Bridging Magazine: What kinds of extra-curricular activities have you enjoyed most since you retired in 1998?
John Howe: My wife and I spent 2000-2001 in Washington, D.C., where I worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring up a new grant program for faculty teaching at historically black, Hispanic serving, and Native American colleges and
universities. We have also enjoyed travel to China, Egypt, Costa Rica, Italy, and France. Visits with our two kids and their families in Florida and Pennsylvania, and with in-laws in Ohio and South Carolina, round out the list of our wanderings.

Bridging Magazine: Please describe your recent and current research projects.
Howe: I remain stubbornly busy with my writing agenda. In 2006, the University of Massachusetts Press brought out my book, Language and Political Meaning in Revolutionary America. In it, I argue that writers of the revolutionary generation transformed American political language. Though some employed language to capture universal truths and contain human behavior, as historians have often argued, others, preeminently the Federalists, accorded multiple meanings to key political terms, thus fashioning a language well suited to political experimentation and the rapidly changing circumstances of American political life. Contrary to much scholarly wisdom, it was not the Jeffersonians but the Federalists who fashioned the linguistic strategies essential to the creation of a truly democratic politics. More recently, I've been working on a project focused on changing practices of oral discourse in revolutionary politics, using Boston as a focal site. Work goes on, months go by, and I think that progress is being made. We shall see.

Bridging Magazine: You were very active throughout different parts of the university during your career at the University of Minnesota. In retrospect, what stands out as being among the most rewarding activities for you? In what ways are you currently involved in the academic community?
Howe: During my thirty plus years at the university, I logged considerable time in faculty governance and university affairs, and it's been satisfying to leave something of a mark on the institution. Fifteen or so years ago I chaired a committee charged with developing new liberal education requirements for all university undergraduates. As I soon discovered, there's no quicker way to learn about
academic politics than by debating the meaning of liberal education at a complex university! Perseverance and a strong committee, though, finally brought University Senate approval of our proposals. I like to think that students have benefited as a result.

Sometime after that, I put in two years as interim university librarian. As it happened, the Library brought up its long awaited on-line catalogue during those years, which proved a turning point in the library's ability to serve faculty and students. Though I had precious little to do with the accomplishment, I was pleased to share in the congratulations, then take advantage of the moment to strengthen the library's budget and political standing on campus. More recently, I've been active in the University Retirees Association where colleagues and I have helped secure a reduced parking rate for retirees, thus encouraging their continued participation in campus activities. At the moment, we're working to establish a small grants program intended to support retirees who wish to continue their professional work. On a grander scale, the Association will soon initiate discussions about creating a Center on the Twin Cities campus for programs and services important to retirees. The Center will also foster relationships between retirees and the university.

Bridging Magazine: You are currently organizing the Early American History Workshop. What does the workshop do, and why are you so committed to it?
Howe: I value learning what colleagues and graduate students in the department are up to and asking their help in figuring out my own work. Through the years, the Workshop has provided a splendid venue for students and faculty to share their work-in-progress. I'll enjoy keeping the Workshop going during the 2008-09 academic year.

Bridging Magazine: How has the university changed since you came here in 1965? Which changes are for the better, do you think, and which are cause for concern?
Howe: Across more than forty years, I've watched the university change in all sorts of ways. High on the list of positive changes would be a more selective and at the same time more diverse student body. On the down side, the university seems less firmly connected to the people and traditions of the state. As is true of many public institutions, a radically smaller portion of the university's budget comes from state legislative appropriations than previously, and more from undergraduate tuition and program-specific outside funding. No longer do the traditional Arts and Sciences center the university's intellectual mission. One has only to note shifts in research support, physical facilities, and faculty expansion across the university to find clear evidence of the institution's changing contours. America's public universities, always sensitive to the changing intellectual and political world around them, have taken on new shape any number of times in past years. Often that's been to the good of students and the general public. Yet today the outlook appears unclear. Once again it seems a timely moment to consider the university's larger purposes and mission.

Dr. Maureen Lowe remembers walking through Checkpoint Charlie as a college senior, and reminding herself not to smile. On that cold December day in 1982, less than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she marveled at the famous passage between West and East Berlin. Military men and police roamed the empty streets of East Berlin.

"It just had this kind of gray, drab feeling to it," she recalled 25 years later, while sitting at her desk at St. Paul's Regions Hospital.

Lowe returned to East Berlin in 1990 after graduating from medical school, as the city was opening up. "It was like somebody had just pulled the curtain open," she said, "and everybody felt like they could say what they felt, talk how they wanted, and they didn't have to look over their shoulder."

Lowe, a 1983 History alumnus, is now a staff pathologist at Regions. She spends much of her day in a laboratory, looking through a microscope and making diagnoses. While her visits to East Berlin as a young woman seemingly have little in common with her day job, they both represent something she has been doing as a student of history, a doctor, and a mother: Watching things change.

In the lab, she looks at slides to diagnose things such as cancer. She's also the director of quality for the lab, making sure that slides don't get lost and that the lab follows all the various hospital and legal rules and regulations. Her strengths lie in looking for patterns, she said, and having a good visual sense of when something is going wrong.

"Not just having a history degree, but a liberal arts degree, has helped me," she pointed out. "I'm a better problem solver. I don't just look at things in black and white."

As a child in Mendota Heights, Lowe went with her father to the University of Minnesota campus for football games and concerts. She remembers being fascinated with the old buildings, and wondering about the stories of the men that saw the empty land on the Mississippi and pictured a university in its place.

As a freshman in 1979, Lowe signed up for her first history course on a lark. She'd been taking science classes with the idea of becoming a veterinarian or doctor, but wanted to take something "for fun."

"Some people say history is boring," she said. "But I really like the stories. People behave the same as they always have, and the way leaders behave doesn't change that much either. You have to understand where people are coming from."

Now, Lowe and her husband Carl McGary, who is also a pathologist, spend most of their time going to concerts and sporting events in the area. They also devote a considerable amount of time to their two daughters, ages 10 and 8, and watching them grow and change.

It's a little bit confusing when Hennepin County District Judge Allen Oleisky talks about being retired.

Minnesota law says that judges need to retire on their 70th birthday, and Oleisky, the longest serving judge in the state, hit the benchmark last spring. Gov. Tim Pawlenty declared March 31, the Judge's last day, to be Allen Oleisky Day. That seems easy enough to understand.

