OXFORD, Miss. — Noell Wilson, University of Mississippi interim chair of the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and cross Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies, is headed to Japan to on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to work on a book on American whalers in the North Pacific in the 1800s.

Wilson will travel to Sapporo for the 2017-2018 academic year and there where she will be affiliated with Hokkaido University. She will be completing archival work on a book about the experience of American whalers in Asia in the 1850s and 1860s, provisionally which will be titled “The Birth of a Pacific Nation: Hokkaido and U.S. Whalers in Nineteenth Century Japan.” Wilson said the award is immensely important to her because it will allow her to do the complete archival research, but also to find Japanese collaborators for a public history project she will develop with curators of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

“While in Japan, my goal is to finish collecting manuscript documents and maps related to the US whaling industry’s interactions with Japanese officials, merchants and sailors in the 1850s and 1860s to add an overlooked chapter to the early history of United States-Japan relations,” Wilson said.

Wilson is one of over 800 U.S. citizens who will teach, conduct research, and or provide expertise abroad for the 2017-2018 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Recipients are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields. The program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the larger world. It is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State.

The program was created in 1946 through legislation offered by the late U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., and it has given more than 370,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. Its alumni include 57 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 82 who have received Pulitzer Prizes and 37 who have served as a head of state or government.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Wake Forest University in 1994, Wilson spent a year with the Japanese Exchange and Teaching program in Hokkaido, Japan before returning to complete an master’s degree in regional studies/East Asia in 1997 and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages in 2004, both at Harvard University. Her first book, “Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan,” published in 2015, focused on the influence of coastal defense on early modern state formation.

Jeff Watt, who will become the Arch Dalrymple III History Department acting chair July 1 while Wilson is away, said Wilson is no mere ivory tower scholar as her interest in long-distance sailing is not purely academic. She and her husband, Gary, are planning to retrace the route of the American whalers by sailing a 40 footer from New Bedford to Hakodate, Japan.

Wilson is a star among other historians of early modern Japan, he said. Her first book, which dealt with the politics of maritime security during the Tokugawa regime dynasty, was highly innovative and very well received, but her second project looks to be even more cutting edge, Wyatt said.

“Delving into both American and Japanese sources, she is researching the influence of nineteenth-century American whalers on the transformation of Japan into a Pacific nation, a major maritime power that became more focused on the vast open sea rather than on Asia,” Watt said. “Professor Wilson is the rare complete package: a brilliant scholar, motivating teacher, and exemplary citizen to the College of Liberal Arts and the University of Mississippi.”

Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies Shennette Garrett-Scott has been awarded a Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies fellowship to Princeton University for the 2016-2018 academic years.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is among only a half-dozen scholars from around the world to receive the Princeton fellowship this year. The theme of this year’s Davis fellowship is “Risk and Fortune.”

Garrett-Scott’s scholarship focuses on gender, race and business, all topics that coincide with a book she’s writing on African-American women in finance and banking.

“The center’s biennial theme ‘Risk and Fortune’ was precisely up my alley,” Garrett-Scott said. “People have tried to avoid risk and increase their fortunes throughout history. They insure their lives against inevitable misfortunes that acknowledge – and hopefully limit – risk. They save and invest money to increase their fortunes.”

Her book explores the Independent Order of St. Luke, a mutual aid society organized in Baltimore in the 1850s by African-American women. After moving to Richmond, Virginia, following the Civil War, the IOSL organized a bank that became the oldest operating African-American-controlled bank until it was purchased in 2011.

“My book is the first history of the insurance and banking industries that focuses on African-American women, tracing how they saved, lent and invested from the Jim Crow to the civil rights era,” she said.

The fellowship will allow her to continue her research while contributing her own knowledge to the intellectual culture at Princeton. The fellows will participate in weekly seminars, conferences, workshops and other activities to bring together scholars from different disciplines to study historically important topics.

“This fellowship will allow her to finish researching this very innovative topic and allow her the opportunity to dialogue with other fellows and faculty at Princeton,” said Charles Ross, UM director of African-American studies and professor of history. “This is a wonderful opportunity for Dr. Garrett-Scott and the African-American studies program is delighted that she was awarded this prestigious fellowship.”

Garrett-Scott, a native Texan, earned her doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Texas in 2011. She joined the university in 2013 and teaches courses such as “Experiences of Black Mississippians,” “Origins of the Jim Crow South” and “Oprah Winfrey, Gender, Race and Power.”

By Christina Steube | July 22, 2016

Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football

Temple University Press, 2016

“Although other writers have explored the history of the American Football League, Mavericks, Money, and Men is the most extensive treatment of the league to date. Linking the history of the AFL with a number of key developments in American society and culture, Ross skillfully synthesizes an array of personal memoirs with a wide range of compelling anecdotes. Archival materials also illuminate the internal workings of the AFL. Mavericks, Money, and Men is a valuable narrative history that captures key moments in the development of the nation’s most popular sport.“—Gregory Kaliss, author of Men’s College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality

The American Football League, established in 1960, was innovative both in its commitment to finding talented, overlooked players—particularly those who played for historically black colleges and universities—and in the decision by team owners to share television revenues.

In Mavericks, Money and Men, football historian Charles Ross chronicles the AFL’s key events, including Buck Buchanan becoming the first overall draft pick in 1963, and the 1965 boycott led by black players who refused to play in the AFL-All Star game after experiencing blatant racism. He also recounts how the success of the AFL forced a merger with the NFL in 1969, which arguably facilitated the evolution of modern professional football.

Ross shows how the league, originally created as a challenge to the dominance of the NFL, pressured for and ultimately accelerated the racial integration of pro football and also allowed the sport to adapt to how African Americans were themselves changing the game.

James T. Campbell will present “Freedom Now: History, Memory, and the Mississippi Freedom Movement” on Monday, April 11th at 3:30PM in the Overby Center Auditorium. This event should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about the African American freedom struggle, the civil rights movement, public history, and how history is remembered and commemorated.

James T. Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History at Stanford University, where he specializes in African American history and the history of the black Atlantic. His research spans the history of the American slave trade with Africa, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights movement. In his current research, Campbell focuses on historical narratives and storytelling, examining the ways in which societies document and explain their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies, and political movements.

Campbell earned his B.A. at Yale University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2008, Campbell worked at Brown University, where he served as the chair for the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, an organization created by Brown President Ruth Simmons to explore the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice has subsequently become a model for similar investigations on campuses throughout the United States.

Campbell’s first book, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner prize. His second book, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), received the Mark Lyton History Prize from the Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and the Lois P. Rudnik Prize from the New England American Studies Association. Middle Passages was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.