January 17, 2024
Happy Winter from the labyrinthine fourth floor of Rush Rhees Library and the Department of
History. As I sit in my office, icy rain pings the glass of my office window, and I reflect on the past year of work and course in our undergraduate program. And what a year it was. The Department graduated thirty-five seniors, the highest number of majors in over a decade, as well as another ten minors. In addition, five seniors successfully completed our Honors Program, while the History Honors Society Phi Alpha Theta inducted five new members.
I was reflecting on the success of our undergrads when talking to a group of prospective students and their parents last spring. One parent wanted to know what exactly their daughter could do after college with a BA in History. “Well,” I said, “our recent graduates are attending prestigious law schools, attend elite PhD programs in History, and are training for master’s degrees in social sciences and humanities. They win Fulbright Fellowships. They live abroad. They become journalists, civil servants, primary and secondary school teachers. They work in advertising, healthcare, film, and music.” And then I paused, took another breath, and said, “As you can see, a history major can do pretty much anything.” This, to me, is what’s so special about the work and teaching we do in our department. We are not training our students for any one career and job path. We are teaching them new ways of thinking about the world, methods for gathering and interrogating information, and
how to present those ideas clearly and compellingly to others. And then our fabulous students take it from there to anywhere they want to be.
In other news, I am especially proud of the work we did in the Department this past year to create new History S.W.A.G., specifically t-shirts, hoodies, and stickers. In order to increase our visibility on campus, we thought it would be prudent if our students had some nice duds to advertise our presence on campus. Last winter, we organized a competition to create a new design. The winner of the competition would not only receive a complementary set of clothes and stickers but also fifty dollars' worth of notebooks, pens, and books from the University Barnes & Noble in College Town. We had many submissions, but the winning design was sketched for us by Chloe Campbell ’23. We then took her design to a graphic designer who rendered it into a high-quality version suitable for printing; hired a local print shop, Kitty Box Press in the South Wedge, to print coral pink t-shirts and gray hoodies; and then released them to our Undergrads. We worked closely with UR graduate and History alum Jon Getz, who graciously subsidized the cost of the shirts. Thank you again to Jon, as well as Jacqui Rizzo and Sarah Murphy, for all their hard work in making the design competition a success.
The other big change is we continue to refine our Honors Program. In 2020, Prof. Pablo Sierra completed a massive revamping of Honors into a three-semester sequence, which has been an enormous success. Incoming senior honors students are better prepared to hit the ground running in their fall semester. Since the revamp, the number of students successfully completing honors has grown by fifty percent. Now, we’d like to focus a bit more on the potential of our Junior Honors program as well.
Starting this year, junior honors students will travel to Washington, D.C., for a weeklong intensive research trip. For five days, students will work in archives in the city to begin research on their projects. We envision students researching in the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Agricultural Library, and other similar institutions. Students will spend their morning hours doing research, while the afternoon will be reserved for field trips to museums, meetings with researchers, and conversations with people who work in public history. Finally, we will also take advantage of our massive UR History alumn network in the area and set up dinners and get-togethers with former Yellow Jackets. So if you’re in the D.C. area, and you’d like to participate, please reach out to myself, and we’ll include you in our planning. Many thanks to Michael Hayata, our Visiting Assistant Professor who will lead this inaugural trip, and Department Chair Ruben Flores for his enthusiastic support.
Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and productive New Year.
-Tom Fleischman
Associate Professor,
Director of Undergraduate Studies