Literary House Celebrates Faculty Authors With Open House Saturday, September 29

CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College invites the community to meet seven faculty authors at a special event Saturday, September 29, at 2 p.m.  Please stop by the House, located at 407 Washington Avenue, to visit with the following faculty members and learn about the books they have published in the past two years:

Emily Chamlee-Wright

The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-Disaster Environment

Routledge, 2010.

The Political Economy of Katrina and Community Rebound

Edward Elgar, 2012.

Jehanne Dubrow

Red Army Red: Poems

Northwestern University Press, 2012.

Stateside: Poems

Northwestern University Press 2010

Meredith Davies Hadaway

The River is the Reason: Poems

Word Press, 2011

Alisha R. Knight

Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer's (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success

University of Tennessee Press, 2012.

Kathryn M. Moncrief

Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction and Performance

Co-edited with Kathryn R. McPherson

Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011.

Gary S. Schiff

In Search of Polin: Chasing Jewish Ghosts in Today's Poland

Peter Lang Publishing, 2012. 

Richard Striner

Lincoln and Race

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Supernatural Romance in Film: Tales of Love, Death, and the Afterlife

McFarland & Co., 2011.

Lincoln's Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

Starr Center's New York Times Series Separates Fact from Fiction in Political Claims on History

CHESTERTOWN, MD—In an unprecedented journalistic partnership with one of the world’s foremost media outlets, faculty and students at Washington College have created a new online feature in The New York Times that will keep watch over the ways politicians and special interest groups use and misuse history. The series, which is titled Historically Corrected, launched on Sunday, July 8, with a broadside aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, casting significant doubt on claims that both President Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney, have recently made on the campaign trail.

“History is often the language of American politics,” says Adam Goodheart, director of the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which is spearheading the project. “But whether it’s Democrats harking back to the New Deal or Republicans claiming the mantle of the founding fathers, fact and fiction are often much too easily confused.”

For instance, Mr. Obama’s standard stump speech usually hails past achievements such as Hoover Dam as examples of how Americans “built this country together.” But this week’s column reveals that the dam’s construction in the 1930s was far from what one might call a “kumbaya” moment. Washington College undergraduate Kathy Thornton, part of the faculty-student research team at work on Historically Corrected, unearthed a 1932 newspaper article documenting protests against policies banning Asian-American laborers from working on the site, while African Americans were relegated to a few menial jobs.

Meanwhile, Mr. Romney recently gave a speech celebrating the United States as “unique” and “exceptional in the history of the world” as the only nation that has never taken land through war. But as the Historically Corrected team points out, he made the comment in San Diego – which itself was seized by a U.S. force in 1846, invading what was then part of Mexico.

Co-directing the project with Goodheart is journalist and historian Manseau, a scholar-in-residence at the Starr Center. Beginning with a handpicked group of student associates this summer, the project will expand in the fall when Manseau’s “Writing for the Media” course will serve as a “newsroom” allowing students to track down leads, hone their fact-checking skills, and pitch topics for the series just as they might do one day at newspapers or television networks. “Working on a project affiliated with the New York Times is unbeatable real-world experience for any aspiring journalist,” Manseau says. “Students will come away from Historically Corrected with a better sense of how news and other media are created today, and the role they might play in that process.” 

With tens of millions of unique visitors per month, the newspaper’s Web site is one of the most-read media outlets in the world. Historically Corrected will run several times per month under the rubric of the Campaign Stops blog, one of the Times’ most high-profile online series. A condensed version of this week’s inaugural column also appears in the Sunday, July 8 print edition of the Times.

“The Times is excited to be able to include in our pages and online this valuable contribution to the political discussion,” says Clay Risen, senior editor in the paper’s Op-Ed department, which will oversee the series. “We expect that Adam Goodheart, Peter Manseau and the rest of the Washington College team will offer our readers a unique insight into American history, ironically via a medium — the Internet — that has only recently made such perspectives so quickly and widely available.”

Washington College president Mitchell B. Reiss sees the project as “a wonderful opportunity for our students to be engaged at the intersection of history and politics in a meaningful way. They will be learning from some of the finest historians in the nation, and their research will support journalism on one of the most widely read and influential Web sites in the world,” he adds.  “Adam and Peter are illustrating yet again how the work of the Starr Center can bridge the past and present and bring the insights of history to the forefront of the national dialogue.” 

Unlike existing fact-checking sites that simply declare a statement to be true or false, Historically Corrected is designed to encourage nuanced interpretation, discussion, and debate among readers. Nationally distinguished scholars will contribute comments to spark the discussions. The initial group of participating historians includes Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania, the biographer and journalist Richard Brookhiser, and Ted Widmer of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, along with Washington College professors Melissa Deckman, Joseph Prud’homme, and Richard Striner.

“Readers will be encouraged to join the debate in the comments section and through social media,” Goodheart adds, “and the column will also offer a window into the past by providing primary sources—documents, letters, and images—gathered by Washington College students.”

This examination of how history is incorporated into today’s politics is at the heart of the mission of the Starr Center, which was founded in 2000 to encourage new approaches to studying American history, to draw connections between the past and present, and to make the work of first-rate historians accessible and inviting to the general public. The Center also creates unique opportunities for Washington College students both on-campus and far beyond; in addition to the new Times endeavor, it has developed longstanding partnerships with the Smithsonian, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and other nationally eminent institutions.

Goodheart, who serves as the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Center, is a historian, essayist and journalist. His recent book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, was a national bestseller. A frequent contributor to the acclaimed New York Times online Civil War series  Disunion, he also contributes to numerous national publications, including Slate, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and the New York Times Magazine. 

