Historians in the Field: Ramblers at the 2020 AHA Annual Meeting

The 134th American Historical Association Annual Meeting will take place in New York City from January 3-6th, 2020. Loyola History faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students will be taking part at the meeting in numerous ways. Dr. Ben Johnson along with Sonia Hernandez, Trinidad Gonzales, John Morán González, and Monica Muñoz Martinez will be receiving special recognition at this year’s meeting for the “Refusing to Forget” project. The project was awarded the Herbert Feis Award for its “ distinguished contributions to public history.” Read on for an interview with Dr. Johnson followed by a list of the panels and sessions Loyolans will be participating in this year’s meeting.

Congratulations on the AHA's Herbert Feis Award! Can you tell us about "Refusing to Forget" and how the project was started?

Along with four other scholars of the border and Mexican-American history, I established Refusing to Forget in 2013 in an effort to take advantage of the centennial of some of the worst racial violence in U.S. History, which took place in Texas along the border in the 1910s.  We were frustrated that these events and their reverberations had been studied by scholars for decades but were not well known in the general public or widely taught. So we convinced the Bullock Museum of Texas History to develop an exhibit on the violence, applied for five state historical markers, and developed a website to provide information to educators, the press, and the general public.

The AHA has awarded the Herbert Feis Award annually since 1984 to "recognize distinguished contributions to public history" What does winning the award mean for the project?

Well, it’s very gratifying to receive this kind of recognition from the most important national professional organization of historians.  It sends the message that the kind of public history we have done it not just of regional interest, but is in fact important to the U.S. and Mexican history, and to the practice of public history.

"Refusing to Forget" has been such a successful project from the beginning with public lectures, online and museum exhibits, and the creation of historical markers, what is next for the project?

We’d like to get one more historical marker approved — to mark the 1911 lynching of Mexican national Antonio Rodriguez, in Rock Springs, Texas — and conduct events around some of the historical markers that have been approved.  And we have a book coming out next year that looks at the legacies of legislative hearings into this violence conducted in 1919.  But for the most part, we’re winding down.

The project addresses such a sensitive and relevant topic for today. How do you teach this kind of historical examination in your classes at Loyola?

I teach about these events a bit in my U.S. survey class as a part of how white supremacy was created and maintained by extralegal violence in the early twentieth century, and have taught them in greater detail in a Latina/o history class.  I look forward to bringing some of these experiences into our graduate curriculum, since Refusing to Forget is a good example of the bridges between public history and more conventional academic history. It’s a delicate balance, though, because if you present people only as victims in an odd way you end up dehumanizing them.  So I go to some lengths to introduce specific individuals and family stories, and to put these tragic episodes in the context of a larger history that has seen survival, resilience, and even triumphs by border communities.

Five Loyolans will be presenting papers and posters at this year’s meeting. Dr. Gema Santamaria will be presenting “Religion, Violence, and the Secular State in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920s–40s” on January 5th.  PhD candidate, Kelly Schmidt will present ““Without Slaves and without Assassins”: Transnational Jesuits and the Challenges of Race and Slavery in Antebellum Cincinnati and the Missouri Province” along with serving as chair of her panel, “Transnational Ties of Jesuits in the United States”. Undergraduates will also be taking part at this year’s poster session in large numbers. Jacob McAloon will present “"Eighty Acres of Hell" or "a Grand Old-Time?": The War of Words Surrounding Chicago's Camp Douglas and Historical Memory” and Kristin Morrison will be presenting “An Evolution of the Eighteenth-Century Conduct Book: Expanding the Domestic Woman's Presence in the Public Sphere”. Rounding out the undergraduate poster session, Shelbi Schultz will introduce her work “Urban Cleansing: The Antiseptic Renewal Project of Sandburg Village and the Failure to Build Community”. 

 Several Loyola faculty are also serving as chairs and commentators of panels including Dr. Michelle Nickerson, Dr. Jilana Ordman, Dr. Kyle Roberts, and Dr. John Pincince. Dr. Patricia Mooney-Melvin and PhD candidate, Hope Shannon, will be serving on roundtable discussions addressing career diversity. Dr. Mooney-Melvin will discuss the role of career diversity in graduate education during the roundtable conversation, “The New Normal? Integrating Career Pathways in History Graduate Education”. Hope Shannon will speak on the importance of building relationships with alumni who are positioned outside of academia as well as some techniques to make this possible during “Alumni Relations: Building a Historical Community”.