But the picture gets murkier if you consider the fact that Oleisky, a 1960 history alumnus, talks about his retirement from behind a desk in the Hennepin County Government Center during a break from the day's drug court proceedings. He hands out a new business card and mentions that he's had two days off since retiring. Aren't all the days since retirement supposed to be "days off"?

"I still feel like I'm capable of working, so I'm working as a retired judge," he said, pointing out that retired judges can still work for the courts in certain capacities. "I want to stay real active. I still feel I can contribute. I'm not just a person that wants to play golf and do leisure-type things."

Oleisky arrived at the U in the fall of 1956 and declared a history major because "they made me choose something." But the classes fascinated him, and he stuck with it.

He credits the department with making him a better student, and giving him insights into human behavior that have proved beneficial inside the justice system. Oleisky graduated from the U's law school in 1962. He has been a judge for 36 years, and he plans to keep an office with his son and daughter, who are local criminal attorneys.

In 2007, Oleisky was awarded the Sidney Barrows Lifetime Commitment Award from the Twin Cities Cardozo Society, which recognizes a Jewish attorney or judge in the Twin Cities for excellence in their profession as well as community service. He also received the Golden Gavel Award for the state's Fourth Judicial District.

In his years on the bench, Oleisky has witnessed hardship and renewal. One case from the 1980s still haunts him. A young boy had a mentally ill stepfather who wanted to have unsupervised visits with his son. After progressive steps the father took, Oleisky allowed it. That weekend, the father killed his two year-old son.

"If I could get one case back," he ponders, "that would always be the one. I was heartsick. I actually thought of quitting. I really started questioning my judgment," he said.

Oleisky has seen children come before him as juveniles only to return decades later in the criminal courts. But he also once helped a teenage girl escape a life of prostitution, and years later she asked him to officiate at her wedding.

"The courts are the repository for the social problems of society. They're the place of last resort, and people look to us to make those decisions. You're always making difficult decisions. There are all sorts of shades of grey in just about every case."

Farah has worked to get a fix on the turbulent Middle East since long before such enterprise became a geopolitical necessity. A son of Lebanese immigrants who grew up in both Oregon and Beirut, Farah studied at Princeton in the 1950s with Philip K. Hitti, the legendary historian who introduced Arab cultural studies to the United States. Even so, few universities at the time had slots for Middle Eastern specialists; when Farah completed his Ph.D., he had to settle at first for a foreign service post in New Delhi. Things improved only incrementally in the 1960s. When Farah was hired at the end of the decade by the University of Minnesota, it was less for his faculty experience at two other universities--not to mention his pioneering publications on the Ottoman Empire--than for his Arabic language proficiency.

In the 1970s, however, the field of Middle Eastern studies began to coalesce, with Farah a leading exponent. At Minnesota, his teaching and leadership in multiple departments helped the new multidisciplinary area of study take root (with the history department's thriving Middle Eastern subfield one culmination). At the same time, Farah made his own mark as a widely respected scholar. He has published 12 books and hundreds of articles, including the country's first Arabic language textbook and important studies of Yemen and Lebanon under the 400-year Ottoman reign that lasted until World War I.

Farah is perhaps best known as a meticulous and at times unflinching expert on the history of Islam. His 500-page guide to the history and culture of the Arab Peninsula long has been a staple of college classrooms. It covers Islam as a major political and social force and details the practices and beliefs of Islam as a religion. In its latest editions, Farah offers post-9/11 analysis of the motivations that inspire Islamic extremism--a topic he is also tapped to address in interviews and speeches around the globe.

"We can learn a lot by taking a clear-eyed look at history," says Farah. Conflicts over religion, nationalism, ideology, and land have roiled the Middle East for centuries. Yet present-day unrest owes much to 20th-century politics, he observes.

"The United States stayed out of it after World War I when the British and French took over the Middle East--set up colonies in Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine; created Iraq. Even amid growing Arab nationalism, the United States remained the most admired country in the world. So what changed? How is it that today we are so mistrusted and even despised across the Middle East?"

What changed, Farah says, is that by World War II the United States was advancing its own interests in the region. The discovery of huge oil fields came into play; so, too, did U.S.-Soviet power struggles. Another factor: The state of Israel, whose 1948 establishment in the heart of the Arab world displaced 700,000 native Palestinians.

Farah's deep interest in the Middle East took hold from a front-row seat. He spent his formative years in Beirut, where he and his mother were stranded during World War II. He returned briefly to his Portland hometown (where his father owned a department store) before heading off to Stanford University, where he soon was engrossed in historical studies. "One of my professors was a former World War II intelligence officer who was impressed that I knew Arabic. He said, 'We need people like you,'" Farah recalls.

He has never been one to keep the world at arm's length. In a planned memoir, he hopes to revisit his travels across India and Pakistan as a cultural attaché during the turbulent years after India's partition. He met pivotal Pakistani figures such as Ayub Khan, Ziya ul-Haqq, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He also enjoyed friendships with his Soviet counterparts--under the wary eyes of both the CIA (which tapped his phone) and the KGB (which insisted he down several vodkas before mingling with guests at a Soviet Embassy reception).

He has since journeyed often to the Middle East (and elsewhere), especially as a lecturer for the U.S. State Department. He met his spouse, Irmgard Tenkamp, a German scholar, while lecturing in Istanbul, and notes that his six children grew up "getting to know dozens of international airports."

Even for a historian, the conflicts between Arab nationalism and political Zionism pose political minefields, Farah has found. "But I've always seen my role as working toward reconciliation in the Middle East--between feuding parties in that part of the world and between those parties and the U.S," he says.

Today's war in Iraq does not give Farah much cause for optimism. "My view is that our foreign policies toward the Middle East have failed-- they were really failing when Bin Laden showed up," he says. "We do need to look at our foreign policies in historical perspective. We also need to bring into our policymaking a stronger understanding of the cultural and religious history of the Middle East. Looking at history is really going to be our best hope for peace in the long run, and that means looking at history from all sides."

"I did not expect I would see it in my lifetime--either a serious woman candidate or a serious African American candidate," marvels Evans, who retired from the Minnesota faculty in June. "And that we have both just knocks my socks off."

