Christopher Daly (Boston University) will be appearing in a new historical documentary titled “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People.” It has been shown at several film festivals (and is due to show at the NY Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 10), and it is scheduled to appear on PBS in the “American Masters” series on April 12.
W. Joseph Campbell (American University) wrote an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the 1948 “Dewey defeats Truman” upset that identified parallels between polls and media coverage in that election and in the widely unexpected outcome of the 2016 presidential vote.
Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri) now serves on the campus-wide “MU History Working Group.” The group will make recommendations to Chancellor Alexander Cartwright about the best ways “to acknowledge and honor laborers and enslaved people who built Mizzou.” This committee is emblematic of similar efforts at other universities such as the University of Virginia, Princeton, Brown, University of Southern California, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hudson’s work on this committee is connected with his previously serving as chair of the Mizzou Race Relations Committee, formed in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.
Dave Nord (Indiana University) has abandoned his studies of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia in favor of Bedford, Mitchell, and Tunnelton, Indiana. In the last few years, he has pretty much given up U.S. journalism history in favor of local history, especially the history of Lawrence County, Indiana, just south of Bloomington. How this intellectual metamorphosis happened is a complicated story, which is of no interest to readers of CLIO. But there is one element of the story that might be of some interest. Nord has become fascinated with historic maps, including the ever-expanding realm of digitized maps online. Recently, he published a map bibliography: Mapping Lawrence County, Indiana: An Annotated Bibliography, 1818–1941, Bedford, Ind.: Lawrence County Museum of History, 2018.
Mapping Lawrence County exists as both a booklet and a PDF. The PDF version has clickable links to all the maps available online, and that includes maps two dozen collections in Indiana and around the country. Some readers of CLIO might be interested in the links to these collections and might even be surprised to see how easily accessible digital maps are today even for a single, out-of-the-way county in Indiana. Here is a link to the free downloadable PDF of Mapping Lawrence County at the Indiana Historical Society.
David E. Sumner’s (Ball State University) book, Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant-Wally Butts Football Scandal that Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law has been nominated by McFarland Books for the 2019 book award offered by the North American Society for Sport History.
Graduate students in Wayne Svoboda’s (City University of New York) Spring 2019 seminar called “Voices and Perspectives in Conflict” at Newmark Journalism travel to meet news sources on the receiving end of journalism. These sources include NRA members at a Manhattan gun range, carriage horse drivers in Central Park targeted for unemployment by New York City’s mayor, members of a Brooklyn mosque and a fundamentalist church, officers and cadets at West Point, and others. One goal is to learn what these groups make of how their issues are covered by reporters. A second goal is to introduce students to people they might not otherwise meet.
Bob Trumpbour (Penn State-Altoona) and Ken Womack’s (Monmouth University) book, The Eighth Wonder of the World: The Life of Houston’s Iconic Astrodome, was recently released in paperback by the University of Nebraska Press. The project explores the history of the nation’s first large-scale indoor sports facility from its initial construction to recent attempts to ensure its historic preservation. The new release includes an additional chapter on current efforts to repurpose the Astrodome. Upon its initial release, Trumpbour and Womack’s book received positive recognition in a variety of venues. It earned the Society of American Baseball Research’s prestigious Seymour Medal, the Pete Delohery Award for Best Sports Book from Shelf Unbound, as well as several regional awards.
Kimberly Voss (University of Central Florida) was among
the 22 faculty members inducted into the UCF’s Scroll and Quill Society. The scroll representing research achievement and the
quill representing creative achievements, such as published books and plays. Voss
was inducted for her four books.
Compiled by Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair