I enjoyed several public engagement opportunities in 2024. I was a discussant at conferences and public events including: the American Political History Conference, the 8^th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany. In the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention, I shared my thoughts on comparisons to 1968 with NPR, CBS Mornings, and WILL’s The 21^st. The highlight of the year, however, was the publication of my book, Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism. To promote the book, I published articles to share some of its themes in Time Magazine and Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History. I also discussed my book with journalists and historians including Chuck Todd, Sam Roberts, Richard Aldous, and Claire Potter.

Antoinette Burton was active in the History department, serving on the Executive Committee and on numerous preliminary examination and dissertation committees.  She also continued in her ninth year as director of the Humanities Research Institute. She published essays in several edited collections, gave a number of presentations on the public humanities, and learned how to write Op Eds through the Public Voices Fellowship sponsored by the University of Illinois President’s office. Her pieces appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Tech Policy Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ms Magazine, and Public Seminar. She continued her work as chair of the faculty board at the University of Illinois Press and as a board member at Illinois Humanities. In summer 2024 her book Gender History: A Very Short Introduction, came out with Oxford University Press.

Publications:

• Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, Mary Frances Berry and V.P. Franklin (Eds.), Reparations and Reparatory Justice Past, Present and Future. University of Illinois Press. (2024), 256 pages. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087875

• “Introduction.” Chapter in Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry and V.P. Franklin (Eds.), Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present and Future. University of Illinois Press. (2024). 1-26. Book Chapter.

• Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, “Reparations: Universalism and the African American Struggle for Autonomy.” Chapter in Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry and V.P. Franklin (Eds.) Reparations: The Struggle for Reparatory Justice. University of Illinois Press. (2024), 189-202. Book Chapter.

• Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Helen Neville, “The Abolition of Capitalist Work and Reimagining of Labor.” Chapter  in Lisa Flores and David Bluestein. Rethinking Work: Essays on Building a Better Workplace. Routledge (May 2023). 131-137. Book Chapter.

Lectures:

• “White Terrorism & Black Resistance II, 1890-1930.” CRITIMetric Toolkit1B. University of Southern California. Zoom. March 24, 2024.

• “White Terrorism & Black Resistance I, 1441-1887.” CRITIMetric Toolkit1B. University of Southern California. Zoom. January 22, 2023.

• “Kujichagulia: Self-Determination in African American History & the Road Forward.” Danville Correctional Center. December 30, 2023.

Conference Presentations:

• “The Two Central Contradictions Characterizing the African American Sociohistorical Experience.” Theory and History in the Making and Reshaping of Black Liberatory Thought. Association for the Study of African American Life and History 109^th Annual Conference. September 18, 2024. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Other Activities:

• “RealTalk: A Black Perspective,” News Gazette. By-weekly column.

• “RealTalk: History as a Weapon for Black Liberation.” Black Liberation Media. By-weekly podcast.

• Historical consultant for the CRITIMetric, Brendesha M. Tynes, Center for Empowered Learning and Development w/ Technology, USC.

• Executive director, “Black Studies: An Intellectual Genealogy. 2024. Documentary film, written and directed by Shawn Utsey.

Kristin Hoganson made the most of a long-awaited sabbatical, highlights of which included a short stay as the Roosevelt Visiting Professorship at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands and research trips for her book-in-progress on infrastructure building in the Circum-Caribbean at the dawn of the big carbon era. She designed a new course on ecological footprints and continues to serve on the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC) to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian.

Bob Morrissey has spent the first part of this year serving in a new role: Associate Dean for Technology and Online Learning in the college of LAS. He continues to work on the collaborative project, Reclaiming Stories, with members of Illinois Indigenous communities. In Spring ’24, he taught his course “History 202: American Environmental History” as a Humanities Research Lab, focusing around the Oakley Dam controversy and the history of Allerton Park. He has new publications on climate resilience in Indigenous Illinois communities and the French colonial period of the Midwest.

Kevin Mumford contributed to the roundtable about a new book in Queer Studies, in Modern American History:  “Recentering Race and Class in Queer Career,” and recently finished another extended review for the Society of United States Intellectual History on Ambivalent Affinities, about the politics of black homosexuality since World War II. He is now completing a round of edits and corrections for his current book project, American Animus that looks at bias crime and organizing against hate in the late-twentieth century. It is due out sooner than later from a favorite university press.  New research focuses on the opening and closing of the American Mind and the fate of multiculturalism in the U.S. 

Professor Leslie Reagan continues to reflect on the current state of reproductive health and law and to share her expertise with the public and scholars.  With colleagues, she submitted the Brief for Amici Curiae Historians with Expertise in the History of Abortion, Medicine, Law and Regulation ito the Texas Supreme Court in Support of Appellees, Paxton v. Zurawaski et al, Texas Supreme Court, Nov. 27, 2023.  She presented talks at the Christopher Newport University in Virginia as an Organization of American Historians distinguished speaker; and appeared on a panel on “Roe v. Wade at 50” at the American Historical Association; and had the pleasure of talking with high school students at University High School in Urbana.

She appeared on MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on “The throughline from America’s pre-Roe past to the post-Roe present,” Dec. 17, 2023, https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/-the-throughline-from-america-s-pre-roe-past-to-the-post-roe-present-200416837538

Carol Symes began the new year of 2024 by taking up a new position as Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Illinois: a dynamic interdisciplinary unit which was among the first in the world to promote and model global approaches to studying the premodern past. It currently boasts over two dozen faculty affiliates with expertise in a range of topics and world regions and supports a small but might group of undergraduate majors and minors, as well as graduate students. Her publications in the past year included a revised edition of the bestselling Western Civilization textbook (W.W. Norton) and a new verse translation of a 12th-centuy Latin drama, The Play about the Antichrist, presented alongside a dramaturgical analysis and historical commentary co-authored by her former PhD student, Dr. Kyle A. Thomas. Together with colleagues D. Fairchild Ruggles and Renée R. Trilling, she has authored the lead article in a special centennial issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, “Medievalists in the Mirror: Looking back to the World of 1925 and Its Legacy,” which examines the conditions that shaped the American invention of a new field and the founding of the Medieval Academy of America in 1925.

