The teacher/scholar model lies at the heart of any successful liberal arts and sciences institution, and must remain at the center of the Guiding Coalition’s work in imagining the future of Truman State University. It contributes to an intellectually vibrant community with a pervasive sense of the value of the liberal arts and sciences. Faculty scholarship plays an important role in building Truman’s reputation and gaining our graduates entrance to top-notch graduate and professional programs. The teacher/scholar model not only keeps faculty abreast of their field, but even more importantly models behavior that we expect in our students of a life of engagement with ever widening knowledge of our fields and their relation to the larger world. It is important that we do not ask students to do things that we are not willing and able to do ourselves.

Given these realities, it is of utmost importance that Truman State University maintain an active program of internal research grants and sabbaticals. The suspension of this funding threatens the future of Truman State University as a liberal arts and sciences university. We applaud the commitment and support that the School of Social and Cultural Studies (SSCS) demonstrates to faculty research, and call on the entire University to embrace this priority.

Connor Stangler, a junior English and history double major from Columbia, Mo., was recently awarded a national competitive scholarship of up to $30,000 from the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation.

This year, the Foundation received 587 applications from 272 colleges. Only about 65 scholarships are awarded annually. Stangler is the only student from a Missouri university to receive the award.

Stangler, who will graduate from Truman in May 2013, tentatively plans to pursue a joint juris doctorate/master’s in public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed by a Ph.D. in politics and social policy at Princeton University. He credits Truman’s broad curriculum and focus on personal education, as well as service-learning experiences, with helping him secure this scholarship.

“Had I gone to a larger university, or one that placed less of an emphasis on civic commitment, I would not have had the same opportunities,” Stangler said. “The faculty, staff and administrators devote so much of their time to developing leaders and broadening the intellectual capabilities and, especially, the bold imagination of their students. Truman is interested in more than producing efficient professionals; they are interested in producing honest citizens, ones that have the chance to effect change.”

The Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., provides funding to students pursuing graduate degrees in public service fields. The Foundation also provides assistance with career counseling, internship placement, graduate school admissions and professional development. Scholars are invited to participate in a number of programs, including Truman Scholar Leadership Week, The Summer Institute and The Truman-Albright Fellows Program. A complete list of all of this year’s scholarship recipients can be found at truman.gov/meet-our-scholars.

During 2012-2013, Truman history professor Daniel Mandell will focus on research and writing at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worchester, Mass., thanks to a long-term fellowship awarded by the AAS and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He will also spend a week as a visiting scholar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.  Mandell’s project, which began with his sabbatical in 2007, is a study of changing concepts of equality in America.

The AAS, founded 200 years ago, is one of the oldest research libraries in the United States, with one of the most complete holdings of materials published in America before 1850.  The NEH provides much of the funding for the Society to give three long-term research fellowships every year to scholars who apply on an international competitive basis.  Mandell will spend most of his time at the Society reading relevant children’s literature, newspapers, pamphlets, and periodicals published between 1790 and 1850,.  He also expects to write large segments of the book manuscript, which will examine questions of class and ideas of equality from 1600 through 1880.

The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, founded in 1930, is one of the world’s foremost centers for groundbreaking theoretical science and humanities research, with closely linked Schools of Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Historical Studies.  Every year each of the Schools brings together scholars to conduct and share research on aspects of a broad topic; Mandell will be participating in the School of Social Studies, which this coming year will focus on the theme of “Economics and Politics.”

Huping Ling, Professor of History, has been selected by the University of Saskatchewan as a Role Model Speaker at the College of Art and Science in 2012. She will deliver a public lecture on the “Rise of China and Chinese in North America” on May 15, 2012.

On March 29 and 30, Professor Ling will give a series of invited public lectures in Chicago on her newly published book Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community Since 1870 (Stanford University Press, 2012). She has been invited by DePaul University for its “Women’s History Month Lecture” to deliver a public lecture on “Celestial Women in the Windy City” on March 29 (Richardson Library Room 400, 5-6 pm), by the Asian American Studies Program at University of Illinois in Chicago to give a public lecture on “Chinese in Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community” on March 30 (208 Burnham Hall, 10-11am), and by the Chinese American Service League to give a public lecture on “Chinese Community in Chicago” (Grand Hall, 2141 S. Tan Court, 1-2pm).

On Thursday, March 15 at 7:30 p.m., The Truman State Department of History will host Rev. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C from Notre Dame University, who will deliver the 2012 Barbara Early-Vreeland Lecture.  The Lecture will take place in the Student Union Building, Activities Room.

Rev. Miscamble, Professor of History at Notre Dame, will speak on his recently published book The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

At Notre Dame, Rev. Miscamble teaches U.S. diplomatic and political history.  His research focus is post World War II U.S. foreign policy.  The author of numerous books, two of his titles have received the Harry S. Truman Book Award.  Those have been George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton University Press, 1992) and From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

A native of Australia, Rev. Miscamble earned both a B.A. and a M.A. from the University of Queensland.  He then earned three degrees at Notre Dame: a Master of Divinity, a M.A. in history, and his Ph.D. in history.  He was ordained as a priest in 1988.