To say that Evans understands how far America has come is putting it mildly. An internationally renowned social historian, she is the author of seven groundbreaking books exploring racial conflict, identity politics, and, especially, the stories and struggles of women in the 20th century. She is also a product of the segregated South who came of age in both the civil rights and women's movements.

"I grew up in the 1940s and fifties with white-only schools and businesses, with buses where black people had to walk to the back--and I didn't know any other white kids who thought that was wrong," Evans recalls of her South Carolina childhood. That she felt seared by the racism that permeated daily life owes much to the progressive values of her parents--a "gut-level radical" mother who taught Evans and her brothers about the legacy of slavery, and a Methodist-minister father once banished to a remote pastorate for preaching against racism.

Also formative for Evans was the legacy of sexism, from overt workforce discrimination to powerful ideologies pressuring women to find fulfillment as wives and mothers. Her own mother, Evans says, "was a brilliant free spirit who should have been a botanist or a zoologist; I sensed that behind the canaries and gardens she tended was a lot of anger at choices denied."

Evans became a historian, she has written, to "spare the next generation the rage we experienced about having been cut off from our own history in all its complexity." Her intellectual passion gathered steam in the tumult of the 1960s as she saw unfolding around her a history she'd never been taught. When she enrolled in a Ph.D. program in history at the University of North Carolina, she found not a single course on women--startling to someone who had by then participated in women's liberation groups, joined Martin Luther King's historic Selma-to-Montgomery march, led Vietnam War protests, and organized clerical workers and a child-care cooperative.

Evans went on to write Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left--a landmark book on the roots of the contemporary women's movement. A breakthrough look at the intersections of gender and race, the book is credited as a founding text of the field of women's history, where it remains essential reading. "Women's history isn't about romanticizing women," Evans emphasizes. "It's about using women's experiences as a powerful lens to get at a more complete understanding of history."

In 1976, she came to Minnesota to fill one of the country's first faculty positions in women's history. In a department purposefully expanding beyond a Eurocentric curriculum, Evans hit her stride; among her books are acclaimed examinations of social justice movements and women's political participation along with a consummate analysis of how feminism has reshaped American society.

True to her activist roots, Evans also became a force for institutional change. She helped build the U's program in women's studies and found a pathbreaking feminist research center. Her reputation and leadership also spurred the growth of the U's top-flight program in comparative women's history.

"As a department, we've hired brilliant faculty, many of whom turned out to be doing women's history," says Evans. A striking contrast to the women's history wilderness Evans found in graduate school, the program today boasts a dozen experts covering women and gender worldwide.

In 1997, Evans was named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and in 2004, a Regents Professor, the U's top honor. A catalog of her accomplishments over the years would fill many pages. Two of her proudest achievements were in highly public realms. In the mid 1990s, as head of the University's faculty governance committee and a leader in the American Association of University Professors, she led a successful fight to protect the tenure system fundamental to the tradition of academic freedom at Minnesota and all research universities. A few years later, she helped organize her colleagues to beat back a reactionary social studies curriculum proposed for Minnesota's public schools. Both experiences galvanized her commitment to "speak out to help the public understand the value of a great research university like ours," says Evans, a particularly eloquent champion of the liberal arts ("the core of the University and the heartbeat of democracy").

A frequent media commentator on women's social history and civil rights, in recent months Evans has been a go-to expert in connection with the historic Obama-Clinton contest.

"It's scary watching them spar with each other, because they're both so good, which puts us in a bind," Evans says of the two Democratic candidates. "And the race clearly has gotten complicated. I see alot of sexism in the coverage of Hillary. It's hit a nerve, particularly with older women--to see sexism coming out of the woodwork in this way really stings. And it also stings to see the issue of race used to undermine Obama. But we do need to stop and celebrate that this is the choice. It's awesome. It gives me a great deal of hope for the future."

Evans's immediate future will be less about politics and books and more about rivers and mountains. With her husband, Chuck Dayton (an environmental lawyer who helped protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness), the adventure-loving Evans is already planning trips to kayak in Greenland and hike in India.

She also plans to spend several months a year at a little house on land her parents left her in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. There, she says, surrounded by her mother's gardens, she'll continue to think and to write. "I hope to experiment with creative non-fiction," says Evans. "I've been thinking a lot about my parents' lives, and my own, and I have this feeling of being full of stories I want to tell."

In June she attended the Berkshire women's history conference, held in the Twin Cities. In honor of Evans's retirement, the national gathering featured an intergenerational panel on women's history as well as a reception sponsored by the history department.

How, one wonders, can the University possibly fill the large gap left by the retirement of one its superstars, one of the country's premier historians of women? The characteristically modest Evans smiles and looks toward the top shelf in her office, teeming with books yet to be packed off to her St. Paul home. "Those are all by my former students," she says with matter-of-fact pride. "Thirty years ago, I was the only one here doing women's history. Now we have a dozen faculty in the field, and we're raising money for an endowed chair."

"I can leave now," concludes Evans,
"because I know it all will continue."

My research on "royal entries"--ceremonies where monarchs were formally received into a city through a gate in the city-wall--connects celebrations at the municipal level to broader social, economic, and political forces present in Late Medieval Spain. The municipal scope of my project is important, because it is here that one can best see how power relations were negotiated between kingdom-wide, regional, and local interests. For instance, these ceremonies provided opportunities for local elites to enhance their connections with the Crown and to secure specific political favors, such as acceptance of their daughters into royal monasteries. My study focuses primarily on the case of Castile--the kingdom in Spain that came to dominate the Iberian Peninsula--although it draws comparisons with the Crown of Aragon and Portugal, and other parts of Western Europe.

Previous studies of Spanish royal entries drew their data from royally-sponsored chronicles, focusing on the symbolism and supposed "propaganda" projected by the monarch. But it seemed to me that another side of the story was missing. Surely the urbanites hosting the royal entries had an important role in organizing them. Armed with a grant and my obstinate hunch, I went to Spain to research during the 2006-2007 academic year. I came back with a file-box full of documents from over a dozen municipal archives across Spain and Portugal, including copious letters, city-hall minutes (libros de actas), account books, supply and worker lists, and receipts.

