Fall 2019 Courses

The department is going to be offering some cool classes next fall.  Professor Dalton will be teaching two new courses, one on world cinema and one on wizards and witchcraft.  He will be teaching the first-year seminar on the topic of wizards and witchcraft using case studies from different continents and time periods.  Dr. Henning will be offering European military history and modern Ireland.  Dr. Pitt is offering his course on Native American history, which will be a nice complement to some of the anticipated activities on campus.  Dr. Payne will be offering introduction to public history.  This class is designed to help students explore history careers but also to develop career skills such as team-work and iterative design.  Students create games based on research in Civil War materials in the archives.

Dr. Henning's Book is Now Available

Dr. Lori Henning, new to our history department, has a new book.  Harnessing the Airplane is published by the University of Oklahoma Press.  Her research is timely and important.

From the description from the University of Oklahoma Press:  At its dawn in the early twentieth century the new technology of aviation posed a crucial question to American and British cavalry:  what do we do with the airplane?  Lacking the hindsight of historical perspective, cavalry planners based their decisions on incomplete information.  Harnessing the Airplane compares how the American and British armies dealt with this unique challenge.  A multilayered look at a critical aspect of modern industrial warfare, this book examines the ramifications of technological innovation and its role in the fraught relationship that developed between traditional ground units and emerging air forces.

"Lori Henning demonstrates that not all who oppose new developments are opposed to the technology that drives them.  Harnessing the Airplane is an intriguing work that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of air power, the cavalry, and science and technology."  Brian D. Laslie, author of Architect of Air Power:  General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the US Air Force.