Faculty News

Professor Jean-Baptiste received the honor due to her global approach to research, teaching, and service.Her reseach focuses on the history of race, marriage, family, and colonialism in Africa and global contexts. In her teaching, Jean-Baptiste emphasizes how world regions are interconnected. Her courses enable students to learn from and engage with materials from all over the world—and her versatile teaching style weaves in real-life challenges and solutions in global settings. 

Jean-Baptiste’s international engagement is particularly evident in her dedicated service for the past two years as faculty director for the UC Education Abroad Program’s (UCEAP) Study Center in France. Responsible for the academics of 300 UC students across four French universities in this role, she is a tireless advocate for the academic and personal growth of students during such a momentous time in their lives.

Read more about Jean-Baptiste's commitment toward the campus' Global Education for All at https://globalaffairs.ucdavis.edu/chancellor-awards/2018-19-honorees?fbclid=IwAR1q8SmM9YjAugd2n26YaAQ-qrP8qJSsUpQdiGg0w-vPwx9IgrYwPUcCmVI

Decker will conduct workshops on oral history methodology with students at Stawa University in Kampala, Uganda this summer. While there, she will also carry out research for a project on the history of youth in Uganda. 

https://globalaffairs.ucdavis.edu/funding-resources/seed-grants/2018-19-grantees

Professor Sudipta Sen's new book, Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019), has made a big splash in newspapers and radio since it came out in January. Check out the reviews:

The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/unruly-waters-and-ganges-review-in-india-water-is-politics-11546641300

New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/ganges-many

Science: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2019/01/14/ganges/

LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-sudipta-sen-ganges-review-20190124-story.html

You can also listen to an interview with Prof. Sen about his book on Krys Boyd's show Think, broadcast by Dallas' NPR station, from February 12, 2019: http://think.kera.org/2019/02/12/595985/

Ganges is available for purchase from Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119169/ganges.

The Tang Prize foundation (est. 2012) tasked the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan to administer the annual prize competition.  In 2014, Yu Ying-shih was the inaugural recipient of the highly prestigious Tang Prize in Sinology, and he donated NT$10 million of his cash prize to establish the Yu Ying-shih Award for junior scholars in Sinology (3 book awards and 3 dissertation awards each year).  For more info on the award, see: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aedu/201508230021.aspx.  The 2018 prize winners were announced on Nov. 30 on the Institute of History and Philology's website: http://www2.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/bulletinDetail.php?TM=1&M=1&C=&bid=1307. 

In light of that history, everyone should be aware that those who advocate hatred of others make themselves open supporters of policies and actions that are disastrous for the entire human community—systematic discrimination, contempt for the law, chaotic civil violence, the destruction of democracy, tyranny, global war, and mass murder.

The open expression of vicious lies and fake fears regarding any group is incompatible with the constitutional order of our state and country, and with the fundamental values of our democratic society. Because of the catastrophic history of such rhetoric in our country and around the world, we urge the entire campus community to remain actively true to UC Davis' Principles of Community, and to the essential democratic civic virtues of truthfulness, mutual respect, and civic solidarity.  We urge the entire campus community to reject inwardly, and denounce openly, those who are attempting to tear our country apart and to sow hatred and lust for violence among us. 

The defense of democracy and of civil order requires of us more than passive civility or tolerance.  It requires that we actively denounce and resist the erosion of the values fundamental to the freedom and to the law and order that we cherish, and on which the lives and liberties of all of us ultimately depend.

Professor Brantley was the first female professor and first Africanist historian in the department. As a trailblazer, she wore many hats when she arrived at Davis in 1972. She designed and taught the first undergraduate course on American women’s history, which regularly attracted 100 students or more. She used her own resources to create a course reading list because there were no textbooks available at the time. The introduction of women’s history set the stage for the department’s Women’s and Gender History (originally Cross-Cultural Women’s History) research cluster and graduate minor (http://history.ucdavis.edu/affiliates/womens-and-gender-history). As one of the few women faculty on campus, Professor Brantley served on dozens of committees when she arrived, and her service to the university resulted in the creation of the Women’s Resource Center (https://wrrc.ucdavis.edu/).

