James A. Rawley (1916-2005) was author of numerous books, including Turning Points of the Civil War; Race and Politics; The Politics of Union; The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Secession: The Disruption of the American Republic; Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For; and London: Metropolis of the Slave Trade. He was a recipient of the Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, UNL; George Howard-Louise Pound Distinguished Career Award; NEH fellow, Huntington Library; fellow, Royal Society of American Historians.

This annual conference, presented by the History Graduate Students’ Association, is held in honor and memory of his years of service to the university, the History Department, and friends, students, and colleagues around the world.

2008

Uncle Sam’s Farm: Congress and Free Land Policies in the Nineteenth Century, Tonia M. Compton

Uncertain Transformation: The Role of Asceticism in Death in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Paul Ferderer

Communities Of Comfort: Quilts to Comfort the Families of America’s Fallen in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, Jonathan Gregory

The UNL Botanical Seminar: Establishing a Scientific Community at the Turn of the Century, Susannah Hall

Revisiting Elwyn B. Robinson’s History of North Dakota: How the State’s History Created a Community, Jennifer Heth

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Africana Womanist Vision of Environmental Justice, Julie Iromuanya

“Hired Hands from Abroad”: The Populist Producer’s Ethic, Immigrant Workers, and Nativism in Montana’s 1894 State Capital Election, Brian Leech

War and Memory: The Creation of the American Memory of the Atomic Bombings and the End of the War in the Pacific, Michael Mishler

Community of Coercion and Compliance: Scientific Agriculture at Lake Andes, South Dakota, in the 1920s, David Nesheim

Protestant England Revisited: A Study on English National Consciousness between 1540 and 1559, Ramazan Hakki Oztan

Lonely Sounds: Sonic Self Sufficiency, Personal Control, and Social Shields, Chris Rasmussen

Americanization versus Open Society: Answering the Challenge of Multicultural Education, Svetlana Rasmussen

Indians, “Esquimaux,” and Race: Identity and Community in the Lands West of Hudson’s Bay in the Eighteenth Century, Strother Roberts

The Historical Community and the Digital Future, Brent M. Rogers

Pine Ridge Reservation Fairs: Building Intercultural Communities through Play, Elisabeth Saunders

Nurses, Patients, Physicians, and Science: Changing Nursing Ideals in the United States, 1924-1955, Lisa Schuelke

Newsworthy: Implications of Gender and Class in the January 12, 1888, Blizzard, Heather Stauffer

Stoking a White Backlash: Race, Violence, and Yellow Journalism in Omaha, 1919, Nicolas Swiercek

Duncan Hines’ Consumption Community and the Geography of American Gastronomy, 1936-1956, Damon Talbott

Enticing the Iron Horse: The Unexpected Effects of Railroads on Town-Building in the Great Plains, Robert Voss

2007

Constructing Virtue, Making Place: Regional Creation in a National Context. The Second Annual James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities

‘Riding Well and Shooting Straight’: The Ideal Southern Man in Literature, Catherine Biba

German-American Nazis and the Meaning of American Homeland, 1935–1939, Edward S. Price

Gumbo Flats and Slim Buttes: Visualizing the “West River” Region in Western South Dakota, Nathan B. Sanderson

2006

1st Annual Conference Program: Coming to Terms: Legacies of Conflict and Resolution

A Path of Healing and Resistance: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna and Going Under, Amber Marie Aragon

The Literature and Memory of World War I. Remarque, Aldington and Myrivilis: Fictionalizing the Great War., Zacharoula Christoupolou

Preserving the Old Beijing: The First Conflict between Chinese Architects and the Communist Government in the 1950s, Xiao Hu

Machine Guns, Cows, and Quarantines: Foot and Mouth Disease in the United States, Mexico and Argentina, David Nesheim

Ugly and Monstrous: Marxist Aesthetics, Chris Rasmussen

The Toilsome March: An Indiana Soldier’s Experience in the Mexican War, Nathan B. Sanderson

Lost Lessons: American Media Depictions of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965, Shayla Swift

Balancing Democracy with Power: Responsibility, Order, and Justice in Reinhold Niebuhr’s World View, 1940–1949, Andy Ulrich