With these materials I am reconstructing the processes of communication, negotiation, finance, and preparation necessary to organize such ceremonies. Additionally, the minute detail of my source base allows me to recover the forgotten stories of the urban populace: the merchants, artists, carpenters, general workers, blacksmiths, lance makers, town criers and messengers, carters and transporters, scribes, and municipal administrators. From the initially dry, numerical data in city government documents, I am able to create a livelier picture of medieval Spanish society than the chronicles alone allow. My work gives insight into the worry, excitement, political intrigue, and even charity with which average citizens went about their daily lives.

What first caught my attention were the ironies and contradictions of the "Historical Court": the archive was called upon as evidence in order to "correct" itself; the state courts exonerated themselves of perpetrating injustice; the exoneration purported to make a state hero of an historical enemy of the territorial government. I saw the event as one that used both historical narratives and collective memories to acknowledge and contain Indian historical presence in the region.

As the Historical Court demonstrates, collective memories help to form cultural identities, explain the legacy of past events, and shape the meaning of present actions. Yet memories are contested within and across groups because they express differing and sometimes oppositional interests. Even within the Historical Court, I found that public historians, lawyers, and Native rights activists used the exoneration to meet a number of contradictory goals.

It was not until I started my research in the Puget Sound area that I saw how deeply imbedded Leschi's memory was on the landscape: neighborhoods, streets, ferries, and schools were named in his honor. I even toured an urban warfare training facility, "Leschi Town," built on the former Nisqually reservation land that is now the Fort Lewis Army base.
My dissertation takes Leschi as a case study to explore discourses of justice, acts of commemoration, and the constructions of historical narratives about Indians and the settlement of the land. Although certainly messy and often contradictory, changing public expressions of Leschi's memory elucidate the connected and contested nature of historical interpretation, claims on the land through memorialization, and possibilities for addressing historical injustices by changing the historical record.

Hello again! I'm as surprised to see myself back in this space as you are. Eric Weitz was invited to Princeton for a year as a Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, and so I am filling in as Interim Chair until his return to the post. During the coming year, the cityscape I will see out of the chair's office window will change. After more than four decades in the Social Science Tower, the Department will be moving to the top four floors of nearby Heller Hall, where we will get some much needed additional space. Our views will be oriented north and westward toward downtown Minneapolis rather than toward the Mississippi. We will miss the river but relish the additional and newly redesigned spaces for offices, for the many journals we edit, and for seminars and conferences.

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the state of Minnesota, hence the theme of this issue of the newsletter "A Sense of Place: Minnesota Past & Present."  You can read contributions from a number of colleagues who examine Minnesota history from various perspectives. Also fitting for the sesquicentennial year has been the introduction by David Chang and Kevin Murphy of a new course on the history of the Twin Cities. Now students new to campus can explore local history as they learn their way around town. This course is one of several exciting innovations in undergraduate teaching that resulted from our recent overhaul of the curriculum.

Our graduate program continues to thrive as the numerous awards and accomplishments of our current students and alums attest. Faculty and graduate students continue to collaborate on innovative cross-area and cross-disciplinary work even as they excel in traditionally defined areas of research. One important new initiative on this front is the Program in Law and History that got its start last year under the directorship of Barbara Welke.

It was wonderful to see dozens of faculty, grad students, and grad alums on campus in June as participants in the program of the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. "The Berks" is the preeminent conference for historians of women from all over the globe. The organization's decision to hold the triennial meeting on our campus - the first Midwestern meeting in the organization's history - and our notable presence on the program attest to our strength and visibility in women's and gender history. Ruth Karras played a lead role as the Conference's president. And the meeting provided the perfect setting for a reception in honor of Sara Evans, pioneering historian of U. S. women, who retired from the department in June after 30 years of outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service to the University and the state.

In Fall semester 2008 we welcomed two fine new colleagues who joined the department as a result of last year's searches. Daniel Schroeter (Ph. D., University of Manchester, 1984) is moving from the University of California, Irvine, to be the first holder of our endowed chair in Jewish History. Professor Schroeter's research focuses on the history of the Jews of the Muslim and Mediterranean worlds. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick (Ph.D. Minnesota, 1999) is moving back to Minnesota from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to take a faculty position in African History. Professor Pohlandt-McCormick's first project focused on the Soweto uprisings; her new work is an oral history of political exile in South Africa.

I hope that you will enjoy learning more about the past and present of the
department and the state as you peruse the newsletter. Many thanks to newsletter editor, Kirsten Fischer, who, within days of completing work on this issue, departed for Germany for a yearlong stint as Deutsche Bank Junior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg.

“It seemed to be a perfect position for me, but I thought they would want a more conventional historian,” says Good, who calls his 1990 hiring by the U “a central transformative event of my life.” Having retired this past June, he is reflecting on his remarkable career over lunch at Minneapolis’s casually bohemian Café Barbette, one of his favorite spots.

Good had been a professor of economic history at Temple University for 16 years, where he enjoyed an international reputation, but he feared the CAS would be put off by his data-driven training and scholarship. What saved the day was what he calls “a happy accident of geographic focus—a good illustration of the way contingencies shape the unfolding of history, both personal or global.” Although he was in the economics department at Temple, his work on the Hapsburg Empire (which ruled much of Central Europe for six centuries) happened to fit perfectly within the field of Austrian historical studies. More, as one of very few scholars charting the economic history of the period, Good arguably was among the field’s intellectual vanguard.

His arrival at the CAS and on the history faculty plunged him into the stimulating milieu of interdisciplinary study. “I was interacting with cultural historians, German literary people, sociologists, geographers. It had a huge impact on me,” Good recalls.

His intellectual renewal spilled over into his teaching. He revamped his undergraduate course on European economic history, which at Temple had rested on standard economics texts, to be “a broad look at how economics has related to culture and politics.” With colleagues, he also brought the department new graduate-level courses on comparative economic history and the history of capitalism. More recently, he developed an innovative freshman seminar on the American Midwest.

Good often steers the conversation toward how much he learned from his colleagues. Yet they, in turn, are apt to talk of Good’s influence on their own work and his role in broadening historical scholarship at Minnesota. As CAS director for six years, Good is credited with having linked Austrian studies more firmly to European studies. He also helped steer the history department at a crucial time of generational change. In the late 1990s, with colleague M.J. Maynes, he presided over an audacious “mega search” that replaced retiring faculty with four of the best historians in the country. As department chair from 2000–03, he led an invigorating strategic planning initiative that created a blueprint for future hiring and an aggressive funding program to recruit top graduate students.

