Everyone wants to draw lessons from the past right now. My Twitter TL is full of links to news articles comparing the COVID-19 crisis and the 1918 influenza pandemic. There’s even a #COVID19syllabus project that gathers recent articles and supplements them with scholarly books and articles. So I couldn’t ignore the fact that my campus closed in 1918, just as it closed in March 2020. Sitting in Webex meetings with other administrators, I wondered what happened back then, what decisions those administrators made, and what impact influenza had had on the State Normal School at Harrisonburg. [read more]
Continue readingCategory Archives: JMU Campus History
What’s in a Name? The JMU Quad as a Lesson Plan
I’m republishing this August 2019 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because petitions linking to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
If you understand that a college campus is a commemorative landscape, that its named buildings, statuary, roadways, plazas, and so forth all comprise a text that can be read for insights into the institution’s cultural values, then you’ll appreciate it when I say that JMU’s Quad is a kind of lesson plan. Conceived by Dr. John Wayland, first professor of history at the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg and head of the department of Social Studies until 1931, the plan relies on the associative properties of monuments, which call forth the great deeds and virtues of the person or Continue reading
Searching for Mr. Walker Lee
His name leaps out at me. “In Science Hall there was Walker Lee, the janitor. Short, rotund, and coal black, Walker’s smile, cheerful disposition and willingness to be of help made him a favorite with the girls. He could out spell many of them and was said to write a finer hand than President Burruss himself.” These sentences appear in Chapter 5 of Raymond C. Dingledine, Jr.’s Madison College (1958), a celebratory review of this institution’s first fifty years. Although the name is right there in black and white, the customary honorific “Mr.” is missing. Following the customs of the day, Dingledine, the Continue reading
Confronting Blackface
I’m republishing this Feb. 2019 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because links to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
Blackface minstrelsy has a long history on this campus, so in light of recent revelations about state officials’ participation in related activities I thought I’d pull together some information for students wondering what the heck is going on. First, as Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes noted in her recent WaPo essay, “The Troubling History Behind Ralph Northam’s Blackface Klan Photo,” minstrelsy was absolutely “central to civic and campus life in 20th century America.” White men, young and old, poor and elite, uneducated and erudite, not only used “the profits of amateur blackface to build white-only institutions” but, more importantly, to affirm their political, economic, and cultural Continue reading
Alumni Scrapbooks and Collective Memory
Page from Carrie Bishop’s scrapbook with mementos from a “masque party” she attended in 1916.
Collegiate scrapbooks are no longer a thing. Sure, modern students still take photographs to document their college years—arguably, they take even more than my generation, thanks to digital cameras–but instead of pasting images into memory books, they post them to Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. It’s interesting to compare the ephemerality of today’s memory-keeping activities to the materiality of yesterday’s.
Physical scrapbooks fascinate me. I’m a scrapbooker, myself, have been since middle Continue reading
Confederate Heritage at JMU
This building commemorates noted 19th century scientist and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who resigned his commission in the US Navy in 1861 to serve as a commodore in the Confederate navy. After the Civil War, he briefly lived in Mexico, where he tried to create a slaveholding colony for exiled Confederates. He eventually returned to his home state, Virginia, and accepted a position as professor of meteorology at Virginia Military Institute. A strong advocate for public higher education, he helped create the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech). Photo by author.
I’m republishing this May 2017 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because links to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
Talk of Confederate heritage seems to be everywhere these days. As a public historian who studies, teaches, and writes about this subject, I find the sudden resurgence fascinating and repellent at the same time. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, put it well when he said, Confederate statues “are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” I make a similar point in my forthcoming book, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in WiImington, NC, which includes an analysis of monuments and memorials in that city. But my interest is more than academic. Every day, I go to work in a building that long served as a Confederate monument. To be clear, my views on renaming/removing/contextualizing such Continue reading