History Graduate Research Articles

A Future in the Past

Australia's History educators frequently face challenges regarding the value of post-school qualifications in history. Comments from Australian Government ministers have intensified claims that history degrees lack broad skills valued by employers. This study addresses the dearth of research examining the alignment between learning outcomes from history degrees and occupational skills. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on learning outcomes from 27 history degrees offered by Australian universities. These outcomes were mapped against the Australian Government's Skills Classification Core Competencies and Occupation Listings, employing a rigorous curriculum mapping methodology. The results identified 126 occupations that align with the skills and competencies developed through history degrees. This research not only challenges misconceptions about the employability of history graduates but also provides empirical evidence of the broad applicability of historical skills across various sectors. The findings reveal a significant concentration of history graduates in managerial and professional roles, indicating the high value placed on critical thinking, analytical, and communication skills developed by studying history. However, the study also highlights areas for improvement, particularly in digital engagement and numeracy skills. The research demonstrates that history degrees cultivate a range of transferable skills highly sought after in the modern job market, including advanced communication, critical analysis, research proficiency, and adaptability. These skills position history graduates to excel in diverse fields such as public policy, journalism, law, business, and education. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in curriculum design to enhance graduate employability. This research contributes valuable insights for curriculum development and career guidance in history education, demonstrating that history degrees lead to diverse and meaningful employment outcomes. It also provides a robust evidence base for advocating the value of historical studies in an increasingly skills-focused higher education landscape.

A comparative analysis of gender trend in academic achievement among history graduates of a University in Nigeria

Given gender as properties that distinguish organisms based on their reproductive roles as female or male, these properties have been argued to have discrepancies in the learning abilities of males and females. Therefore, this study analysed gender and academic achievement trend of graduates in History Studies from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, from 2019 to 2021. This study adopted ex post facto research design within a census population. 1,491 male and female graduates of History Education from the Faculty of Education and History and International Studies from the Faculty of Arts from 2019 to 2021 were used as the sample. Therefore, the Order of Proceedings of the University of Ilorin for 2019, 2020, and 2021 was used for data collection. The data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics, such as bar charts and percentages, to answer research questions, and inferential statistics, such as the independent t-test for the hypothesis at a 0.05 level of significance. Findings from this study revealed that the trend of academic achievement among male graduates with 2nd-Class-Upper and Lower was upward, while the proportion of males with 3rd Class and Pass was downward. The trend of academic achievement among female graduates with 2nd-Class-Upper, 2nd-Class-Lower, and Pass was upward, while the trend for 3rd-Class was downward. Additionally, there was no statistically significant difference in the academic achievement of male and female graduates from the University of Ilorin. Therefore, it is recommended that male and female students should take their studies and courses seriously, among other recommendations.

From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime.

From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime Leslie J. Reagan (bio) I began researching the history of abortion in the United States when I was in Judy Leavitt’s Women and Health class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Assigned a research paper, I suggested the 1960s abortion legalization movement. “That’s too recent,” Judy replied; she advised me to instead examine the medical literature for discussions of abortion. I went to the UW’s incredible medical library, where I used the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office to identify journal articles about abortion and then tracked them down in dozens of regional and specialist medical journals held by the library.1 In this first-year graduate seminar paper, I discovered the persistent conversation among doctors about abortion and their own practices and techniques of performing what they called “therapeutic abortion”—induced when the physician believed that pregnancy threatened the life or health of the woman. The medical literature included patient case studies, collective data, the introduction of new instruments, and discussion about when a therapeutic abortion was required. At one point I switched to colonial history, but one sleepless night of tossing and turning told me that I was not done researching abortion. I made it my dissertation topic. The threat to the legality of abortion posed by Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, while I was a college student, had turned me into an activist, so the topic mattered to me. [End Page 11] But equally important, no one had investigated the hundred years during which abortion from conception on had been criminalized across the nation. What happened to women when early abortion was criminalized? What role did the medical profession play in the new legal landscape? How did the state enforce the new laws?2 I have been asked what it’s like to do research on a “controversial” topic. I don’t know that I ever thought much about whether focusing on abortion was controversial or dangerous. My advisors, Judy Leavitt and Linda Gordon, supported the project. And as an activist before becoming a graduate student, I had already managed my fears of public speaking; my anxieties focused more on writing. The one person who expressed opposition to this dissertation topic, renowned historian Gerda Lerner, was trying to protect me and other students of hers interested in studying sexuality from jeopardizing their future careers; the profession was far more conservative at that time, and many historians were suspicious and disrespectful of topics they considered trivial or not “real history.” She feared that the new field of women’s history and the UW Women’s History Program that she founded could be associated with sexuality and sexual nonconformity at a time when women’s history was already widely marginalized. Her anxiety resembled feminist Betty Friedan’s fear that the “purple menace”—i.e., lesbianism—would hurt the new feminist movement and her new organization, the National Organization for Women (NOW). But Gerda’s fears arose both from her knowledge of the male-dominated historical profession and from her experience as a Jew and a leftist in a rapidly Nazifying Austria: as a student in Vienna, after the 1938 Anschluss, she had been active in the student anti-Nazi resistance and was imprisoned for six weeks until she managed to escape to the United States. A decade later she had seen how the 1950s McCarthyist Red Scare destroyed many people’s careers (including her husband’s).3 But Gerda was no coward: despite her disapproval of sex-related topics, when I told her of my plan to pursue the history of abortion, she soon returned to her role as a historian and mentor, suggesting archives and sources. Though Gerda’s response unnerved me, I plunged ahead—with the support of my advisors Judy Leavitt and [End Page 12] Linda Gordon4 and the extraordinary group of women’s history graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. I was fortunate, too, to find support from the wider historical profession. Senior scholars whom I knew only as books, like Jim Mohr, Joan Brumberg, Allan Brandt, and Nancy Tomes...

