Jordyn H. May, a PhD candidate in History, has published an essay online in the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. Her essay, “’Bears Do Not Roam the Streets’: Woman Suffrage and the Reimagining of the American West,” explores the important role that maps played in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of the American West in contemporary maps. Congratulations, Jordyn!
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A New York Times article has cited the expertise of Stephen J. Cerulli, a Fordham History PhD Candidate, on the history of pizza. The article, “The Many Lives of Tomato Pie” by Mari Uyehara, explores different styles of tomato pie which groups of Italian immigrants developed across the Northeast United States. Read the article here before grabbing a slice!
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Roger Panetta, a former Visiting Professor of History at Fordham, curator of Fordham’s Hudson River Collection, and graduate of the Fordham History M.A. program, has launched a Digital Humanities project, “Shadows on Stone: Identifying Sing Sing’s Incarcerated.” This project, an outgrowth of research that Dr. Panetta conducted in collaboration with Fordham undergraduates, invites the public to participate in a crowdsourcing project to study the Admission Registers of Sing Sing Prison.
To learn more, read this article by Patrick Verel in Fordham News, and visit the “Shadows on Stone” website.
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Will Hogue – History department PhD Candidate (Cohort 2018-2019) working with Dr. Chris Dietrich – is currently working on his dissertation, the working title of which is: “From Neo-Christendom to Neoliberalism: The Thirty Years War Over Cold War Christianity.” In this week’s From the Archives, Will shares some of his experiences while researching at the Library of Congress and the Catholic University of America Archives in Washington, DC.
What is your current research on?
My current research is on how religion shaped politics in the mid-20th century, and how religious thinkers and politicians grappled with the Cold War. In particular, my focus is on the shift from developmentalist and Center-Left Christian Democratic global politics in the ‘development decade,’ to an increasingly polarized Christian politics by the mid 1970s. Just many prominent global Christian institutions begin to reconcile with decolonization and accept, for example, the model of the Cuban Revolution, a burgeoning neoconservative religious movement resurrects hard-line anticommunism and makes strange bedfellows with neoliberals and right-wing reactionaries.
What archive(s) did you visit and can you describe the archive a little?
In a trip to Washington DC last semester, I went to the Library of Congress and to the Catholic University of America Archives. This was a great example of how different archives can be. Of course, the Library of Congress (LOC) has distinct rules and regulations governing how to maneuver the archives, and it is a massive facility (I got lost more than once). You are required to have a LOC Reader Card which will be made for you on-site. Also, be sure to book an appointment in advance – as you can imagine there is a great demand to get access to the LOC archives.
Catholic University of America, however, had their archives in a tiny room way in the back of campus. I found myself crowded around one library table with a couple other scholars and our piles of (very large!) file boxes. While LOC (and most Presidential Library) file boxes are relatively small, these were large copy paper boxes – so I had plenty of material to cover. Still, the staff was very friendly, and the USCCB papers were very helpful in shaping my research.
What was the purpose of your trip? What type of documents did you plan to look at? What makes those documents important for your research?
The purpose was for dissertation research. I was looking at the papers of Reinhold Niebhur, Richard John Neuhaus, and the Catholic Bishops Conference. The Catholic Bishops had a Peace Corps Desk and were highly involved in recruiting new members. Most interesting here were a series of letters between Fr. Ivan Illich, who ran a training program for missionaries/peace corps people, and the Bishops. Illich became one of the foremost critics of the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and American development plans in Latin America, so it was exciting to see his (sometimes incendiary) letters.
What was a challenge you encountered during your research? How did you overcome it?
I found what would probably be a very revelatory series of letters between Pope John Paul II and Zbigniew Brzeziński, but unfortunately, these are restricted by family request – so I cannot access them via FOIA. That’s part of the job I suppose – I just have to find as many meetings and letters between the two from other places as I can.
Was there anything surprising you found in your research?
