As we begin a new academic year, the Department of History and Geography is proud to celebrate three books published by our faculty over the past year, including work by two colleagues recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.
Stephanie Hassell, recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor, is the author of Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal’s Indian Empire, 1500-1700 (Ohio University Press). The book examines how enslaved Africans and Asians were part of the larger Portuguese project of building and maintaining a Catholic empire in the Indian Ocean. Responsible for the conversion of their enslaved dependents to Catholicism, slaveholders became religious stewards whose spiritual duties helped expand the Christian population. That converted population was treated as part of the imperial security apparatus, imagined as loyal allies against neighboring Muslim states, even as Catholicism conveyed rights, enabled agency, and provoked struggles within households. Hassell shows that the making of a Catholic empire was a contested process bound up in the complex relationships between enslaved individuals, their enslavers, and the Church.
Rod Andrew Jr., Professor of History and Alumni Master Teacher and a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, is the author of The Marines’ Fight for Survival: War, Politics, and Institutional Crisis, 1945-1952 (University Press of Kansas). Just after World War II, leaders in the other services and the Truman Administration launched a determined effort to abolish the Marine Corps or to cut its role back so severely that it would become irrelevant. Through politicking, intrigue, leaked classified documents, deceit, and extreme moral courage, key Marine officers and their supporters barely staved off the crippling of the Corps through 1950. Andrew argues that only the outstanding performance of the Marines in the first year of the Korean War saved the Corps and anchored the place it holds today in the national defense structure. The book has been named co-recipient of the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.
Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, newly tenured as Associate Professor, is the author of Tied to Their Country: The Farm Crisis, Agrarian Activism, and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism (University of Nebraska Press). In the book she examines the Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and its lasting political consequences. As banks collapsed, Main Street storefronts closed, and small towns emptied, what began as an agricultural crisis enveloped all of rural America. Stoil argues that the collapse of rural society during those years helps explain why anti-federal sentiment runs so deep across rural America today, even as many farmers are now beneficiaries of federal programs. Tracing both the immediate upheaval and its long aftermath, she shows how disparate groups coalesced around an ideology of rural anti-federalism.
Please join us in congratulating Professors Hassell, Andrew, and Stoil on these remarkable achievements.
