In April Kyle Ciani presented the
paper “Revelations of a Reformer: The
Awakening of Social Injustice in the
Mind of Helen D. Marston Beardsley” at
the 33rd Annual Western Association of
Women Historians Conference held at
the Huntington Library in Pasadena,
California.
The editorial boards of H-France and
the Society for French Historical Studies
have jointly named
Anthony Crubaugh
18th century book review editor.
Ray Clemens has engaged in several
recent collaborations with Chicago’s
Newberry Library, including publishing
the National Endowment for the Human-
ities slide set “Gregorio Dati’s Sfera and
Geographical Education in Renaissance
Florence” and presenting in February
2002 the paper “Text and Meaning in
Hildegard’s Corpus” before the Medieval
Intellectual History Workshop. Clemens
also held the workshop “Witchcraft and
Magic in the Middle Ages and Renais-
sance” for the program Teachers as
Scholars: A Professional Development
Program of the Newberry Library and
the Chicago Academy of Sciences in Part-
nership with the Chicago Public Schools.
At the 2002 American Historical
Association annual meeting in San Fran-
cisco,
Frederick Drake delivered the
paper “Building Collegiality between
Teachers and Professors to Prepare His-
torical Citizens.” Drake traveled to Riga,
Latvia, in July 2001 to present “Principles
and Practices of Democracy in Preservice
Education” at the conference Internation-
al Partnerships for Civic Education and
Democracy: A Conference for Civic Edu-
cators from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
and the United States of America. He has
coauthored with Lynn R. Nelson “Myths
and History in the United States: The
Need for Deliberative Discussions,” Inter-
national Society for History Didactics,
2001 Yearbook; and “Civic Intelligence
and Liberal Intelligence in the History
Education of Social Studies Teacher and
Students” in
Principles and Practices of
Democracy in the Education of Social Stud-
ies Teachers: Civic Learning in Teacher Edu-
cation,
edited by John J. Patrick and
Robert S. Leming, (Purdue University,
2001).
Sandra Harmon will guest curate for
the McLean County Museum of History
a special exhibit on the Great Depression
set to open October 29, 2004. Titled
Weathering the Storm: Life in the Great
Depression,
the exhibit will open on the
75th anniversary of the 1929 stock
market crash.
The Journal of Urban History has
named
Alan Lessoff to its editorial
board.
Lawrence W. McBride and Freder-
ick Drake
have written six lessons that
comprise the book
From Courtroom to
Classroom: The Lincoln Legal Papers Cur-
riculum,
edited by Dennis E. Suttles and
Daniel W. Stowell, and published in
2002 by the Illinois History Preservation
Agency. The Illinois Bar Association and
Abraham Lincoln Associates provided
grant support for the project. Four gradu-
ates of the Illinois State history education
program assisted McBride and Drake:
Shari Conditt Hills, Carmen Ganser,
Jessica Pilson,
and Lindsay Shaw.
Clinical Applications: The Yellow
Emperor’s Canon on Internal Medicine,
edited by Richard Pearce and published
by New World Press, Beijing, is being
made available by the China Internation-
al Book Trading Corporation.
Jo Rayfield, history professor emerita
and Illinois State University archivist,
delivered the 2002 Heritage Day address
“A University Goes to War.” The event
was sponsored by Senior Professionals
of Illinois State University.
American Nineteenth Century History
has published Silvana Siddali’s article
“‘Refined, Highfalutin’ Principles’: The
Northern Public and the Constitution
in 1861-1862” in volume 2, number 2
(2001).
Mark Wyman’s article “Return
Migration: Old Story, New Story”
appeared in the London-published,
special issue of
Immigrants & Minorities
titled “Stayers, Leavers and Returners,”
volume 20, number 1 (March 2001). He
also authored the booklet
ParkLands: A
History,
which is about a McLean County
(Illinois) preservation area.
3
Presses roll for History Department faculty
Master teacher receives
Sorensen prize
The prestigious Clarence
Sorensen prize has gone to Joyce
A. Witt, D.A. ’01, who served as
the department’s “master teacher”
for the 1999-2000 school year.
Witt, who teaches at Highland
Park High School in Chicago’s
northeast suburbs, will receive
$500 and a plaque for the award,
which goes to the outstanding dis-
sertation written by an Illinois State
student during the previous year.
Her dissertation, written under
the mentorship of Lawrence
McBride, is titled “A Humanities
Approach to the Study of the Holo-
caust.” It won the Cavanagh Award
for best history doctoral disserta-
tion in fall 2001.
A 1966 master’s graduate who has
authored or edited eight books on Native
Americans received an honorary Doctor
of Literature at the February 21st
Founders Day convocation.
He is R. David Edmunds, now Wat-
son Professor of American History Chair
in Arts and Humanities at the University
of Texas at Dallas. He spoke at the
convocation and met with History
Department faculty and others from the
University in sessions during a two-day
period.
Edmunds’s record includes serving as
director of the Newberry Library’s Center
for History of the American Indian, as
well as consultant for such documentary
films as
Ishi, the Last Yahi; The Way West;
and the Five Hundred Nations series.
At Illinois State in the 1960s he wrote
his master’s thesis on “A History of the
Kickapoo Indians in Illinois, 1750-1834.”
He then went to the University of Okla-
homa, and his Ph.D. dissertation on the
Potawatomi tribe was later published as
The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire;
it won the Francis Parkman Prize in
American history.
He taught at the University of
Wyoming, Texas Christian University,
and Indiana University before taking his
present position in Dallas.
Indian historian Edmunds honored