I found a lot more letters from Donald Rumsfeld than I was expecting – defense industry people apparently really care about religion it seems.
Did you receive any funding to support your research?
What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing historical research?
Look for published primary sources! Especially if you are working with policymakers, political leaders, social reformers, etc. chances are they wrote copiously and you’ll have tons of material in these books/articles to corroborate with archival materials.
Some images from the National Museum of the American Indian which Will visited after working at the Library of Congress. Will notes that they have an excellent and detailed exhibit on the fight for indigenous sovereignty. Will definitely recommends it if you’re in DC!
From the Archives is a special series for the Fordham History blog which highlights the research experiences of members of the history department in an effort to bothshowcase their work and provide insight for future researchers preparing for their own archival projects.
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Jordyn May – History department PhD Candidate (Cohort 2017-18) working with Dr. Kirsten Swinth – is currently completing his dissertation, entitled: “‘A campaign so splendid could not fail’: Reexamining the Woman Suffrage Movement through Interrelationships between the Eastern and Western Branches.” In this week’s From the Archives, Jordyn hares some of her experiences while researching at the Huntington Library in California.
What is your current research on?
My research for the dissertation currently examines the California and New York woman suffrage state campaigns from 1890 to 1920, specifically looking at how suffragists from the East and West influenced each other’s strategies, methods, and tactics. My research also delves into how tensions developed between Eastern and Western suffragists and how that influenced the national movement.
What archive did you visit and can you describe the archive a little?
I visited the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in July 2022. The Huntington is gorgeous as it is also a famous botanical garden. The library and reading room was situated close to the entrance of the garden, but after the end of the day, I was able to wander the whole area. The sunshine and fresh air was definitely nice after being in a freezing archive all day! The reading room was very nice and all of the archivists were incredibly helpful. I spoke to a curator who knew the collections inside and out and who was able to give me great advice on what collections to look at.
What was the purpose of your trip? What type of documents did you plan to look at? What makes those documents unique for your research?
The purpose of my trip was to find crucial primary source information about how the state campaigns operated in Southern California as I had done a previous research trip to Northern California. I looked at a lot of correspondence between suffragists, organizational records, speeches and essays written by suffragists, suffrage newspapers, biographies of a couple suffragists, and histories of other organizations in California that helped with the campaigns. Reading the correspondence between various suffragists has been the most enlightening. These women were very sassy and did not hold back when discussing their views of other women and the tactics of the movement. These letters give me the best, unfiltered, view of the tensions between Eastern and Western suffragists.
What was a challenge you encountered during your research? How did you overcome it?
No one tells you how exhausting it actually is to sit in a reading room and look through documents all day. I had a month long fellowship at the Huntington which meant I was in the reading room Monday through Friday from 9am to 4pm with a short break for lunch and I often went Saturday mornings as well. Research can be very exciting when you are finding documents that you need or find something you didn’t know existed, but the rest of the time is sorting through boxes and folders and can be incredibly mentally taxing, especially when you are trying to decipher handwritten documents! When I got too tired and mentally strained, I tried to change tasks or take more breaks to rest a little.
The organization of the collections was also not standardized, so there were some collections that had no finding aids. I would have to request every box in the collection just to see if it was even worth looking at. It was frustrating, but I also found interesting material that I might not have requested in the first place.
Did you receive any funding to support your research?
I applied for and received a short-term fellowship from the Huntington to support my research. The application was due in November and was fairly simple. The application consisted of a 1,500 word project description, current CV, and two letters of recommendation. I received the award letter in March and spent my month in California in July. The grant was for $3,500 which helped cover travel and living expenses for the month, but the award money is paid out after you have already been there for a few weeks. Affordable housing was a little difficult to find within walking distance of the Huntington which was my only qualm with the award amount.
What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing historical research?
