History Department
After World War II, California's forest labor camps offered state prisoners a bit of freedom and community respect in exchange for dangerous work fighting fires and floods and providing disaster relief. But the growing estrangement between urban, minority prisoners and the rural communities where the camps were located all but put an end to the experiment.
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A keepsake two-dollar bill in a man's wallet. A firefighter's battered helmet. A sister's favorite handbag. Everyday objects, they became something more when retrieved from the ruins of the World Trade Center towers. Filmmaker Jonathan Fein will examine how people invest such ordinary objects with deep personal meaning in the aftermath of catastrophes in a presentation Tuesday (Dec. 1) at Indiana University.
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The History Learning Project, a project developed by Indiana University faculty members to document and improve student learning in the discipline of history, is the subject of a feature article this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Faculty members from the Indiana University School of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences are beginning newly funded projects to enhance the teaching of U.S. history in schools, thanks to grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The grants are each from the Teaching American History program, which the department describes as a program designed "to raise student achievement by improving teachers' knowledge and understanding of and appreciation for traditional U.S. history."
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Over the past 20 years or so, scholars have delved deeply into the racial ideologies that became influential in the early 1900s and helped facilitate the rise of Nazi Germany. But has the pendulum swung too far? A conference this weekend at Indiana University Bloomington will examine the limits of the "racial state" model in explaining Germany's Third Reich and explore the role of other factors, such as nationalism and ethnic and class issues.
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In its September 2009 issue, the Indiana Magazine of History offers five essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of Richard C. Wade's seminal book in Midwestern and urban history, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830.
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