Swan Lake to cyber [skills - arts

Remember that controversial campaign featuring a ballerina encouraged to take up a career in cyber security? It appears the current climate has nudged a fair few people previously in arts and humanities toward the tech sector. We spoke to a handful of people who have made this leap. Coding, says a former National Trust professional, is a little like knitting. “It's like magic - you write some code, click a button and results just appear. It's more creative than I realised,” explains Jen Openshaw, a history graduate who's retrained to become a software engineer. Her career, while unusual, follows a pattern familiar to many who've leapfrogged into engineering and technology from an arts and humanities background.

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: <i>The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson</i> and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender &amp; Sexuality in World History: Ten Design Principles

A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender &amp; Sexuality in World History: Ten Design Principles

News from the CENFAD Community

Highlighting the accomplishments of former and current Temple history graduate students and professors, as well as others from the CENFAD community of scholars.

Reflections on Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art

In December 2020, the Vatican unveiled its annual nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square. Headlines across conservative Catholic newspapers quickly latched on to what many observers described as “shockingly unconventional”: nineteen monumental ceramic figures, including an astronaut, a cyborg, and a turkey-dinosaur chimera, surrounding a covered sculpture of the infant Christ. The sensationalized convergence of otherworldly and religious subjects was a means to reflect on the 2020 Art History Graduate Student Association’s 45th Annual Symposium Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art, which likewise examined manifestations of the supernatural. The paranormal is important for the study of art and culture not simply because they elicit new and diverse aesthetic categories, but also because as a strategy, they offer insight into major socio-political and environmental problems shaping the present. This paper traces the development of the symposium’s theme and showcases some of the ways artists and art historians are engaging new perspectives and strategies of alternate world-making.

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

Doran H. Ross

Doran H. Ross

Tearing Down Walls, Opening Doors: Teaching an Art History College Course in Jail During Covid

AbstractWith no possibility of teaching in prisons in person because of the pandemic, a group of social justice concerned art history graduate students offered a remote learning college course for people incarcerated in a detention facility in the United States. The culturally sustaining and trauma‐sensitive course, delivered asynchronously via tablets, was a survey of contemporary art. Because of a quarantine in response to the COVID pandemic, the class had the opportunity to use technology that is new to carceral spaces. The advantages and problems will be discussed. This article will close with practical recommendations for educators seeking to provide similar programming.

Surviving, Learning, and Striving in the Times of Pandemic: Teaching With A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY)

With the onset of COVID-19, spring 2020 proved difficult for teachers and students everywhere. But amid the challenges of online and hybrid education, incorporating A Journal of the Plague Year: a COVID-19 Archive (JOTPY) into classrooms provided students a unique and impactful learning experience, while also helping them process the anxieties and uncertainties of the pandemic. In this article, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) Cheryl Jiménez Frei shares insights and best practices for teaching with JOTPY, and a model incorporating the archive across multidisciplinary courses to address archival silences. Beyond the university, JOTPY can be a valuable pedagogical tool for elementary, middle, and high-school teachers during the pandemic. To examine this, in the article’s second half, UWEC public history graduate student and high-school teacher for the Eau Claire Area School District Shane Carlson shares his reflections on contributing to the archive as a student, strategies bringing JOTPY into his own teaching, and the results of elementary teachers also doing so in rural Wisconsin.

CoC Methodology: Generating Communities of Care Within Indigenous Spaces Through Trauma-Informed Visual Culture

Interdisciplinary Two-Spirit, Métis/Saulteaux/Polish artist, Dayna Danger establishes Indigenous protocol through their artistic practice, which translates through their Mask series and their digital film Bebeschendaam, as they demonstrate the ways in which community is generated, upheld and maintained through their art works. In particular, these collaborative projects exemplify methodologies that revolve around building and nurturing community, which generates a Communities of Care methodology, formed by feminist theorist and scholar, bell hooks. Through this concept, Danger advocated for the term, CoC Methodology at their keynote at Concordia University’s Art History Graduate Student Association’s (AHGSA) 13th annual symposium on the theme of Communities of Care, held in February 2019. CoC Methodology relates to the stability and growth of Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, trans, female and gender-variant Indigenous folks. By advocating for CoC Methodology, Danger’s artistic practice not only concentrates on the creative output, but also on the facilitation of community building and safe-keeping.

