The Chair’s Message: History at Binghamton Newsletter 2024

For more than half a century, our department has enjoyed the privilege of mentoring dynamic students in history and boasting of their many, many lifetime accomplishments as alumni. We want to seize upon this moment to thank you for becoming our colleagues as historians and sharing the value of historical knowledge with your loved ones, coworkers and the broader public. An academic discipline without dedicated alumni is nothing. You make history the vibrant field that it is.

But we still have much work to do. We live in an era of grave threats to democracy, of violence and inequity that reverberate on a global scale. In this context, political players often find it useful to refashion historical knowledge for their own agendas or to negate it altogether. Undergraduate students confront many misconceptions about the professional pathways that degrees in history can illuminate. In their uncertainty, they fear limitations and migrate from the discipline whose moral value and purpose they recognize. As university administrations shift focus to the natural sciences and professional schools, history departments struggle to support opportunities for students of color, who are often first-generation college students.

Our faculty members have been devoted to meeting these challenges in our teaching, our mentoring and our research. Anne Bailey is now co-founder and co-director of the Harriet Tubman Center for Freedom and Equity. Kent Schull has established the Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies, supported by an NRC grant of nearly $1 million.

Just now published is Elisa Camiscioli’s Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations, which makes a global inquiry into the movements, lives and experiences of expatriate French sex workers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. On the verge of publication is Rob Parkinson’s The Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, a book that scrutinizes the infamous Yellow Creek massacre of Shawnee/Mingo non-combatants in 1774, which has often been mythologized and glorified in the popular imagination and even scholarship. These past two years, Wendy Wall has been teaching a research-intensive cycle of courses on Mapping American Prejudice for the university’s Source Project. In this letter, we celebrate in greater detail the achievements of some of our distinguished faculty, students and alumni. But we still have much more work to do.

A discipline without dedicated alumni is nothing, and today our students and future alumni need your support more than ever. This support can take many different forms. Is there a type of historical work that you would like to help finance? You can contribute to our general fund or to whatever purpose you define, including student scholarships, high-impact learning experiences, faculty and student research, or projects in public or digital history. Would you like to mentor our future alumni by contributing time and energy? You can offer to host student interns at your professional workplace, offer a workshop on career pathways or serve as a career mentor to a major. Do you have any ideas to share? We warmly welcome them.

But above all, we thank you for being our colleagues and for your dedication to the discipline of history. It would not exist without you.

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