Jim Barrett published "The Irish and Labor in the Industrial Era, 1880-1930s,” in The Routledge History of Irish America, eds. Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan (Routledge, 2024) and with Shelton Stromquist, A David Montgomery Reader: Capitalism and Workers Resistance, (University of Illinois Press, 2024). An interview with Barrett by PhD alumnus Robert D. Sampson appeared in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 117 No. 2 Summer 2024. “David Montgomery and His Legacy in the Field of Working-Class History,” was published in Labor on Line. He continues to co-edit the University of Illinois Press series, The Working Class in American History, which now has more than 170 volumes in print. 

Emeritus Vernon Burton continues as the Judge Matthew Perry Distinguished Professor of History, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Global Black Studies, and Computer Science at Clemson University; and continues to serve as Executive Director of the College of Charleston Low Country and Atlantic World (CLAW) program.  Burton published four articles in academic journals, including one with UI PHD David Herr, (2024) “Contested Pasts and Mythic History: Formerly Enslaved Women, Francis Pickens, and the Federal Writer’s Project.” Slavery & Abolition, 1-35; in addition, he published “The Voting Rights in Georgia: A Short History,” in  Southern Cultures 30:1 (Spring 2024) pp. 80-97, 136; and an online essay, "Can the Constitution and Democracy Survive the Roberts Court?” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 2024: Vol. 23, No. 3. In June, Burton’s coauthored Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court appeared in a Harvard paperback edition. The book continues to garner attention and was featured in a session of the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association. He authored four amicus briefs for the Supreme Court, including one drafted by Prof. Allan Lichtman and Burton on the 14^th amendment Supreme Court case Trump v. Colorado which was cited by a number of sources, including Feb 4, E. J. Dione, Jr. in explaining “Why I Changed my Mind and think Trump Should be Thrown off the Ballot” in the Washington Post and on Feb. 14, Sydney Blumenthal in “The US Supreme Court May Turn this Election into a Constitutional Crisis” in The Guardian ( ). Burton keynoted a number of conferences including one honoring the retirement of U Illinois PhD Dr. Kenneth Noe, the Draughon Professor of Southern History, at Auburn University; Burton keynoted the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission’s annual conference at the South Carolina Archives ; the SC Humanities Festival; the University of California Santa Barbara conference on the Supreme Court , and one or Race and Justice at Michigan State University. Burton gave several TV and radio interviews, including on NPR,  “Is Democracy Itself at Risk in the 2024 Election” for The Middle with Jeremy Hobson and The “14^th Amendment” on Throughline. Among other podcasts were  two with David M. Rebuenstein’s “For the Ages:  A History Podcast" produced by The New York Historical Society: one for Justice Deferred and one for The Age of Lincoln.  He continues to edit two book series at the University of Virginia Press: 1) A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era Series, and 2) The American South Series.  In Sept 2024 , Clemson University announced then “Dr. Orville Vernon Burton Annual Lecture Series on The U.S. South” and the Benjamin E. Mays Historical site in Nov 2024  broke ground for the “Orville Vernon Burton Research Library.”

Ken Cuno’s prize-winning book Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (2015) appeared in Arabic translation (Cairo: National Center for Translation, 2023), and he published “Marriage and Family between the Mid-Nineteenth and Early Twenty-First Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History (2024). In addition to enjoying family events in New England and the Pacific Northwest he continued to work on a revision and updating of Egypt: A Short History.

My article, "Murder and Memory in Territorial Hawai'i: A Moloka'i Microhistory," published in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2023, received the 2024 Michael P. Malone Award for the best publication on state or territorial history. The award was announced at the Western Historical Association annual meeting on October 25, 2024.

Diane Koenker concluded her term as Director of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in August 2023. In her remarks at her farewell party, she reflected on the highs of her tenure, including the hiring of 24 new permanent staff and the promotion of 26 academic staff since she took up her post in January 2018. In February 2023, she presented a paper, “How Far from Moscow? Soviet History and Its Challenges,” at a conference on “Survival Strategies of Ukraine and Russia,” at the Slavic Eurasian Research Center, University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan. Her article, “The Strange Case of the Disappearing Soviet Waiter,” appeared in the July 2023 issue of Slavonic and East European Review.  She retired from UCL in January 2024 and continues to live in London, working on her book project on Soviet consumption in the 1960s.

During the past year I’ve been consulting on the creation of the Thaddeus Styevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History & Democracy, to be located in Lancaster, Pa. I’ve also submitted an essay, now under review, to the journal Historical Materialism on how the thinking among Russian socialists evolved in the early 20th century concerning the nature of the coming Russian revolution. That essay, in turn, will eventually become a chapter in a book about revolutions throughout the world that aim to secure democratic rights. I have already drafted three additional chapters for that book.

During the 2023-24 academic year, Mark Micale returned to the U of I History Department to teach as a visiting professor. He offered a new course on "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," and he introduced a new seminar on "The Scopes 'Monkey' Trial of 1925" in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the trial next year. He is also serving as the senior editor of a special themed issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot next year.  The journal publication will coordinate with a three-day international symposium at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris in July 2025.