Ongoing Evolution

Good’s scholarly evolution has been unflagging. Just four years ago, he abandoned a book project on the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe since 1750 to turn his attention to an entirely new subject: the history of the American Midwest in a global setting over the last four centuries.

The seeds have been germinating for years. As a young man, Good couldn’t wait to leave his small downstate Illinois town for what he presumed would be the headier ether of the East Coast. Now, he says, “I think I’m interested in reconstructing that part of my life that I discarded when I was young. And on a cultural and intellectual level, the Midwest offers an extraordinary lens for a larger perspective on the world—you can tell the story of America from the industrial age to the global economy through the history of a Midwestern town.”

Using his own hometown of Kewanee, Ill., as a case study, Good hopes to write a series of essays or a book, possibly for a popular audience, combining “history, biography, and memory—essentially throwing over all the vestiges of my old scholarly apparatus,” he smiles. He has refined some of his ideas in community presentations and, for three years, in his freshman seminar on the Midwest that employs everything “from hard-core economic history to slave narratives.”

He also has quietly nurtured another pet project. With his spouse, Rosemary Good, he has endowed a fellowship fund in history. The fund annually provides a semester’s funding for a graduate student, “and we hope, with additional contributions, to get it up to a year,” says Good.

“It’s a way of leaving a tangible legacy in the history department beyond someone’s memory of me. But more than that, it’s a good way for both Rosemary and me to express our gratitude to the University of Minnesota,” says Good.

“We’ve always been very much a team—a great couple in life for 41 years as of June—and our move to the Twin Cities was wonderful for both of us. Both of us made new friends, found new interests, and reinvented ourselves here”—in Rosemary’s case, moving from the field of music to concentrate on needle-related crafts (she now specializes in textile conservation and hanging for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and private clients).

Both of the Goods’ two children also have creative interests, Good adds. Son Adam, who lives in the Netherlands, is a guitarist specializing in the folk music of Eastern Europe. Daughter Allison, in the Twin Cities, is a freelance orchestral violinist as well as a human resources manager.

Over the years, the Goods often have welcomed students and faculty to their home for fondly-remembered parties, and they plan to continue hosting dinners for their fellowship recipients. But they may have to step off a Moroccan hiking path or a Twin Cities dance floor to do so. The two met (“and fell in love at first sight, or pretty near,” Good says) in a college summer-study program in Vienna, and they have been inveterate travelers ever since—in recent years touring Alaska, Hawaii, and Egypt by foot through a group called Country Walkers. And in the past year, the Goods have become impassioned ballroom dancers who waltz, foxtrot, tango, rumba, swing, and cha-cha every chance they get at the On Your Toes dance studio and other venues.

“I find dancing exhilarating,” says Good. “It requires athleticism, and grace of course. But it is challenging in other ways, too. It requires a whole new way of being and interacting—I have to learn to lead in a whole new way.”

For over two decades, she has cast an appraising eye on the world’s dramas and hotspots as an intelligence expert for the CIA and the White House. But as a onetime overseas flight attendant for Pan Am—and even as a budding scholar of African history—she never imagined she would travel quite so far.

Originally of East Lansing, Mich., McCarthy majored in history at Michigan State and then fell in love with Africa while flying for Pan Am Airlines. A born multitasker, she was already juggling bimonthly New York-Africa flights with the demands of an M.A. program in African history at Michigan State. Soon, she was commuting to the University of Minnesota, earning first a master’s in library science and then a Ph.D. in history while her husband, Michael McCarthy, pursued a doctorate in American studies.

After moving to Washington, D.C., she worked as a globetrotting “risk assessment” analyst for multinational corporations before joining the CIA. “At first I said, CIA—no way; I’m a child of the sixties,” McCarthy recalls. “But it turned out to be a fascinating job—and the culture of the agency was dominated by ‘smart skeptics,’ so I fit right in.”

Hired as an analyst for Africa, McCarthy rose to become the intelligence officer charged with identifying key national security threats around the globe. From 1996–2001, she moved into a more policymaking sphere when she was assigned to the National Security Council in the White House.

“It was a pretty interesting job, I have to say,” says McCarthy, who served both presidents Clinton and Bush. She found Clinton “brilliant” and his White House at the top of its game, even amid the “surreal distraction” of the impeachment hearings (“unless you passed the TV, you wouldn’t even think about it”). She often worked 16-hour days, and on top of that was regularly yanked from concerts and dinner parties by, say, a crisis in the Balkans. Yet, says McCarthy, “I never left the White House without thinking what an incredible privilege it was to have the trust of presidents and be able to serve.”

Her departure from the CIA in 2006 was eventful: Just days before she was to retire, she was sent packing for reasons that remain murky (and that she and reliable news accounts suggest may be largely political). McCarthy, an old hand at bumpy landings, has in any case moved on with aplomb. A sought-after consultant on terrorism and foreign policy, she recently lent her expertise to a task force studying the radicalization process. “I’m also hoping to specialize in taking vacations,” says McCarthy. Whether that’s in her DNA code is an open question. Just two years ago, she polished off a law degree at Georgetown University, and she allows that she’s now both writing legal articles and sketching out a novel set in the national security world.

She speaks with warm admiration of all she learned from her Minnesota teachers—from Phil Porter, whose prescient warnings about the global impact of greenhouse gases “have long stayed with me”; to Allen Isaacman, her adviser, “who taught me to ask questions—to understand that information always comes from a particular mindset, motivation, and world view.”

“The other valuable thing Allen taught me was not to dabble at anything you care about—to put yourself fully into everything you do,” McCarthy adds. “I hope he’d say I’ve done that.”

As a principal with the Twin Cities firm Bond & Devick, Devick spends much of his time devising estate plans and investment portfolios for retirement-age professionals. Yet he’s also remained the eager and idealistic student of history he was at the University (class of 1991)—and even earlier. As a boy in Mound, Minn., he grew up watching Patton and other World War II films with his grandfather, who owned a dairy farm next door. Spellbound by his grandfather’s stories of having served in Patton’s army, the young Devick also came to share his grandfather’s interest in the Revolutionary War and then, on a family trip to Washington, D.C., developed a keen interest in America’s political past.

