Not Even Past
New Perspectives on American History
The great American novelist William Faulkner famously reported, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
History as an academic discipline is alive too. Past understandings mature and change as historians gain new insights, discover new sources and develop new research tools. Cultural change also reshapes how scholars look back on the past. The stories they tell are never settled.
They’re not even past. Historians take them up again and again, reacting to old ways of making sense of the past and bringing into the ongoing conversation new ways of telling the story that we call history.
During the 2009 spring semester, faculty from Penn’s Department of History joined in public conversations that touched on their recent scholarship to explore aspects of America’s story.
January 28, 2009
KATHLEEN BROWN in conversation with Kathy Peiss
Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America
February 18, 2009
THOMAS SUGRUE in conversation with Sarah Barringer Gordon
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
March 18, 2009
STEVEN HAHN and BARBARA SAVAGE
Rethinking African American Politics and Religion
April 15, 2009
THOMAS CHILDERS in conversation with Bruce Kuklick
Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II
May 16, 2009
RICHARD BEEMAN
Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
Faculty Participants
Richard Beeman is a historian of the American Revolutionary Era, and he has written six books and several dozen articles on aspects of America's political and constitutional history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His most recent book, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution is the most comprehensive account of the Constitutional Convention to appear in the past half century.
Kathleen Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. A professor of history, she teaches courses on comparative slavery, colonial America, women in American history, gender and sex in early America, and cultures and contact in the Atlantic World. She is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.
Thomas Childers, the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History, is an internationally recognized expert on the Third Reich and the Second World War. He recently completed a popular trilogy on themes related to the war: Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II, In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and The Camps of Nazi Germany and Soldier from the war Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II.
Sarah Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History. She is a widely recognized scholar and commentator on religion in American public life and the law of church and state. Her expertise encompasses American constitutional history, religion and religious experience, westward expansion and property. Her first book is The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, and she is at work on another about religion and law in the 20th century.
Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History, is a specialist on the history of the American South, the history of the 19th-century United States, the international history of slavery and emancipation, and African American history. His book A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration won several prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for history. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom is due to be published this year.
Bruce Kuklick is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. He is a scholar of the political, diplomatic and intellectual history of the United States. The author of 10 books, his most recent books are Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War From Kennan to Kissinger and the biography Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine. A new title, One Nation Under God, is scheduled for publication this year.
Kathy Peiss, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, is chair of the history department. She has written on the history of working women, leisure and popular culture, the beauty industry, and working-class and interracial sexuality. Her books include "Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York", "Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture" and "Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality."
Barbara Savage, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought, teaches 20th-century African American history, the history of American religious and social reform movements and the history of the relationship between media and politics. She is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938 – 1948 and most recently, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us:The Politics of Black Religion.
Thomas Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of History, is a specialist in 20th-century American politics, urban history, civil rights and race. The Origins of the Urban Crisis, his first book, was showered with awards. His most recent work is Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. He is currently at work on a history of real estate in America from European conquest to the foreclosure crisis.