Fall Colloquia

Saturday, October 26, 2002
University of Houston, Hilton Hotel, Grand Ballroom

Nell Painter, "Standing at Armageddon"

Nell Painter is the director of African-American Studies and the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of the United States South and has written extensively on southerners such as Hosea Hudson, Gertrude Thomas and Wilbur Cash. She also has written on the United States as a whole and more recently on the life of Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist and women's rights advocate.

Her books include Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919, which won the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize (awarded by the Association of Black Women Historians); The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South; Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction; and Sojourner Truth, A Symbol. Her current research builds on her analysis of Sojourner Truth's photographs and concerns personal beauty.

Pointer has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Bunting Institute, and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before Joining Princeton's faculty in 1988.

Linda Gordon, "The Family As Battleground"

Linda Gordon specializes in the historical roots of contemporary social policy debates, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. Her first book was a documentary history of working women in the US (America's Working Women, orig. 1976, revised ed. 1995). She then turned her attention to the history of birth control; her book on the topic, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America, was a runner0up for the National Book Award in 1976.

Her 1988 book, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence, winner of the Joan Kelly prize of the American Historical Association, examined the history of Child abuse, child sexual abuse and wife-beating. As a domestic violence expert, she serves on the Department of Justice/Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women. More recently she turned her attention to the history of welfare. Her Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994), winner of the Berkshire Prize and Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award, explains how we ended up with a welfare program detested by recipients and non-recipients alike.

Her 1999 book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard University Press) uses a narrative about a 1904 white vigilante action against the Mexican American foster parents of white children to illustrate how family values and racism can interact. It was the winner of the Bancroft prize for the best book in American history. Her most recent book, Dear Sisters, edited with Ros Baxandall (Basic Books, 2000), offer an historical introduction to the women's movement of the 1970s through essays and documents.

Allan Winkler, "The Cultural Civil War of the 1960s"

Allan Winkler is Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio. He has also taught at Yale University, the University of Oregon, the University of Helsinki, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Nairobi.

His books include The cold War, Oxford University Press, 2000; Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom, Oxford University Press, 1993; America: Pathways to the Present, Prentice Hall, 3rd ed. 1998; The Recent Past: Readings on America Since World War II (editor), Harper and Row, 1989; Home Front, U.S.A.: America during World War II, Harlan Davidson, 1986, 2nd ed. 1000; Modern America: The United States from World War II to the Present, Harper and Row, 1985; and The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945, Yale University Press, 1978.

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The Project for the Active Teaching of History
www.path.coe.uh.edu

Funded by a major grant from the U.S. Department of Education, PATH seeks to enhance the teaching of American history throughout the Gulf Coast region. A joint project of Region 4 Education Service Center, the University of Houston Department of History and College of Education, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, PATH will host a series of summer seminars for teachers and colloquia for the general public.

For additional information: Please contact Debra Williams, Education Specialist in Science/Social Studies Services at Region 4 Education Service Center, 713-744-6846 or dwilliams@esc4.net