Still, Devick—the first in his family to go to college—started out as a U freshman “thinking I should major in business,” he recalls. “But my adviser pointed out that I’d have plenty of time after graduation to knuckle down and do the practical thing, so I followed my passion instead.” He took every history course he could find, whether on art, U.S. diplomacy, economics, or Asia. One favorite was a course in Russian history taught by Theo Stavrou—“he’s just a rock star,” Devick says.

Just how Devick became a top financial adviser is a case study in the versatility of the liberal arts and the magic of serendipity. After stints with the Nature Conservancy and on a congressional campaign, Devick was a restless junior manager with a St. Paul casualty company when a boss impressed with Devick’s well-rounded intelligence and personability steered him to Penny Bond. She promptly hired Devick for her growing financial planning firm and mentored him in the complexities of retirement, estate, and tax planning. Six years ago, he became a full partner.

“I love what I do—it’s the greatest job on earth,” says Devick. “We do get down to taxes and investment strategies, but most of our face-to-face time is about life stuff, the grandkids, catching up. It’s a perfect fit for me, because I just love helping people realize their hopes and dreams.”

That love takes many forms. He is a longtime volunteer for the Minneapolis homeless shelter People Serving People, where he has tutored fourth-graders and now leads a fundraising campaign. He has helped the St. Paul-based Children’s Home Society raise funds for an orphanage in Ethiopia, reflecting a deep concern for the well-being of the world’s children—a concern Devick traces back to high school readings about the killing of infant girls in China. R.J. and Teresa Devick have three daughters of their own, including one adopted from Korea and one from Ethiopia.

Devick also has maintained strong ties to the University, and not only as a Gopher football fan. “I never miss a history department alumni lunch,” says Devick.

“‘History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes’—I don’t remember who said it, but it’s on the mark. My history education opened my eyes and my mind to the world. And in investments, I make better judgments because I know about the Tulip Craze and the Roaring Twenties—it’s why my clients didn’t get more hurt when the tech bubble burst.”

Devick is funneling his gratitude for his education into a new cause: raising money for what he hopes will become the Sara Evans Chair in Comparative Women’s History, named after the U’s internationally respected Regents Professor of History.

“Sure, most of the books on my shelf are on Washington, Adams, and their ilk,” smiles Devick, who is spearheading a CLA campaign emphasizing gifts of all sizes from fellow history alums. “But I’m also one of those people who realizes the importance of telling all of history’s stories. Sara broke ground in moving the field of history beyond ‘great white guys,’ and she helped put this University on the map. She richly deserves to be honored.”

In that classroom, the affable professor and his students exchange ideas over coffee, share books and smiles, and imbibe history and hummus while piles of olive pits gather at the edges of their plates. Amidst his photographs, Stavrou proudly displays the faces of former students, “oi gorgones kai oi psarades”—the mermaids and the fishermen—as he affectionately calls us.

I first met Professor Stavrou in a freshman seminar, “Introduction to the Arts and Sciences.” He’d assigned us a short story to read about Cyprus. His lecture was genial and enthusiastic. He laughed, he told stories, he mesmerized us. At the end of the class, he delivered two gifts to every student: a book and an open invitation to stop by during office hours.

That night I called my parents back home in Missouri to rave about the amazing faculty at the University of Minnesota. “Professor Stavrou!” said my dad (Edward Brent, Ph.D. Sociology ’76). “I took all his Russian history classes.” It was Stavrou I had to thank for my father’s interests in the former Soviet Union, the book of Russian poetry he still keeps, and the stories he told me as a child about the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

So I did what many U of M students have done: I signed up for every class that Professor Stavrou taught. He was my modern Greek language instructor, my study abroad adviser, my Russian history professor, and my mentor in the truest sense.

My father’s story—and mine—speaks to the quality of Stavrou’s teaching and to his enduring influence, which pervades many of our lives years after we were students.

It is not surprising that Professor Stavrou has received nearly every University teaching award, including this year’s Rutherford Aris Mentoring Award. The root of that Homeric word mentor, μεντορ, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, is “intent, purpose, spirit, passion.” Stavrou embodies each—intent in scholarship, purpose in service to the community, spirit in teaching, and passion for living history.

He is a visionary, whether building the gem collection of modern Greek literature at the Andersen Library or founding the University of Cyprus in Nicosia. Where translations do not exist and scholarship lags, Stavrou pioneers his own. Under the direction of Theo and Soterios (his brother) Stavrou, the office of Modern Greek Studies edits a journal, publishes books, and hosts an annual lecture series that has attracted ambassadors and authors alike.

The Modern Greek Studies Yearbook
features translations, reviews, and
articles from the best and brightest in the field. In the first journal, you can find Eugene McCarthy’s reflection on the Nobel Laureate George Seferis; in the tenth, a thorough exploration of the Cyprus problem from historians around the world. For longer works and complete translations, the Nostos series of history and culture has produced more than two dozen volumes. Each book is bound in the same blue and white of the buildings nestled along the Aegean Sea.

This year marks a decade since I traveled to Greece and Cyprus with Professor Stavrou and seven other students. Under the aegis of Student Projects for Amity among Nations, we studied, traveled, and conducted research. Stavrou is the executive director of this unique program that has sent more than 2,500 students to visit 76 countries on six continents.

Traditionally such trips are called “study abroad,” but I learned vast amounts before ever using my passport. To better our understanding of Greek culture, Professor Stavrou spent a year preparing us for the voyage, laying the foundation of Greek language, history, politics, religion, food, music, and hospitality.

Over the years I spent in Minnesota, I tutored with Professor Stavrou’s brother Soterios, shared coffee with his wife Freda, traded the names of playwrights with his son Gregory, applauded the singing of his daughter Nikki, and celebrated Easter with his grandchildren. I became part of his extended family.

Professor Stavrou treats his students like family, and it is with great respect and admiration that we count him among our own.

When Gabriella Sliwinska first came to the Immigration History Research Center with an assignment to “write a paper on any subject I wanted to, dealing with women’s legal history,” she had a special topic in mind.

Both of her parents migrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s from Poland. They lived in Chicago until Gabriella was ten years old, when they bought “a mom and pop motel” in Grand Marais. It was here on the North Shore that Gabriella spent the rest of her youth.