 Professor Brantley’s contributions to African history are equally impressive. Among her many publications are two influential monographs, The Giriama and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, 1800-1920 (UC Press, 1981) and Feeding Families: African Realities and British Ideas of Nutrition and Development in Early Colonial Africa (Heinemann, 2002). Professor Brantley launched the African history program at UC Davis, designing the first undergraduate courses in the field and mentoring the inaugural cohort of African history graduate students.

A respected scholar, generous colleague, and devoted mentor, Cynthia Brantley will be missed enormously.

Cynthia Brantley is survived by her partner of 36 years, Nancy Peden, her sister Betty Sue Norton (Donald), nephews and great-nephews and nieces. A celebration of Professor Brantley’s life will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10, at Stonegate Country Club, 919 Lake Blvd. in Davis.

Donations in Cynthia Brantley’s memory may be given to the University of San Francisco Memory and Aging Center, the Davis Community Meals & Housing H Street Shelter, or a charity of your choice.

For a full obituary, see the Davis Enterprise: https://www.davisenterprise.com/obits/cynthia-louise-brantley/.

The Society of American Historians was founded in 1939 by the historian and journalist Allan Nevins to promote literary excellence in the writing or presentation of history. Membership is by invitation only; among our current fellows are scholars, journalists, independent historians, essayists, biographers, novelists, filmmakers, curators, and poets working in many different genres on topics that deal in whole or in part with American history. For more information, go to https://sah.columbia.edu/.

For more on this program, see http://blog.historians.org/2018/03/aha-announces-2018-20-career-diversity-implementation-grants/.

Warren is the second UC Davis author in two years, and the third in five years, to receive the prestigious American history prize. Last year, his colleague Andrés Reséndez won for The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Ari Kelman won in 2014 for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, about the Colorado site of an 1864 massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahos.

God’s Red Son (Basic Books, 2017), one of three winners this year, offers a new view of the iconic Ghost Dance religion that led to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.That year on Indian reservations across the West, followers of the new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the U.S. Army killed more than 200 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek.

The Ghost Dance has been viewed by many historians as a failed effort by Indian militants to resist American conquest and return to traditional ways. Warren makes the case that the Ghost Dance helped Indians retain their identity and reshape the modern world.

The Bancroft Prize, established in 1948 by the trustees of Columbia University with a bequest from the historian Frederic Bancroft, includes an award of $10,000.

Columbia Provost John Coatsworth will present the awards at a dinner next month.

Edward Dickinson, professor and chair of the Department of History, said three faculty members winning the prize in five years is "a further testament to the intellectual and scholarly dynamism of our department."

This is the fourth time overall that department faculty have received a Bancroft Prize, beginning in 1996 when Alan S. Taylor won for William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. The book also won Taylor the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes. He taught at UC Davis from 1994 to 2014. 

Historian Gregory Downs has been awarded a 2018 UC Davis Academic Senate's Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award for his leadership in establishing the nation’s first monument to Reconstruction.

The January 2017 designation of the new monument in the historic Sea Islands region of Beaufort County, South Carolina, followed nearly four years of efforts by Downs and other experts on the post-Civil War era.

In nominating Downs for the award, fellow UC Davis history professor Eric Rauchway said his colleague’s devotion to setting the record straight on Reconstruction led to “an accomplishment of value to the public that few of us will ever match.”

Downs has devoted much of his career to educating the public about a widely misunderstood period in U.S. history—writing books, articles and an interactive website about the "forgotten second founding of the nation.”

He co-wrote the National Park Service’s Theme Study on Reconstruction, helped edit the Park Service’s handbook on Reconstruction and helped identify appropriate sites for a monument.

When President Barack Obama, during his last week in office, proclaimed the new monument to Reconstruction, he echoed Downs’ words—saying that the era “was in many ways the nation’s second founding, as Americans abolished slavery and struggled earnestly, if not always successfully, to build a nation of free and equal citizens.”

