Robert Johnston has won a grant from the NEH for a Summer Institute for K-12 teachers entitled Rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which will convene at UIC from June 26 to July 22.
Professor of History Emeritus and former chair of the department Melvin G. "Mel" Holli passed away on January 7, 2016. Holli was a founding member of the Department of History at what was then known as the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. An expert on urban history, particularly that of Detroit and Chicago, he had a strong interest in the history of mayoralty and of immigration to the United States.
2013 Ph.D. graduate Anne Parsons has been named a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow by the Open Society Foundation to complete work on a book exploring the link between the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the rise of mass incarceration.
Kevin Schultz appeared on MSNBC's June 5 program, "The Cycle" to discuss his new book, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties.
Javier Villa-Flores, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies and history, has been named a fellow of the National Humanities Center for the 2015-16 academic year. Villa-Flores, who studies religious issues, colonialism, performance studies and the social history of language in colonial Mexico, will join 36 other distinguished scholars from 32 institutions across the United States and eight foreign countries working on a wide array of projects. He will also have opportunities to participate in seminars, lectures and conferences.
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) Committee on the Status of LGBTQ Historians and Histories is very proud to announce the launch of a fundraising campaign to support the creation of an annual Ph.D. dissertation prize in U.S. LGBTQ history. The prize will be named in honor of John DEmilio and administered by the OAH.
The International Labor History Association (ILHA) is pleased to announce the ILHA Book of the Year Award for 2014. The volume, Workers in Hard Times, edited by Leon Fink, Joseph McCartin, and Joan Sangster (University of Illinois Press, 2014), represents a cogent contribution to labor history with lessons drawn from past and present worker struggles.
James Mestaz received the Adrian Bantjes Best Graduate Student Paper Award from The Rocky Mountain Council in Latin American Studies (RMCLAS) for his paper, Their Technology, Our Way: Mayo Uses of Fuerte River Infrastructure,1930-1950 which he presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting in Tucson, Arizona, April 8-11 2015.
Graduate student Jeff Nichols found film clips of the SS Eastland disaster, an excursion vessel that capsized in the Chicago River in 1915. He found the footage while looking through archival films from the EYE Film Institute in the Netherlands. These precious few seconds of film are the only known moving images of the disaster. News of the discovery spread quickly via social media and online newspaper outlets. For more information and to view the film clips, visit: http://www.eastlanddisaster.org/news