Sliwinska, a U of M graduating senior who is now on her way to law school at Louisiana State University, had traveled to Poland several times with her mother, and her family maintains strong ties to the immigrant Polish community in Chicago. All of which suggested an initial topic for her paper. “At first I wanted to research something about Polish women immigrants,” she says. “But I had trouble finding the sort of individual story that I was hoping to tell.”

At the IHRC archives, she found herself looking through the papers of the International Institute of San Francisco, collected at the center. This was an immigrant aid association formed to help newcomers to the U.S. lead a more integrated life. There Sliwinska came across a five-page case file detailing the life of Hideko Wyman, a Japanese war bride who had married a U.S. serviceman after World War II and soon found herself abused and abandoned in San Francisco.

“I found her story immediately fascinating,” says Sliwinska. “Here was this war bride who met her husband in Japan in the shoe store that her mother owned. They fell in love, and he wanted to bring her back to this country. At first she was reluctant and said, no, and he actually went back to the U.S. Then he kept sending her letters, pleading with her to reconsider.”

Finally, Hideko agreed to marry him. They were wed in Japan and had a child there. Then Hideko moved with him and their baby to San Francisco. Soon enough, however, the marriage turned sour and Hideko found herself at the International Institute, looking for help. “There were a series of horrible things,” says Sliwinska. “The husband was abusive and at one point abandoned her. Hideko sought help from the Institute, but in the end the case worker found that she had returned to live with him.”

Sliwinska says that the IHRC was a great help in locating the materials for her story. She’d never worked in a research library before and found the idea of putting in a request and having a librarian head off to find the materials in the archives “a little daunting”; but by the time she’d finished her paper, she was ready for more. Sliwinska took Donna Gabaccia’s seminar on immigration history the next semester and loved it.

First, there was the abundance of materials in the IHRC archive itself: a wonderful collection of documents pertaining to immigration between 1880 and 1930, with extensive materials on the experiences of post-war refugees in the last half of the 20th century. Then there was the vast community of scholars: dozens of university faculty members, across numerous disciplines, had scholarly interests that verged on IHRC territory.

Gabaccia needed to get a handle on who these scholars were, how the IHRC might foster their work, and what it could do to serve as a conduit for interdisciplinary collaborations. This was no easy task. “These people are scattered throughout CLA, the Law School, the Medical School, public health, and more,” says Gabaccia.

Add to this the fact that public issues surrounding immigration had begun to heat up in the past year or two, and Gabaccia knew she faced enormous challenges. She and the center needed to be scholarly, topical, and global, and they had to do it on the fly.

Beyond Archives

One of the first steps IHRC took to meet new challenges was electronic. Its web site was overhauled with a new feature, “Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration History,” which showcases faculty expertise and serves as a blog on immigration-related issues. Visitors to ihrc.umn.edu will find research papers on a variety of topics as well as links to related archival material. Documents once stored in boxes or on microfiche are being digitized and placed on the site as well, making those documents far more accessible to the public.

“We wanted to make the web site less archival and more global,” says Gabaccia. “We also wanted to call attention to the expertise of the faculty at the University of Minnesota, and we wanted to use the web site to connect with our constituencies—public school teachers, students, ethnic groups, and researchers who come to our center.”

The timing for these improvements couldn’t have been better. The Online Encyclopedia Britannica has recently designated IHRC as one of its iGuide web sites, meaning that anyone reading on the subject of immigration in the Encyclopedia Britannica is simply a click away from delving deeper into the subject at IHRC.

But the changes in IHRC aren’t just digital. Programming has been ramped up for the 21st century. For starters, the IHRC has partnered with the Center for Global Studies on a series of events called Global REM—Race, Ethnicity, Migration. A first event in May 2007, called “Revving Up: Global REM,” brought together university faculty from across disciplines to speak to these issues.

Lectures, seminars, and a series of conferences over the next few years will continue the theme, but a first international REM gathering, “Belonging, Membership, and Mobility in Global History,” is already scheduled for April 2008. “The focus of this conference is going to be on the years before 1800,” says Gabaccia. “So much of what we know about issues relating to race, ethnicity, and migration comes from the last 200 years. We want to examine how these issues functioned prior to the advent of nation-states.”

“All of these things draw interest from scholars and professionals from a variety of areas,” says Gabaccia. “The conferences, the REM initiative, and the changes in the web site are all designed to help steer diverse studies, interests, and educational users of IHRC toward each other.”

Collections and more

IHRC has made a significant addition to its archival collections this past year with the arrival of the papers of Professor Sucheng Chang, a renowned emeritus scholar of Asian American Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

As for the IHRC’s future, the center will have to deal with both the opportunities and the difficulties that arise in the digitized world. To some extent new technologies will relieve archival storage problems, but decisions about what to digitize (or not) will undoubtedly be agonizing. And funds for the costs of future collections, electronic or otherwise, will need to be found.

All of which suggests that Gabaccia is going to be no less busy in the months and years to come at IHRC. “But I’m enjoying this,” she says. “With all the challenges and hard work, it remains a pleasure.”

“That shaped my life,” says O’Brien, now an acclaimed scholar and teacher of U.S. colonial and early American Indian history. Her interest in Native American history “came out of my family history,” explains O’Brien, who as a girl in Faribault often visited her grandmother on northern Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation, where her mother had grown up.

“Like many other Indians, my grandmother’s family had lost all of their land … and I grew up hearing those stories,” says O’Brien, seated in her campus office at a desk wedged in among shelves nearly bursting with colorful books and papers. “To have the University give American Indian studies an institutional place … even at age 14 or 15, that felt huge to me. It gave Indian history legitimacy as a thing I could do.”

More than that, says O’Brien, she’d found her vocation—“the Puritans I study would have said ‘calling,’” she offers with an infectious laugh. Inspired, O’Brien “read everything I could find about Native American history,” including Vine Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, which galvanized a generation of activists. The young O’Brien went on to Bemidji State University and then to the University of Chicago. There, in her very first graduate seminar, she stumbled across some documents suggesting that American Indians in Natick, Massachusetts, had not been crushed into extinction by colonialism—contrary to what most scholars had maintained.