The Academic Senate award, given annually, honors "exceptional faculty who continue the tradition and demonstrate the commitment of the Davis campus to public service.”

2017-18 ISS Junior Faculty Research Grants

Diversity has long been a challenge in the history profession. According to the AHA, the nation’s largest professional group of historians, African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but only 5 percent of all history faculty nationwide; Latinos, who make up roughly 14.5 percent of the population, represent only 3 percent of history faculty. The Equity Award was established in 1996 to promote diversity.

The even lower representation of Chicana historians impressed Oropeza during her doctoral studies at Cornell University in the early 1990s. She heard a talk by Vicki Ruiz, a noted Chicano/a historian who taught at UC Davis from 1985-92 and who is now a distinguished professor at UC Irvine, and had the opportunity to meet her. Ruiz greeted her by saying, “‘Good to meet you. You’re No. 13.’” Oropeza was confused until Ruiz explained: “She said that I was the 13th Mexican American woman in the nation to get a Ph.D. in history,” recalled Oropeza. “That was a few years ago, but there’s not that many of us.”

Inspiring Mentor

A UC Davis faculty member since 1996, Oropeza has made an impact by mentoring her graduate students. She meets with these young scholars regularly to share and discuss their research—a group that some of her students have dubbed "Team Lorena" and that Oropeza calls their “mutual sounding board support team.” She believes that preparing students for life with a Ph.D. is essential, especially in a changing economy.

“The best thing about working with Lorena is that she makes it [the study environment] home,” said Genesis Lara, a Ph.D. student and a member of “Team Lorena.” “It’s just such a great feeling to know you always have a support system for you. [She] always believes in you and wants you to be the best that you can, and I think that just makes all the difference.”

Graduate student Griselda Wille said, “Lorena was the mentor that I was looking for. When I think about what I wanted from graduate school, Lorena is what I imagined, and I latched myself onto her for dear life.”

Second Diversity Award

Oropeza will officially receive the Equity Award on January 4, 2018, at the American Historical Society’s Annual meeting in Washington, DC. The Equity Award comes on the heels of the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community, which she received in February 2017. She was surprised and honored by both awards, and she admits that she’d rather stay out of the limelight and focus instead on research, teaching, and mentoring.

“To be recognized . . . is really gratifying. I never think of what I do as unusual but evidently some other people did,” she said. “I’m honored by both awards, but I see it as just the work that I do.”

A Journalist Turned Historian

Oropeza’s experiences as a journalist in Arizona and Florida inform her research and remind her of the importance of equity in the field of history. “As a reporter,” she said, “the question was, ‘How do you make the newsroom reflect the city?’ Journalists miss important stories if they don’t have a connection to the whole city and all of its manifestations.

 “Who sets up the [historical] archive and what voices are included? If you’re only looking at it from one perspective or if you don’t have a bunch of diverse people in it, you might be missing stuff.”

A More Inclusive View of U.S. History

Oropeza has been fascinated by the intersection between race and foreign policy since her days studying American foreign policy in graduate school. Much like news reports, her research uses oral history in addition to available written documents. Oral history taps the memories of people who participated in or witnessed historical events—providing a way to include previously silenced voices. “Oral history is transmitted through memory and time and therefore can be viewed as a little less trustworthy,” she said. “But in some cases, that might be the only source you have. So to me, oral history research is deeply tied to a larger equity project.”

For her, this larger project is integrating Chicano/a history into the broader narrative of American history, particularly in the 1960s. Her forthcoming book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, examines the leader of a Chicano resistance movement called the Alianza in New Mexico in the '60s. She describes the Alianza as an anticolonial movement, since its members sought to reclaim the land that had been taken from their ancestors by Americans following the war between the U.S. and Mexico in the 1840s. Race and foreign policy was also the subject of her first book was Raza Sí!, Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era, which was published in 2005.

