscape and Power: Evidence from the Petra Garden and Pool Complex.” In Crossing Jordan: North American Contributions to the Archaeology of Jordan. Edited by T. E. Levy, et al. Pp. 375-83. London: Equinox (2007).
- The Petra Pool-Complex: A Hellenistic Paradeisos in the Nabataean Capital (results from the Petra Lower Market survey and excavation, 1998). Gorgias Dissertations: Near Eastern Studies 4. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press (2003).
- “Desert Oasis: Water Consumption and Display in the Nabataean Capital.” Near Eastern Archaeology 65/4: 225-34 (2002).
Articles in the American Journal of Archaeology and the Annual for the Department of Antiquity of Jordan. Participation in Scholarly Organizations: Committee on Archaeological Policy for the Americans Schools of Oriental Research.
DOUGLAS CHARLES, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Lecturer in History. Ph.D. University of Edinburgh, 2002
Teaching interests include world history, United States history, gay and lesbian history, surveillance and intelligence policy, political history, FBI. Dr. Charles is currently writing a book exploring the FBI's surveillance of gays and lesbians from 1937 until 1977
- J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945. (Ohio State University Press, 2007).
- "Was Gonzales' Historical Defense of NSA Eavesdropping Convincing?" History News Network (20 February 2006).
- "'Before the Colonel Arrived': Hoover, Donovan, Roosevelt, and the Origins of American Central Intelligence," Intelligence & National Security, 20 (Summer 2005): 225-37.
- "Informing FDR: FBI Political Surveillance and the Isolationist-Interventionist Foreign Policy Debate, 1939-1945." Diplomatic History, 24 (Spring 2000):211-32.
- "FBI Political Surveillance and the Charles Lindbergh Investigation, 1939-1944," The Historian, 59 (Summer 1997): 831-47, with John Rossi.
MICHAEL CHRISTOFFERSON, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D., Columbia University, 1998
Dr. Christofferson teaches French and European history after 1648 and world history after 1492. His courses emphasize the reading of original historical documents, the evaluation of historical scholarship, and writing. He is currently working on a biography of the French intellectual François Furet for which he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2006.
- "An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: François Furet's Penser la Révolution française in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s." French Historical Studies (Fall 1999).
- "François Furet Between History and Journalism." French History (December 2001).
- French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. Berghahn Books, 2004. (French translation forthcoming with Éditions Agone.)
- "French Intellectuals and the Repression of the Hunganian Revolution of 1956: The Politics of a Protest Reconsidered." In After the Deluge: New Perspectives on French Intellectual and Cultural History, edited by Julian Bourg. Lexington Books, 2004.
- Thomas R. Christofferson with Michael S. Christofferson, France During World War II: From Defeat to Liberation Fordham University Press, 2006.
- “The French ‘Sixties’.” French Politics, Culture & Society (forthcoming).
Ralph L. Eckert, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 1983
American Revolution, Civil War and Reconstruction, and Military History
Articles In: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South, Dictionary of American Military Biography, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, History of Pennsylvania Legislature, Reference Guide to the United States Military, The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress.
A. Daniel Frankforter, A.B., M.Div, M.A., Ph.D.
Professor of Medieval History. Ph.D., Penn State University, 1971
We Americans love technology. We eagerly adopt each new development as it becomes available, and we harbor exaggerated expectations for the changes it will make in our lives. This has been especially true in recent years for technologies that have applications in the classroom. As an author of textbooks, I have seen (and helped to make) my books become the tips of vast pedagogical icebergs composed of CD-ROMs and websites with numerous kinds of interactive features. These are intended to make study easier and learning more productive. That, however, was what television was supposed to do when TV sets were first mounted on classroom walls in the1970s. They proved far less revolutionary than originally anticipated, and it is not likely that new web-based techniques will offer any better weapons in the war against ignorance than they did.
Current technology makes an extraordinary wealth of resources available to students, but these treasures are useless if students do not hone the skills needed to work with them: reading, analysis, memorization, and interpretation. Electronic media only present material that is available in books in a more flexible and convenient form. They do not substitute for competent literacy. Students must, therefore, begin--at least in introductory survey courses--by practicing the disciplines needed to extract information from oral presentations and written documents. Lecture courses that use written assignments as evaluation techniques offer a form of instruction that has proved itself over many years and that today still provides the best preparation for processing information delivered by electronic and other media. There is, alas, still no substitute for the work of struggling with difficult texts, identifying and retaining significant bits of data, and discovering significant patterns of meaning in streams of information.
- A History of the Christian Movement (1978)
- Civilization and Survival (1988)
- Poullain de la Barre's The Equality of the Two Sexes (1988)
- The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, with James Madison Davis (1995)
- The Western Heritage (Kagan, Ozment, Turner). Brief Edition (1996); 2nd edition (1999); 3rd edition (2001); 4th edition (2003)
- The Medieval Millennium: An Introduction (1999); 2nd edition (2002)
- Stones for Bread: A Critique of Contemporary Worship (1999)
- The West: Culture and Ideas with William Spellman, (2003); 2nd edition (2008)
- The Heritage of World Civilizations Craig, et al., brief third edition (2007)
Articles In: The British Studies Monitor, The American Benedictine Review, The Catholic Historical Review, The Historian, The international Journal of Women's Studies, Teaching History, Manuscripta, The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Church History, Perspectives, Journal of Women's History
CAROLYN HALLADAY, BA, MA, JD, Ph.D
Lecturer in History. Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz
Historian of modern Germany and modern central Europe, with a particular interest in the everyday interactions of society, culture, and politics. Academic emphases include contemporary German society; Europe since 1789; European Jewry; nationalism; trans-Atlantic relations; European diplomacy; and war, ethics and strategy. Teaching interests include European culture and politics; world history; late-modern intellectual history; women in Europe; and the world wars.
Major Publications:- “Engineered Like No Other: German Society and the Automobile,” in Carl Lankowski, ed., Breakdown, Breakup, Breakthrough: Germany’s Difficult Passage to Modernity (New York: Berghahn, 1999).
- “Jews in German Society,” in Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will, eds., Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (with Andrei S. Markovits and Beth Simone Noveck).
- “Foreign Cultural Policy” in Andrei S. Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
- Editor of Donald Abenheim, Soldier and Politics Transformed: German-American Reflections on Civil-Military Relations in a New Strategic Environment (Berlin: Miles Verlag, 2006).
- Co-editor of Gordon A. Craig, Tact and Intelligence: Essays on Diplomatic History and International Relations (Palo Alto: SPOSS, forthcoming in late 2007).
John Rossi, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D. Rutgers University, 1988
Teaching and research interests include the history of the United States since 1877, American foreign relations, business and economic history, East Asian and Vietnamese history, and historiography. All courses emphasize reading, writing, and critical analysis. Upper-level writing intensive courses also include research into original historical sources. This approach to teaching helps students develop and hone important research, writing, and thinking skills. A number of students have been able to turn research papers written for these courses into published articles.
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Automobile Insurance: Samuel P. Black, Jr. and the Rise of Erie Insurance, 1923-1961 (Routledge, 2001), with Samuel P. Black, Jr.
- History on the Internet: A Student Guide, 1999-2000 (Prentice Hall, 1999), with Andrew T. Stull.
Articles In: Business History Review, Essays in Economic and Business History, The Historian, EH.Net, Proceedings of the Woodrow Wilson National Symposium, Forging the American Century, The American Experience in World War II, the Erie Times-News, and The Journal of Erie Studies.
Participation in Scholarly Organizations: Trustee and Secretary-Treasurer of the Economic and Business Historical Society, Program Chair for the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Economic and Business Historical Society.