Department of History
- In July, the Department sponsored the first “We the People: The Citizens and the Constitution” Summer Institute ever held in Illinois. It is designed to help teachers teach the Constitution and is made possible with funding from the Center for Civic Education, with money provided by the United States Department of Education. Dr. Frederick Drake procured an annual grant of $72,000 from the Center to fund the program and an additional $11,000 from State Farm.
- Professor Lawrence McBride, who made the history education program the largest and one of the most highly regarded in the nation, died on May 3, 2004. In his honor family members, colleagues, former students, and friends are in the process of establishing a scholarship for a student in history education. As of mid-July, the Department had raised nearly $14,000.
- The Department of History is continuing to offer workshops and summer institutes under its three-year, nearly $1 million Teaching American History Grant. Professors Fred Drake and Lawrence McBride procured the grant.
- Dr. Ray Clemens received a post-doctoral Mellon Award to study renaissance history at the Newberry Library in Chicago in FY 04. He is working on a fifteenth-century Florentine geographer and the diffusion of his work.
- In March, the Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American History awarded Dr. Patrice Olsen the Michael C. Meyer Prize for writing the first best book in Latin American history. The book, Artifacts of Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920-1940, is based on Dr. Olsen’s prize-winning dissertation. It was the recipient in 1998 of the Lewis Hake Award granted by the American Historical Association to the writer of the best dissertation in Latin American history.