“There was clearly an intriguing story there to be told, a big story, and I wanted to tell it,” says O’Brien. She leavened her Ph.D. work in history with ethnohistorical insights from anthropology, gaining the tools to sift her story out of 17th- and 18th-century deeds, wills, and other vital records. Continuing her research after she joined the Minnesota faculty in 1990, she went on to produce the landmark book Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The volume details a complex story of Indian resistance and perseverance in early New England that helped shatter what O’Brien calls “the scholarly and popular myth of the vanishing Indian”—the view that Native people in New England, dispossessed of their lands by European settlers, had become extinct by the end of the 18th century. Instead, as O’Brien shows, “Native peoples remained bound to each other by kinship across the landscape, and they found ways to maintain their identities and cultural practices by reconfiguring them over time.”

O’Brien’s book, critically hailed as “a masterful social history,” became an instant classic. Prominent historian James Merrell says Dispossession by Degrees “has taken its place on the short shelf of indispensable works on Indians in New England and, more, as a work with much to say about wider patterns of resistance and resilience in the colonial world.”

Passionate scholar

O’Brien will soon complete a second major book, following on the heels of many articles, essays, and conference presentations. Tentatively titled “First and Lasting: New England Indians In and Beyond the 19th-Century Local Imagination,” the new book draws on local histories, pamphlets, and even folklore to illuminate the stereotypes and imaginary constructs that led New Englanders “to equate cultural change with cultural loss,” O’Brien explains, “and thus to see Indians as part of
the past, not as part of the present
or future.”

O’Brien says her second book, like her first, “is inspired by my desire to help break silences and fill gaps in the historical narrative.” Yet books, she insists, “are only books. Even important books on shelves get dusty.” With a keen sense of indebtedness to the pioneering scholars who came before her, she takes an exceptionally broad view of her responsibilities as a public university professor.

“I would define myself as someone who is passionate about history, and absolutely clear about the vibrancy and importance of Indian people in the past, present, and future,” says O’Brien. “It’s not just about my own research. It’s also about teaching and mentoring, helping to create new opportunities for students and scholars. And of course, they’re all interconnected.”

Both in and beyond the classroom, O’Brien cuts a wide swath. Her courses cover topics ranging from U.S. colonial social history to American Indian historiography to early 20th-century American culture. She is also a sought-after mentor, with scores of student advisees in history and in such far-flung fields as geography, education, journalism, and the classics.

Students heap O’Brien with accolades, and she returns the compliments. “I love my students,” says O’Brien, recently honored with the U’s highest graduate teaching award. “I think you can go a long way as a teacher when you focus on engaging students in a shared process of teaching and learning.”

Tireless collaborator

O’Brien’s passion for nurturing emerging scholars finds many outlets. From 2000 to 2003, she served as chair of the American studies department, where her innovations dramatically increased student diversity. Undaunted by even high-level multitasking, she also made weekly trips to Chicago during this same period to oversee the launch of a new national organization, the American Indian Studies Consortium (AISC).

The AISC links together 13 major Midwestern universities to offer seminars, fellowships, and research opportunities for emerging scholars of Native American history. Few of these institutions have any American Indian studies program at all, O’Brien notes, much less one as venerable and robust as Minnesota’s. “Yet all have resources and strengths that, pooled, create in essence a mega graduate program” in the field. O’Brien wrote the AISC’s bylaws, helped hone a proposal dazzling enough to wrest funding from a dozen deans, and steered the consortium’s early development.

More recently, O’Brien has been working with colleagues from several universities to create the first national professional organization devoted exclusively to American Indian and indigenous studies. The organization will develop out of a series of conferences, culminating with one at the University of Minnesota in 2009. Fittingly for O’Brien, that conference also will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the creation of the U’s American Indian studies department—the very event that propelled her into academic life.

She has, she concedes, “sometimes found it challenging to juggle so many commitments. But I go to the spring conference of the AISC and see all of these students and faculty together, sharing work and exchanging ideas—it’s incredibly useful and energizing. I absolutely believe that those kinds of interactions are what make for great scholarship and great teaching. I have all kinds of colleagues doing things by themselves. This is better.”

While many of our faculty were off on research trips, the collapse of the I-35 bridge affected us greatly. As in any tragedy, we mourn for the people who lost their lives or were injured. But this event had a special immediacy for us because the site is so close to our offices and because so many historians are deeply involved in the community. History faculty conduct workshops for high school teachers in which they discuss together the latest trends in historical research and pedagogy. They train graduate and undergraduate students in the complexities of mounting museum exhibits on the history of neighborhoods like Dinkytown or Cedar-Riverside. People who previously might never have set foot on campus find their own stories a part of the research and teaching of history. U of M historians are part of the community in their daily work and at moments of tragedy like the bridge collapse.

The expertise of our faculty is in demand far beyond Minnesota as well. Whether other universities are developing programs in Native American studies or in Greek history, or government offices are seeking to ensure that their statistical data are preserved and available for research, they come to our faculty for guidance. In their role as public intellectuals, Minnesota’s historians actively and creatively participate in the public service mission of our land-grant University.

Exciting developments are underway also in regard to our teaching. This past year, for the first time since the early 1990s, we engaged in a thorough departmental review of our undergraduate curriculum. A great deal has changed in the fifteen years since the earlier review. Our undergraduates are more diverse, and they have grown up with computers and are highly attuned to visual media and to the easy access of information on the Web. There are great teaching opportunities here, even as we still want to make sure that our students spend time in the library and read (and enjoy!) books. In the coming year and beyond we’ll be offering our undergraduates more small-class settings and research opportunities, and we’ll be enlivening our already well-regarded introductory lecture courses. Our graduate students continue to write exciting dissertations; the number of awards and fellowships they have won, both within the University and from prestigious national research institutes, are far too many to list here.

In May we bade a formal farewell to Professor David Good, who retired after serving so illustriously as the director of the Center for Austrian Studies and chair of the history department. We know that we will still see David, now professor emeritus, and his wife Rosemary, and will continue to benefit from their counsel. David and Rosemary have generously established a fellowship for our graduate students. Professor Theofanis Stavrou, now our longest serving faculty member, has also generously established a fellowship for graduate students studying the history of the Eastern Orthodox world. The generosity of these two faculty, as well as that of our many alumni, ensures that the University of Minnesota remains a point of attraction for young people drawn to the study of history, and that our faculty will continue to provide them with the best education possible.