Applying Library of Congress Demographic Group Characteristics for Creators

This research project explores how to ethically, efficiently, and accurately add demographic terms for African American authors to catalog records. A Department of History graduate student located evidence of self-identification as African American for authors, and catalogers added the demographic term to bibliographic records and are in the process of creating work level Name Title Authority Records for titles written by those authors. This work is the beginning of systematically enhancing catalog data with author characteristics to support making such information available in faceted results.

Editorial

Historical thinking, a necessary tool for us to make sense of an increasinglycomplex world, is on a path of decline across the world. In a recent NewYorker article entitled “The Decline of Historical Thinking” (February 4,2019), Eric Alterman, an English Professor at CUNY and a public intellectual,bemoaned the nosedive that enrollment in history departments hastaken in universities across the United States. For the past decade, historyhas been declining more rapidly than any other major and across allethnic and racial groups, even as more and more students attend college.The steep decline in history graduates (about a third!) becomes especiallyvisible after 2011, presumably in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisiswhen students and parents at the lower rungs of society began to worryabout the financial return of investment in a college education. History isthe top loser, but it is not the only one; in fact, nearly the same rate of declineis evident in other humanities fields including area studies, languages,philosophy, and, to a slightly lesser extent, social sciences (political science,anthropology, sociology, IR, education). The winners, not surprisingly, areSTEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), particularly computerscience and health related majors.1 This trend is not a great surprise initself. What is unexpected, however, is that the decline is not uniform. Inelite universities in the United States, the humanities majors are thriving;history remains among the top declared majors at Yale, for instance. Theeducated elite, in other words, are becoming systematically differentiatedfrom the vast majority of people (“the demos”) in a powerful democracy,one that still sets intellectual and political trends in the world, and one ...

"Страсти по перестройке" в памяти и судьбах выпускников исторического факультета Кубанского госуниверситета 1992 и 1993 гг. (на материалах интервью)

"Страсти по перестройке" в памяти и судьбах выпускников исторического факультета Кубанского госуниверситета 1992 и 1993 гг. (на материалах интервью)

Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns

Book Review| February 01 2019 Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns Michael Johns. San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. 230 pages with 107 illustrations, 62 in color. $19.80. Lindsey Passenger Wieck Lindsey Passenger Wieck St. Mary's University lindsey passenger wieck is Public History Graduate Program Director, St. Mary's University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2019) 96 (1): 154–155. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.1.154 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lindsey Passenger Wieck; Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns. California History 1 February 2019; 96 (1): 154–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.1.154 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

California Gold Country’s Digital Heritage: Innovations in Community Engaged Research and Training

This article presents the results of the Historic Coulterville Digital Preservation Project, an important digital humanities research collaboration which started in the Fall 2015 between the University of California Merced Resource Center for Community Engaged Scholarship, the John Muir Geotourism Center, the Northern Mariposa County History Center, and faculty and graduate students of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program at UC Merced. Dictated by the needs and goals of the community members of the gold rush town of Coulterville, in the Sierra Foothills of California, who are invested in the preservation of their cultural heritage, the project focused on digital historic preservation in four areas of focus: i) the archives and photographs at the Northern Mariposa County History Center, ii) the Coulterville cemeteries, iii) oral histories of Coulterville, and iv) the digital documentation of Coulterville Main Street Historic District. Combined, these four areas of focus presented a breadth of subject matter through which to test various digital preservation methods in a real-world scenario as well as provided both the students and the community members the opportunity to study subjects in greater depth that were of mutual interest. The project provides an example of the potential for community-university research collaborations to benefit local communities while also providing training and networking opportunities for students, and new scholarship case studies for the scholars.

Digital humanities, digital methods, digital history, and digital outputs: History writing and the digital revolution

AbstractWhile the term “digital humanities” appears inclusive, its exact meaning remains unclear and its early association with studies in English Literature means the term has already been partially superceded by “digital methods.” However, that renaming is problematic as it emphasises the research tools used while the field itself is adjusting to include new methods, new topics, and new types of production, not just new ways of working with existing materials. Historians have long been alert to new tools as they become available to researchers. However, even as historians have revelled in the increased access to primary sources provided by digitisation and have analysed the opportunities that access offers, they have been aware of the unevenness of the digitisation process and the gaps it both creates and disguises. Issues of copyright and the ethics of creating public access to private lives have also caused historians concern. More recently, discussion about the evaluation of digital scholarship has begun. Often purely digital outputs are not formally recognised by their authors' institutions, despite having a significant online presence and contributing to scholarship. In parallel with being concerned about fairly assessing the work of peers, historians have also begun to consider how to teach (and assess) the digital skills now expected of history graduates.