Summer Study in Japan

Professor Dalton is organizing a summer class that includes a trip to Japan.  You can see the details here.  Information sessions will be

5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 26
11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4
Room 203 Swan Business Center

HIS200: Excel and Quantitative History

Last week in HIS200: Historical Methods and Historiography, students presented on their short research projects, which required them to engage with excel and Quantitative History. Our majors did an excellent job identifying possible data to extract for their final research papers and provided detailed analysis in their essays and presentations. Projects ranged from measuring polling data from 1945 to the present on Americans' changing perception of dropping atomic bombs in WWII to using mentions of Joan of Arc from 1700 to the present in Google Books to analyze her popularity at different points in history. 

Bill used Google Books to explore Joan of Arcs mentions from 1700 to the present. He used historical context to explain why her popularity rose and fell during certain decades. 

Noah created a database of battles waged by the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire over a 100-year period to find out when Rome had its most effective fighting force. 

Elizabeth employed an anonymous survey to analyze contemporary views on the impact of music during the Vietnam War.  

Mason gathered polling data from 1945 to the present on how Americans view the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He found that right after the war, Americans highly approved of the action but as the memory of the war faded, approval ratings dropped precipitously. 

Like Bill, Tom used Google Books to track mentions of the famous Japanese samurai, Miyamoto Musashi. He also created a pie chart that looked at the different types of studies that mentioned Musashi (see below).

Archivist and Deep Fakes

A piece from Gizmodo, How Archivists Could Stop Deepfakes from Rewriting History, is something that should interest our students who are taking methods and will take digital history and archival practices.

History 417: Culture Wars: The Politics of Memory

Dr. Payne, History Department

Spring 2019

MWF 1:30 to 2:20

The culture wars are back (did they ever go away?)

Are we destroying history?

As a society, what do we decide to honor?  What do we decide to forget?  Who gets to decide? What is the difference between history and commemoration?

What does it mean to be American? 

Who Decides?

We’ll look at the issues that divide America along the lines of region, race, religion, gender, generations, and others.

We’ll place many of the current culture wars topics in historical context.  How did we react to black athletes protesting in the past?  Previous debates over immigration?

What happens when the nation’s demographics change?  Does technology bring us together or split us apart?

We’ll look at previous culture wars – prohibition, Scopes Monkey Trial – and some ongoing hot topics – immigration, urban/rural split, race relations. 

Oct 11 Meet and Greet

The history department is having a little get together for students on Oct 11 at 11:30 in P. 109.  Lots of pizza and cookies available!  Stop by.  You can meet the faculty.  Learn our plans and what classes we'll be offering.  Next semester we're offering two new classes, one on cyberwarfare and another on video gaming and history, plus the return of the class on the culture wars.  Learn about the history club and Phi Alpha Theta.  Make suggestions.  We're looking for ideas.

History Majors at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference

Joe Aldridge and Isaac Ryss presenting at the Bucknell Digital Scholars Conference with Dennis Frank (pictured) and Phillip Payne.

The presentation, "We Built and App:  Exploring New Assignments in a History Class," was about the student, archivist, and faculty perspective in introducing a new assignment building an app to host our digital map of the St. Bonaventure Cemetery.  This is the sort of assignment that brought together the History Department, Friedsam Memorial Library, and the St. Bonaventure Android App Development club.

This being a digital scholarship conference, participants were active on Twitter so here are some Tweets about the presentation.

The conference had a lot of really cool examples of people working across disciplines and unites.  We came back with a lot of ideas for new, fun, assignments. 

Spring 2019 Courses

We've just put together the schedule for the Spring 2019 semester.  We've got the usual array of quality surveys in World, European, and United States History.  We're excited that Dr. Henning is offering a course on Cyberwarfare and Dr. Pitt is offering a class on history and video gaming.  Dr. Payne will be offering Culture Wars:  The Politics of Memory.  These courses should give students a variety of ways to explore history.