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News & Events

Professor Sam Thomas Curates Exhibit on ‘Political Cartoons of the Gilded Age’

In this feisty election season, the Michigan State University Museum presents a new exhibition with a political theme: "No Holds Barred: Political Cartoons of the Gilded Age," Aug. 24 - Dec. 31 in the West Gallery.

Among the most important developments in the popularization of the Gilded Age press (the late 19th Century) was the increasingly sophisticated use of visual ridicule -- political cartoons that informed, aroused, and pronounced on myriad contemporary issues, explains Samuel J. Thomas, MSU professor of history and the exhibition's curator. Favorite targets included graft and fraud that then, as now, too often characterized political life, most often at the local and state levels, but also at times at the national level.

"Political cartoons were widely read and quickly became the most effective criticism available in this highly partisan political culture. "Puck" magazine, the source of the political cartoons in this exhibit, was the premier journal of visual satire during the late 19th century, notes Thomas.

"The late Nineteenth Century was the Golden Age of political or editorial cartooning," he adds. "Colorful personalities and controversial events combined with advances in print and visual technologies and exceptionally talented artists made the Gilded Age a cartoonist's paradise."

Political cartoons -- a staple for searing social commentary in today's newspapers, periodicals and online -- are more than mere illustrations. They are valuable primary sources of the American past. Thomas, who has used these political cartoons in MSU classes and seminars for a number of years, was inspired to create a special exhibit at the MSU Museum during the 2008 election season. The "No Holds Barred" exhibit features 40 original political cartoons from his personal collections.

"They demonstrate both the superb artistry of their creators at the same time that they provide a unique mirror of a bygone age, the residuals of which are still very much with us in this presidential election year," Thomas adds.

MSU History Department co-sponsors international Sport History conference

SPORT HISTORY AND SPORT STUDIES IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

International Conference at the University of Stellenbosch Stellenbosch, South Africa, 1-2 July 2008

This interdisciplinary conference aims to provide a platform for a discussion of the state and future of Southern African and African sport history and sport studies. It also aims to act as a vehicle for the consolidation of South African sport history research and writing, inter alia, through the publication of a volume/s synthesizing current and past work.

The topics will include biography; organizational histories; gender relations and changing patterns in women's sport; sport and apartheid; sport and the liberation struggle; sport on the African continent; the international dimensions of apartheid and sport; sport and identity; sport in the re-imaging of the nation; sport as a socializing and political instrument; capitalism, class and elitism in sport, and the construction of masculinity.

This international conference is a collaborative effort between six institutions, namely the History Department at Stellenbosch University; the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Fort Hare; the History Department at Michigan State University; the Institute of Northern Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University; the International Centre for the Study of Sports History at De Montfort University; and the Sport and Exercise Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster.

The conference is intended by these institutions to be a contribution to the overall preparations for the 2010 FIFA WORLD CUP, which will be held for the first time in Africa.

Six professors to join the Department of History

The Department of History will add six new professors this fall. Georgina Montgomery, Charles Keith, Helen Veit, Ed Murphy, Rich Bellon, and Michael Stamm will be joining the department, continuing the trend of enlargement that has brought over fifteen additional historians to Michigan State in the past few years.

Charles Keith will receive his PhD from Yale University in October 2008. He specializes in the history of Vietnam, specifically the French colonial period, and he is currently working on a manuscript about the transition from missionary Catholicism to a national Catholic Church in Vietnam. Charles's teaching interests are in Southeast Asian history and French colonial history. In the fall, he will teach IAH 204 (Asia and the World), and HST 347 (Modern France).

Georgina Montgomery received her PhD in 2005 from the University of Minnesota and has spent the last two years teaching at Montana State University, Bozeman. She specializes in the history of the life sciences, including ethology and primatology and is currently revising her book manuscript, Seeing Primates Scientifically. Georgina is excited to contribute to the History Department's Specialization in the History of Science and participate in MSU's African Studies and GenCen programs. In the spring, she will be teaching Hist 110: Animal Histories.

Richard Bellon earned his PhD in History from the University of Washington in 2000. He has taught history of science for the past seven years, first from 2001 to 2004 at the University of Minnesota and since at Michigan State University's Lyman Briggs College. His current research concentrates on nineteenth-century natural history and he is writing a book examining the role of botany in the reception of Darwin's evolutionary theory. (Or, to put it another way, he spends far too much time reading obsessively detailed accounts of the sex lives of plants, written by men with excessively impressive mutton chops). In the Fall he will teach HST 483: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: On Life and Liberty in Victorian Britain.

Edward Murphy received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Michigan in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. He is currently completing a book manuscript that explores how squatters in Santiago, Chile have become property dwellers during the course of the past half century. Integrating his interests in state formation, the production of space, domesticity, and social movements, the book analyzes the centrality of property ownership to claims for citizenship, the making of personhood, and the formation of neighborhoods. Murphy will also be joining the Global Urban Studies Program, where he will have the opportunity to maintain his commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry. In the fall, he will be teaching IAH 205 (Latin America and the World) and HST 486 (Rethinking the Cold War from Las Américas).

Helen Zoe Veit will receive her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2008. Her research interests include food and nutrition, the history of technology, and war and society. She is now completing a manuscript on food and rationality in the early twentieth-century United States. She has a joint appointment with Lyman Briggs College, and in Fall 2008 she will teach HST 454 (A History of Inventions in America) and LB 492.

Michael Stamm received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2006 and taught in the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication from 2006 to 2008. He specializes in twentieth century American media and journalism history, and is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Mixed Media: Newspaper Ownership of Radio in American Politics and Society, 1920-1952. The book, which will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, examines how newspapers (the “old media” of the twentieth century) shaped the institutional development of radio broadcasting (the “new media” of the 1920s-1940s) in the United States, and how diverse groups of reformers sought to prevent the early corporate consolidation of the American media. In the fall, he will teach HST 480 and ISS 215.

Register for Online Summer Session Courses

The History Department of Michigan State University is offering online courses for both summer 2008 sessions. You can take certain 100, 200, and 300 level courses online from anywhere in the world and make progress on your degree. All you need is a sustainable, broadband connection to the internet. You can finish a 100 or 200 level prerequisite over the summer and then take more advanced courses during the fall and spring terms. You can also take our 300 level courses on History of the State of Michigan, Early Modern Europe, the Civil War, and History of Modern Sport, many of which can help prepare you for state teacher certification. More information can be found on the Online Courses website.