The Barbara Early-Vreeland Lecture, established by Joseph Vreeland in memory of his wife who graduated from our university in 1973, gives the Truman community the opportunity to hear public lectures by scholars of international reputation.

 

Chinese Chicago:
Race, Transnational Migration, and Community Since 1870
By Huping Ling
Published by Stanford University Press, 2012

Review
“A unique and valuable study, sure to deepen our understanding of extra-national migratory studies in the development of modernity.”—John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York University & Museum of Chinese in America

“Huping Ling, a prolific and leading scholar of Chinese America, gives us yet another refreshingly exciting book. An excellent community study, it offers fascinating stories about various aspects of Chinese America life in the community, ranging from food, laundry-shop work, school life, and family life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago. The book situates these stories in larger contexts, specially the Chinese American transnational world, providing extraordinary insights into the connection between the local and the global. It also connects the past to the present by taking an in-depth look at the post-war forces that have transformed and continue to transform Chinese Chicago.”—Yong Chen, author of Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community
Product Description
Numerous studies have documented the transnational experiences and local activities of Chinese immigrants in California and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less is known about the vibrant Chinese American community that developed at the same time in Chicago. In this sweeping account, Huping Ling offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese in Chicago, beginning with the arrival of the pioneering Moy brothers in the 1870s and continuing to the present.

Ling focuses on how race, transnational migration, and community have defined Chinese in Chicago. Drawing upon archival documents in English and Chinese, she charts how Chinese made a place for themselves among the multiethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, cultivating friendships with local authorities and consciously avoiding racial conflicts. Ling takes readers through the decades, exploring evolving family structures and relationships, the development of community organizations, and the operation of transnational businesses. She pays particular attention to the influential role of Chinese in Chicago’s academic and intellectual communities and to the complex and conflicting relationships among today’s more dispersed Chinese Americans in Chicago.
About the Author
Huping Ling is Professor of History at Truman State University and Executive Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies. She has published eleven books and over one hundred articles. Most recently, she coedited Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (2010).

Visit us at www.sup.org

Professor of History Sally West has published I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia.

This groundbreaking book is the first to study the cultural history of advertising in imperial Russia. In the first part of the book, West describes the development of advertising as an industry, discussing responses from both the business community and the state. The emergence of Russian advertising and consumer culture played a formative role in unsettling traditional tsarist society by promoting the aspirations of self-fulfillment through consumption. Encouraging a consumerist ethic at odds with an autocratic society, advertising spoke the language of both tradition and modernity, simultaneously perpetuating and undermining the values of the past. The rise of pervasive, mass-circulation advertising in tsarist society created paradoxes that reflect the tensions in late imperial Russia—a peasant society swiftly becoming a world industrial power, a modernizing economy within a patriarchal culture, and a population becoming consumers and citizens while still subjects of the tsar.

West presents a cultural study of central themes that form the advertising messages themselves, including consumption as a progressive and civilizing force, the deliberate creation of “consumer” as a new identity, the perpetuation and reformulation of gender roles, and the appropriation and commodification of Russian cultural motifs. In an analysis of the advertisements themselves, West incorporates numerous illustrations from the mass-circulation press and the poster collection of the Russian National Library, many of which are difficult to access and unknown to most scholars.

I Shop in Moscow offers an unexplored perspective for anyone interested in the comparative study of consumer culture and advertising. West’s original study will appeal to scholars and students of advertising and Russian history, as well as those working in gender studies, folklore, and cultural history.

Professor of History Marc Becker has published José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology.

José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most profound but overlooked thinkers. A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin America. He also stressed that indigenous peoples must take an active, if not leading, role in any revolutionary struggle.

Today Latin America is the scene of great social upheaval. More progressive governments are in power than ever before, and grassroots movements of indigenous peoples, workers, and peasants are increasingly shaping the political landscape. The time is perfect for a rediscovery of Mariátegui, who is considered an intellectual precursor of today’s struggles in Latin America but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This volume collects his essential writings, including many that have never been translated and some that have never been published. The scope of this collection, masterful translation, and thoughtful commentary make it an essential book for scholars of Latin America and all of those fighting for a new world, waiting to be born.

Professor of History Dan Mandell has been elected to the membership of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, founded 1892, “a non-profit educational foundation designed to promote the study of Massachusetts history from earliest settlement through the first decades of the nineteenth century.” The society publishes documents (through the University of Virginia Press) and organizes conferences related to that period. Before 1950, membership was limited to descendants of Massachusetts Bay or Plymouth colonists.

Dr. Mandell has also been elected a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, “an independent research library that collects, preserves, makes accessible, and communicates manuscripts and other materials that promote the study of the history of Massachusetts and the nation.” Founded in 1791, it is the first such organization in the United States. It is an outstanding research place, and their web site features a large number of digitized pamphlets and broadsides from the Revolution, a huge number of the Adams Papers (original mss and transcription), and many other items.

The Women’s Resource Center provides history professor Huping Ling a Woman of Distinction Awards. http://newsletter.truman.edu/article.asp?id=6162