The academic year 2021-22 was a great year for faculty publications. History faculty and graduate students produced dozens of books, academic articles, and magazine and newspaper articles. Here are the highlights from last year:
Professor Florin Curta published The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe (Brill, 2021). Continuing his work on medieval Eastern Europe, Curta uses archeological sources to explore the region compared with historical understandings of contemporaneous Western Europe. Professor Curta co-authored a book on the central place of women in Eastern European archeological studies titled Women Archeologists under Communism, 1917-1989: Breaking the Glass Ceiling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). He also served as editor for The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1300 (Routledge, 2022).
Professor Elizabeth Dale released an innovative digital monograph called Fight for Rights: The Chicago 1919 Riots and the Struggle for Black Justice (Library Press of the University Press of Florida, 2022).The multimedia work explores Black Chicagoans’ struggle to gain rights from the 1830s to the 1930s, focusing on the city’s 1919 race riot and its aftermath. It is the first digital monograph UF Library Press has released and is free to read online.
Professor Jack Davis published The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird (W.W. Norton, 2022). In this follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Davis presents an account of America’s national symbol as a way of understanding the environmental history of the United States. As Professor Davis wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, “Bald eagles have not changed since the adoption of the Great Seal — they have shown us that we can change.”
Professor Bill Link released Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World (UNC Press). In this biography, Link examines the life of one of the most important southerners of the twentieth century. The president of the University of North Carolina for two decades, Graham became a national figure as a supporter of the New Deal and an international figure as a United Nations mediator.
The department also saw the publication of several edited volumes:
Instructional Professor Steve Noll edited Writing for the Public Good: Essays from David R. Colburn and Senator Bob Graham (University Press of Florida, 2022).
Professor Paul Ortiz edited People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century with Wesley Hogan, and African American Studies: Fifty Years at the University of Florida with Jacob U’Mofe (both University Press of Florida, 2021).