At UC Davis, she regularly teaches “The History of the United States” from the Civil War through the Cold War (HIS 17B), “Mexican American History” (HIS 169A/B), and co-teaches “History of the United States in the Middle East” (HIS 80) with her colleague Baki Tezcan.

— Noah Pflueger-Peters (B.A., English, ’17) 

The Other Slavery was one of three winners announced March 14 by Columbia University. Reséndez's book was also named a finalist last fall for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

The Other Slavery tells the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Native Americans, from the time of the conquistadors through the early 20th century. Reséndez builds a case that enslavement was more responsible than epidemics for the decimation of native populations across North America.

"Receiving the Bancroft Prize is an incredible honor," Reséndez said. "I am humbled by the notable historians who have gotten it over the years going back to 1948; and I am especially fond of the fact that our former colleague Alan S. Taylor and our current colleague Ari Kelman have gotten it."

Kelman won in 2014 for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, about the Colorado site of an 1864 massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahos.

Taylor won in 1996 for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. The book also won Taylor the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes. He taught at UC Davis from 1994 to 2014. 

Bancroft Prize winners are judged in terms of the scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation they present in the areas of American history and diplomacy. There were 239 books submitted for consideration for the 2017 prize.

The other 2017 Bancroft Prize winning books were Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson, and Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers by Nancy Tomes.

Columbia Provost John H. Coatsworth will present the awards at the Bancroft Prize dinner next month. The Bancroft Prize includes an award of $10,000 to each author.

Olmsted told Time that teaching her course this fall during the 2016 presidential election was an “entirely different experience” than when she last taught it four years ago.

“It seemed like the stakes were higher,” Olmsted said in the Time magazine article, "How Donald Trump Changed the Way College Students Learn About Conspiracy Theories."

“I was more stressed because I did not want to be perceived as partisan," she said. "On the other hand, it was clear that these political events were directly relevant to what we were talking about in the classroom.”

The article also quoted student Sierra Shidner. 

Read the article. 

We are aware that many of our students have been distressed and distracted, and in some cases have felt threatened, by some of the rhetoric widely reported in the media during the recent presidential campaign. Some of that rhetoric was widely understood to be disparaging and hostile to immigrants, to people of other than European heritage, to women, to people of various sexual orientations or gender identities, and to members of certain religious communities. 

People who fall into these categories constitute a very large proportion of the population of our great state of California—in fact, they constitute the majority here. Some three quarters of our students at the University of California are immigrants or the children of immigrants, are not of European parentage, or are members of the religious communities that were characterized as suspect or untrustworthy in some election rhetoric. At UC Davis, 59 percent are women. 

Some events since the election have further heightened the sense among some of our students that they are not welcome, or are somehow problematic, or are in some way under threat. 
The History Department supports the First Amendment right of free speech, but we also believe that all students have a right to pursue their educational goals untroubled by fear and anxiety. We recognize, value, and will absolutely safeguard that right. We will be taking appropriate steps to do that in our individual interactions with students, in our classes, in our departments, and in our colleges. We also support the efforts of President Napolitano and the entire UC administration in doing the same.

Downs, along with Kate Masur, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Northwestern University, have completed a study for the National Park Service focused on the years after the Civil War. During this time, the federal government attempted to remake the nation, ultimately diminishing recognition of the roles African Americans played in the nation’s history.

Downs hopes the research will lead to new parks, or parts of existing parks, dedicated to an era that has been “easier for Americans to forget than remember.” Downs co-wrote the National Park Service’s Theme Study on Reconstruction, expected to be available in the fall, and helped edit the Park Service’s handbook on Reconstruction, which is available now.

The handbook, with editing contributions from Robert Sutton, retired chief historian of the National Park Service, and historian John Latschar, is being used now by National Park Service interpretive rangers and historians across the country as they seek to provide the public a better understanding of the era. 

“I think there should be at least one and possibly several parks that are dedicated to Reconstruction,” said Downs, who has visited historic sites and talked to descendants of Reconstruction-era figures, and historians familiar with the sites. Only Congress can establish a national park, but Downs said many of the sites can be combined into existing parks.