It may sound weird, but do your research before you do your research. You want to be fully prepared before you go into the archive. That means looking at all the finding aids for each collection you want to view and marking exactly which boxes and folders you need to see. One of the collections I investigated at the Huntington was over 100 boxes. I couldn’t feasibly look at all of them so I made a spreadsheet detailing what I absolutely had to look at to help narrow it down. You also need to prioritize your research. Make sure you are viewing the documents you know you need and then looking at documents that might be just interesting afterwards. Time goes by quickly in the reading room and you want to make sure your time is well spent, especially if you are only there for a few days.
The Yellow Ribbon was a short-lived suffrage newspaper specifically for the West Coast. The Huntington had all of the issues, and I think they are one of the only archives to have a complete collection.
From the Archives is a special series for the Fordham History blog which highlights the research experiences of members of the history department in an effort to bothshowcase their work and provide insight for future researchers preparing for their own archival projects.
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This article revisits the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution to argue that amendment adversaries fought over the future of women’s economic security. Post-war US economic growth stalled in the 1970s, bringing the family-wage ideal of male breadwinning and female homemaking down with it. In these unsettled years, how female economic dependence would be addressed was an open question: would it be by propping up male breadwinning, as ERA opponents wanted, or by combining good jobs with fairly compensated domestic labour and government assistance, as supporters believed the ERA promised? A revisionist interpretation of the ERA battle, this article shifts attention from conflict over gender identity and cultural values to economics and capitalist transformation. It examines arguments presented in pamphlets, the media and to Congress about how homemaking women could achieve security in the face of changing economic reality. The ERA’s defeat was a Pyrrhic victory for conservatives. The threat to government-sanctioned male breadwinning appeared to have been vanquished. But the family-wage system was truly on the rocks, and supporters’ vision of a working-family norm, with roles based on function, not gender, won out. Without the ERA, however, working mothers shouldered the consequences.
Cover of Gender & History
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Undergraduate Grace Rooney (Fordham class of 2023) presented her poster entitled “Lesbian Activity and Participation in the National Organization for Women in the 1980s” at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia which took place 5-8 January 2023. Over 1,500 individuals participated in the event and Grace was one of 20 undergraduates to present a poster. Great work Grace!
To learn more about Grace’s research you can read her poster abstract below:
My research question revolved around how the National Organization for Women (NOW), as a mainstream feminist organization, advocated for and included lesbian members in the 1980s. Publications that I examined from the 1980s, including an annual Lesbian Rights Resource Kit, a Lesbian Rights Lobbying Kit, and a Lesbian Rights Conference. These sources are unique and distinct from the 1980s, and no such sources exist for the 1970s. This distinction shows the escalation of NOW’s work on lesbian rights, and more in-depth issue areas which targeted rising homophobia from the right, as well as defending the idea of lesbian rights as a women’s issue. Since lesbian rights had long been controversial in NOW, I also examined the resulting controversies within the organization over lesbian rights in the 1980s. One of the controversies within the organization was over how to respond to homophobic attacks from the right. There was a major debate within NOW at the time between members, who advocated for the organization to take a step away from gay rights work and advocate for feminism as a “pro-family” ideology in line with the rhetoric of the right-wing at the time, while leadership dismissed this view and increased their public-facing work in support of gay rights. Another controversy I examined was over the 1980 Resolution on Pornography, Sadomasochism, and Public Sex. This resolution stated that all of these sexual issues were exploitative of women and that any association with gay rights was entirely and always erroneous. Many lesbian members and outside organizations took issue with the authoritative and definitive tone of NOW when describing the relationship between feminism, gay rights, and sex. Overall, the 1980s presented a unique context of rising conservative power, as well as internal controversy over issues areas of feminism like sex and pornography.
Grace also shared some thoughts on her experience:
I really enjoyed my experience at the AHA. One of the best parts of the conference was being able to meet other undergraduate students who were presenting their research from around the country, and who are going through similar experiences as me. The AHA felt intimidating at first as an undergraduate, but meeting other students who were doing the same thing, and talking about our research really helped. Also, they are all applying to graduate school and figuring out what they want to do with history as a career, so talking to them about that was also very helpful and encouraging.