Manseau, the Center’s scholar-in-residence, is the author of several books on history and religion, including Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead and Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, as well as the award-winning historical novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. Manseau has written for publications including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and is currently at work on a book about the forgotten influence of religious minorities in American history.

For more information on the Historically Corrected project and its research and writing team, visit http://www.washcoll.edu/historically-corrected.

Project directors Adam Goodheart, left, and Peter Manseau, right, discuss
the first installment of Historically Corrected with student assistants
Maegan Clearwood and Kaitlin Tabeling.

New Book by Washington College Historian Explores Lincoln's Racial Attitudes, Political Savvy

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? In his compelling new book, Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press), Washington College history professor Richard Striner weighs the evidence and concludes that, not only was Lincoln free of racial bias, but he also was a political genius willing to deceive his opponents about his racial attitudes in order to further the cause of human rights.

“With lawyerly precision, Richard Striner mines the speeches and writings of our 16th president to make a compelling case for a President Lincoln who, contrary to contemporary belief, had a long and abiding commitment, not just to the end of slavery, but also to equality before the law for all men, whatever the color of their skin,” writes Clay Risen of The New York Times.

The author of five previous books, two of them about Lincoln, Striner has been writing and thinking about the Civil War president since he was a graduate student in history at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s. He says that writing Lincoln and Race gave him a chance to explore in depth one of the themes of his first major work on Lincoln, Father Abraham (Oxford, 2006).

“Was Lincoln, emancipator and champion of liberty, actually a conflicted soul struggling to overcome his own racial prejudice? As I worked my way through the issue in Father Abraham, I thought it quite unlikely for a number of reasons, but most of all because, studying his statecraft and politics, it became clear to me that Lincoln was a moral Machiavellian, an idealist with street smarts,” Striner says.

“Lincoln chose to employ deception a number of times during his White House years, in ways that are easy to document. He had to craft a very careful strategy in order to prevent all sorts of worst-case contingencies, including a white supremacist backlash that would have set back the antislavery cause for God knows how many decades.”

Striner structured Lincoln and Race as a sort of detective yarn, a courtroom drama. He even invokes Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel The Thin Man in his introduction. Assembling the evidence piece by piece, affording all sides of the debate a fair hearing, he has one end in mind: that “any satisfactory theory should make greater sense than the others.”

Striner became fascinated with Lincoln’s statecraft when he was in graduate school, “looking at the past in order to find my own bearings in terms of political philosophy, looking for inspiration. Lincoln struck me powerfully in many ways, not least because of the way he harmonized a great idealism with a very tough realism. Later, when I worked as a grassroots historic preservationist in Washington, I came to appreciate him even more because, trying to summon power to my cause, I realized I was trying at a very low level to do what he did so brilliantly on a grand scale.”

Striner’s habit of mining the past for inspiration has informed his numerous articles, including recent pieces about Lincoln for the popular New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War, and a cover story in The American Scholar in which he urges the administration to consider Lincoln’s strategy of printing greenbacks as a possible cure for contemporary economic woes. His 2011 book, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, examines how Lincoln and five subsequent presidents pushed forward large-scale public projects and policies that made the country great.

Striner is currently working on a book about Woodrow Wilson, who, “unlike Lincoln, was a terrible strategist,” he says. “Wilson was narcissistic and foolish in ways that make him Lincoln’s operational opposite. If democracy is going to work, it demands leadership, and if the world is going to be made better, it will be by people who know how to deliver real results and not just pose on a soapbox demonstrating how perfect they are in their attitudes. That’s nice, but it doesn’t free any slaves.”

Professor Striner's Maverick Fix for Nation's Economic Malaise is Cover of PBK Quarterly

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College history professor Richard Striner’s proposal for fixing the U.S. economy is the cover story of the Winter 2012 issue of American Scholar, the quarterly magazine published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His historically rooted pitch: Congress could create money, as it did during the Civil War, funding public projects that shock the economy back to life.

Striner, a Lincoln scholar whose 2010 book Lincoln's Way explored the use of broad presidential powers under six Administrations, says his research for that book piqued his interest in monetary policy, especially how the United States financed its wars and used major public works projects to boost employment. The son of an economist, he delved into U.S. monetary history from the Civil War forward. His proposal may be heresy to some, he notes, but a number of well-respected economists were saying much the same thing back in the 1930s and ’40s.

Striner’s proposal is different from any previous “Greenback” proposal because he envisions a dynamic partnership between Congress and the Federal Reserve—a partnership that would use all of the existing powers of “the Fed” to prevent or counteract inflation.

“I’m hoping this proposal will stimulate a major reconceptualization of what money is,” Striner says. “Most Americans have no idea of how our money supply is created or how money enters circulation, because the subject is hardly ever explained in vivid language that the general public can understand. This article, among its other aims, seeks to rectify that situation.”

To read the article online, visit http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-pay-for-what-we-need/.

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November 30, 2011

Washington College Professor on Marc Steiner Show Friday

Richard Striner, associate professor of history at Washington College, will appear on the Marc Steiner Show on WJHU, 88.1 FM, at 1 p.m., Friday, June 23.

He will be discussing his new book, The Civic Deal, and responding to calls from the audience.

In The Civic Deal, Striner presents a philosophy for reinvigorating government stewardship in American public life. He advocates a melding of conservative and liberal ideas and values to create effective and far-reaching public policies.

James MacGregor Burns, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox," says, "I greatly admire The Civic Deal because of the way it has brought together grand intellectual and political traditions in American history and applied them effectively to problems today."