“My initial idea was to write a more restricted, more contained book,” the UC Davis history professor said in a recent interview on San Francisco public radio station KALW’s Your Call program. “But the more I learned about it, the more I realized that the best service I could do for the public and for the [history] profession at large was to point to the larger story, the big picture.”

His resulting book, The Other Slavery, The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), has done just that, according to widespread critical acclaim.

“It is not often that a single work of history can change the course of an entire field and upset the received notions and received knowledge of the generations, but that is exactly what The Other Slavery does,” begins a review in the Los Angeles Times.

“No other book before has so thoroughly related the broad history of Indian slavery in the Americas, and not just its facts but the very reason it has been overlooked,” writes a San Francisco Chronicle reviewer.

“Andrés Reséndez lifts the veil of time to dispel ‘our historical myopia’ of the enslavement of Native Americans,” according to The Chicago Review of Books.

The book builds the case that slavery played a bigger role than epidemics in decimating Native American populations.

In his interview with Your Call radio program host Rose Aguilar, Reséndez said there are many local accounts of enslavement of Native Americans.

“But it is very easy to dismiss those and say, well, a couple of dozen here and a couple of dozen there don’t really add up to much,” he said. “So eventually… I became persuaded that the best thing I could do was try to come up with a big estimate and to try to provide an outline of the whole system of enslavement that loomed over North America for four centuries.”

Reséndez called Indian slavery a “massive story” with relevance today.

“I think it’s important to remember it because today the kinds of human trafficking that go on can be traced more directly to these forms of bondage that I’m talking about, rather than a system like African American slavery that was sanctioned by states. Today, slavery is all over the world — 35.8 million human beings around the world are enslaved in these other types of activities that pose as labor arrangements, yet they are akin to slavery. That’s the story that I want to tell. That’s the continuity that’s worth remembering.”

A lecture by University of California, Davis professor Eric Rauchway will air on C-SPAN3’s American History TV (AHTV) this Saturday, January 24, at 8:00 p.m. ET. In Davis, California, C-SPAN3 is available on channel 98.

In this class, Professor Rauchway talks about the role the British Royal Air Force played as part of the Allied strategy during World War II. He describes how proponents of air power -- still fairly new at the time -- had to compete with the army and navy for resources. One of the major air force campaigns was the British bombing of Cologne which was viewed as retaliation for the bombing of London by German forces.

Each Saturday at 8:00 p.m., a different college lecture is featured as part of the channel’s “Lectures in History” series.

Professor Rauchway’s class will available for online viewing in its entirety after it airs at http://www.c-span.org/video/?322561-1/discussion-allied-strategy-world-war-ii.

About C-SPAN:

Created by the cable TV industry and now in 100 million TV households, C-SPAN programs three public affairs television networks in both SD and HD; C- SPAN Radio, heard in Washington DC and nationwide via XM Satellite Radio; and a video-rich website which hosts the C-SPAN Video Library. Visit http://www.c-span.org/. 

Professor Daniel Stolzenberg will receive the UC President's Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities for the 2013-2014 academic year. Professor Stolzenberg will use the fellowship to conduct archival research for a book project about the early modern origins of Orientalist scholarship, focusing on Rome as a Mediterranean entrepôt for the circulation of knowledge between Christian and Islamic societies.

Charles Walker, Professor of History and Director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas, was declared an "Honorary Professor" by the History Department at the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cuzco (Peru) on August 6.  Professor Walker taught at the UNSAAC in 1989 and 1990 and has returned most summers since, offering a course in Cusco under UCD's Summer Sessions International program.

Members of the History Department and the UNSAAC administrators honored Professor Walker in a closing ceremony at a National History Conference in Cusco attended by more than 300 people.  Chancellor Germán Zecenarro lauded Professor Walker's publications on Cusco and his close collaboration with students and faculty.

Congratulations Ari Kelman, Professor of History, History Project Faculty Advisor, and associate vice provost of Undergraduate Education for Honors, for winning the Bancroft Prize for his monograph: A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013).