I was able to go to a variety of sessions, the first being the plenary session about the role of historians in teaching and examining through the lens of social justice. I found this panel very interesting, as those are questions I think about when considering the field as well. There were a lot of very interesting things that the panelists said, but I enjoyed their discussion of the idea that history and the history we study tend to be autobiographical, which I found resonated with a lot of scholars and made me think a little differently about the field. Also, I was able to attend two Fordham professor’s panels, Professor Huezo and Professor Miki. I found their panels to be very fascinating and also useful for me as their subject matter is fairly far away from my own, and they both came and listened to my poster as well, which was very nice to have a friendly face there as well. As far as panels in my field, I attended one on global feminism that I found to be particularly interesting, as well as one on Irish women’s communication networks which taught me a lot, and made me question similar topics in the United States and their relationship to Irish groups given how close the countries work in a lot of areas.
Presenting the poster was definitely the highlight of the conference though. I was able to talk to a variety of professors, and undergraduate and graduate students. Discussing my research helped me a lot in how I could cohesively organize and present the information that I had found, which I had struggled with in writing the corresponding paper because I felt a little bit all over the place. I received a lot of good feedback on the poster, and I also was able to talk about graduate school and further my research with a variety of people, which was great. My major takeaways from the conference will be greater confidence in my research and its organization of it, as well as a wider understanding of the diversity of the field, and how more difficult questions within it can be answered. I also am very reaffirmed in my interest in research, and continuing that in my graduate school and career.
Grace Rooney stands in front of her poster “Lesbian Activity and Participation in the National Organization for Women in the 1980s” at the 136th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, which took place 5-8 January 2023.
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Former undergraduate student Melanie Sheehan (class of 2017) has been offered the Harvard-Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is a current PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Melanie Sheehan (Rose Hill, class of 2017)
Melanie is currently finishing her dissertation, titled “Opportunities Foregone: US Industrial Unions and the Politics of International Economic Policy, 1949-1983,” which demonstrates the critical but underexplored role of trade union leaders in shaping US international trade and investment policy. The project draws on research from business archives at Hagley Museum and Library and labor archives at the Walter P. Reuther Library, the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive, Penn State University, and the International Institute of Social History, as well as several presidential libraries. Congratulations, Melanie!
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On November 7, 2017, Fordham students gathered for the second annual women’s liberation teach-in at Rodrigue’s Coffee House, on the Rose Hill campus. Part of Professor Kirsten Swinth’s Modern U.S. Women’s History, students in the teach-in emulated women’s liberation groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The teach-in is a valuable tool Dr. Swinth has used to move students from the pages of their textbooks into the lived experience of the subjects they study. Here’s what some of the students had to say about that experience. Continue reading →
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The History Department blog recently caught up with Dr. Steven Stoll to discuss his newest book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017). The book illuminates how the persistent poverty and pejorative perceptions associated with Appalachia are a result of the industrial powers that utilized the people to strip the land of its natural resources.
History Department: So how did the entire project begin?
Steven Stoll: I originally set out to write a book about the collision between agrarian people (peasants, settlers, campesinos) in the Western Hemisphere. I then decided Continue reading →
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On November 7, 2017, Fordham students gathered for the second annual women’s liberation teach-in at Rodrigue’s Coffee House, on the Rose Hill campus. Part of Professor Kirsten Swinth’s Modern U.S. Women’s History, students in the teach-in emulated women’s liberation groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The teach-in is a valuable tool Dr. Swinth has used to move students from the pages of their textbooks into the lived experience of the subjects they study. Here’s what some of the students had to say about that experience. Continue reading 
The History Department blog recently caught up with Dr. Steven Stoll to discuss his newest book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017). The book illuminates how the persistent poverty and pejorative perceptions associated with Appalachia are a result of the industrial powers that utilized the people to strip the land of its natural resources.