American Historical Association

In the fall of 2018, Wheaton College historian Kathryn Tomasek made a visit to Indiana University, Bloomington, as a guest of IU’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. AHR Interview producer Daniel Story sat down with her in front of a live audience to discuss historians and digital scholarship. Kathryn Tomasek is Professor of History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history, women’s history, and digital history, and is a founding director of the Wheaton College Digital History Project. She has written extensively on both women’s history and digital history and methodology and served as a member of the American Historical Association’s ad hoc Committee on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Publications by Historians. Her current focus includes an ongoing collaborative project to TEI encode historical financial records.

In this episode, AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with filmmaker Robert Greene about his 2018 film “Bisbee ’17.” In it Greene examines the complex and troubled history of Bisbee, Arizona, a mining town located near the state’s southern border. The film’s central focus is the 1917 illegal removal of more than a thousand striking mine works, and many of their local supporters, by the mining company Phelps Dodge—a scarring event now known simply as the “Bisbee Deportation.” Greene went about the examination, in part, by involving present-day residents of the town in reenacting key aspects of the deportation event, an innovation that effectively transforms the film from a straightforward historical documentary into a far more complex examination of history, memory, and memorialization. Greene’s other critically-acclaimed films include the Gotham Awards-nominated “Actress” (2014), “Fake It So Real” (2011), and “Kati With An I” (2010). He currently serves as Filmmaker-in-Chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. “Bisbee ’17” is the subject of an AHR roundtable titled “Re-creating the ‘Bisbee Deportation’ on Film,” which appears in the June 2019 issue.

One of the late-breaking sessions at this year’s AHA Annual Meeting dealt with the devasting fire that engulfed Brazil’s Museu Nacional in September 2018. The session was titled “Archives Burning: The Fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond.” We spoke with three of the participants just after the panel concluded: Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Seth Garfield, and Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is Professor of Latin American History at University of Kent. She is the author of the book The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz, which was published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2011 and in Spanish by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in 2015. Seth Garfield is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the 2001 book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988, and the 2013 In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region, both published Duke University Press. Mariza de Carvalho Soares recently retired from her position as Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and has more recently served as the curator of the African collection at the Museu Nacional. She is the author of People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, published in English in 2011 by Duke University Press. The panel also included Kirsten Weld from Harvard University and the session chair, Bianca Premo from Florida International University.

In this episode we speak with Brandon R. Byrd about his work in African American and African Diaspora intellectual history. His first book, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, is titled The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti. Byrd is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He also currently serves as vice president of the African American Intellectual History Society and is a contributor to that organization’s online publication Black Perspectives. The African American Intellectual History Society is a scholarly organization dedicated to the research, writing, and teaching of Black thought and culture. Founded in 2014 by Christopher Cameron, it has quickly become a hub of cutting edge, cross-disciplinary public scholarship. In addition to publishing Black Perspectives, it offers a range of fellowships, awards, and prizes, and hosts an annual conference, which in March 2019 will be held at the University of Michigan.

In this episode, editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Kathryn Olivarius, whose article, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” appears in the April 2019 issue of the AHR. Olivarius is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University where she focuses on the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. Her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.