Emeritus Professors

My area of expertise is Latin American history, especially social movements, issues of gender, and labor history in the 19th and 20th centuries. I began my career as a “Brazilianist,” and while maintaining a strong affection for and interest in Brazil’s people and history, I have now branched out into more general studies of other areas of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In research, I attempt to integrate fully the diversity of the peoples of the Americas: young and old, men and women, different categories of race, gender and sexuality. I view this diversity through the prism of state influence, showing the response, and often resistance, of the masses toward national and international economic and political policies that affect day-to-day life. A growing area of interest for me, and my next project, is a study of the transnationalism of popular culture that is increasingly uniting North and South Americans.

Academic Credentials

B.A., University of Wisconsin; M.A., Ph.D.,

My research specialties include Medieval and Renaissance history, especially religion (saints ‘ cults, pilgrimage shrines, miracles, visions, and witchcraft), late medieval science and natural philosophy (physics and metaphysics), and medieval and Renaissance economic history (entrepreneurship).

Publications

On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy
by Steven Sargent (Editor), Steven Sargent (Translator)

Academic credentials

B.S., Purdue University; B.A., M.A., University of Massachusetts; M.S., New York University; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

My areas of specialization include Nineteenth-Century Political Culture, the Civil War and Reconstruction, African-American History, and Public History. My book, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North examines the making of the American cultural and ideological nation state. My most recent article, “Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776-1860,” explores the changing image of slavery in theater and minstrelsy, and is part of a larger project on verbal and visual representations of slavery in the antebellum and Civil War North.

Publications

Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North
by Melinda Lawson
University Press of Kansas, 2002
Paperback edition 2005

Academic Credentials

B.A., State University of New York at Albany; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

His research areas include the history of education, McCarthyism and political repression in US history, the American democratic tradition, history of American pragmatism, New York City history, and urban social movements.

He is the author of Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), on anticommunism in the New York City municipal colleges and public schools before WWII; The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American intellectual, cultural and urban history. His work has appeared in Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Urban History and other publications.

Publications

Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism, Empire State Editions, Fordham University Press, 2019.

Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism
by Andrew Feffer
Cornell University Press
July 1993

The current revival of pragmatism still lacks a deeper historical resonance-an understanding of how pragmatism historically shaped and was shaped by reformist and radical political practice. This book is a crucial addition to our understanding of that history, an example of how intellectual history might inform and benefit from debates about our contemporary political culture. This case reveals pragmatism to be a far subtler-and more contradictory-political and social theory than either its liberal defenders or its radical critics have argued to date. An important, philosophical sophisticated contribution to American intellectual history.

“W’s masculine pseudo-democracy: Brothers-in-arms, suicide bombers and the culture of life,” in W Stands for Women Feminism: Gender and Security in the Presidency of George W. Bush, Lori Marso and Michaele Ferguson (eds.), forthcoming from Duke University Press (Spring 2007).

“Gentrification,” in Encyclopedia of Urban History, forthcoming from Sage Publications.

“The Presence of Democracy: Deweyan Exceptionalism and Communist Teachers in the 1930s,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66.1 (2005), 79-97.

“Show Down in Center City: Manifestations of Collective Identity on a Stage Set by Redevelopment — Philadelphia, 1974-1984,” Journal of Urban History 30:6 (September 2004), 791-825

“’The Land Belongs to the People’: Reframing Urban Protest in Philadelphia, 1973-1981,” in The World the Sixties Made, Van Gosse and Richard Moser (eds) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)

“Industrialism and its Critics,” in Scribners Encyclopedia of Cultural and Intellectual History, Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams eds. (New York, 2001), 617-626.

“Sociability and Social Conflict in George Herbert Mead’s Interactionism, 1900-1919” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (April-June, 1990): 233-254.

“Coroners in the Academy,” Telos 73 (Fall 1987): 185-88 (review-commentary)
Reviews in Journal of American History, Teachers College Record, History of Education Quarterly, American Historical Review, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Peace and Change.

Academic credentials

B.A., Swarthmore College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

History

Research interests

My love of history began as a young girl reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, a biography of Abigail Adams, and Louisa May Alcott’s spunky heroines. My main research interests as a historian developed in part from these female-centered books and some of the historical issues raised in them: female and male gender roles; women’s rights; and interactions between American Indians and whites. I have studied a Minnesota couple’s Civil War correspondence and what it reveals about gender during the national conflict; examined how manuscript and printed maps represent competing American Indian and European land claims leading up to the Seven Years War; and analyzed the gendered content and symbols in political cartoons of Abraham Lincoln.

Teaching interests

The courses I teach reflect my early interests. I offer American women’s history, colonial through the present with a separate course on the history of women’s rights and citizenship; American Indian history and a comparative North American frontiers course; the Civil War; and “Hands-On” History, using archival materials and interning at a local museum.

Publications

“Go if you think it your duty”: The Civil War Correspondence of James Madison and Elizabeth Caleff Bowler (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007).

“Vine and Oak: Wives and Husbands Cope with the Financial Panic of 1857,”Journal of Social History, 36:4 (Summer 2003): 1009-1032.

“To secure a home for my family,” Minnesota History 58.3 (Fall 2002): 147-160.

“Hiding and Highlighting Power in Eighteenth-Century North American Maps,” The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, 2002

Additional media

• Civil War Talk Radio

Academic credentials

B.A., Santa Clara University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Minnesota