Marjorie Lamberti joined the history department faculty at Middlebury College in 1964, and in 1976, was the first woman to be appointed full professorship in the department. Her academic career gives great insight into the past of the History Department at Middlebury, which she strongly believes should be commended for a tradition of gender and racial diversity.

Lamberti was educated at Smith College in the 1950s and emphasizes the lasting impact of her experience at a women’s college. To be educated in an environment where her abilities and competency were “never questioned” was a unique and empowering experience for a woman at the time. She had strong role models in her female professors and felt optimistic about her prospects after college as many encouraged her to pursue graduate school and a college-level teaching career. Lamberti is careful to highlight the unique nature of her experience, as the majority of women at the time did not have such supportive families, strong female role models, and access to higher education.

After beginning her academic career at Middlebury College, Lamberti accomplished countless feats ranging from winning fellowships and grants to support her research abroad, to being appointed to an endowed Charles A. Dana professorship. She noted the obstacles that women faced in academia because “as a woman, you had to be much more competent to achieve the same level of recognition as men,” and thus she was particularly impressed by the high levels of intelligence and determination that characterized Middlebury’s female faculty in the 1960s. However, Lamberti recalled that the history department seemed to be exceptionally accepting of women, especially in comparison to other departments at Middlebury College at the time. Many women left their teaching jobs at Middlebury due to hostile work environments, as women were not respected and given the same opportunities as men. In the history department, however, several women had the opportunity to be pursue tenure track, and only chose to leave for personal reasons.

When asked whether or not female students experienced these obstacles and hostilities, Lamberti was proud to say that she always tried to encourage women in her classes and empower them the same way she was encouraged at Smith. With a proud grin on her face, she remarks that she is “in awe” at what women at Middlebury today are able to accomplish. “Women today are so self-confident and assertive,” she exclaims and points to the “Fat n’ Hairy: Ways I’m Failing the Patriarchy” display currently in the lobby of Davis Family Library, “you never would have seen that in my day!” The cards, described by Lamberti as “sparkling,” are filled with women unapologetically declaring ways they are failing the patriarchy, ranging from challenging the institution of marriage to receiving an education.

When I visited the display after my meeting with Lamberti, one particular card stood out to me, it said “I’m failing the patriarchy by being a good man.” While this seems rather open to interpretation, it reminded me of how Lamberti partly attributes the historic acceptance of women in the history department to the fact that many of her male colleagues recognized and respected women’s intelligence and contributions and did not discriminate against them because of their gender. She speaks particularly fondly of Nicholas Clifford, who was the chair of the department for several years during her career. Lamberti describes Clifford as a man of morals and fairness who was influenced heavily by strong women in his own life, including his highly educated mother, his wife who was a “gifted writer,” and his own four daughters.

In addition to her efforts to empower female academics, Lamberti contributed to the diversification of the history department’s courses. She notes that in the 1960s and 1970s, many universities had very Eurocentric history curriculums. However, it was the opportunity to reach beyond what we know here and now, and the “exhilaration of crossing cultural boundaries” and inspired Lamberti to pursue history in the first place. In this era, Middlebury’s history department was unique in having professors teaching courses outside of Europe and America, such as Professor Nicholas Clifford, the Asian historian, Professor John Spencer the African historian, and Professor Elizabeth Dore, who specialized in South America.

Lamberti herself had an expansive view in teaching history, and in 1971 designed a course on revolutions with a global and comparative outlook, which was the precursor to the Global Studies program at Middlebury College. Several professors in the history department pioneered many courses that reached beyond the narrow confines of Eurocentric education and created programs in Jewish, Asian, African, and Latin American studies. Lamberti was the first to introduce courses on the history of the Holocaust and Jews in Europe, which led to an interdisciplinary Jewish Studies Program at Middlebury. In the history department today, there are professors who specialize in a wide range of fields from environmental history to the Middle East, and this diversity can be attributed to the early efforts of the History Department to expand the study of history.

Through Lamberti’s extensive and colorful career, we can get a glimpse into the past and the growth of the History Department at Middlebury. The department was one of the university’s earliest advocates for women faculty, and pioneered a diverse and global outlook on the study of history. The history department continues to celebrate and embody this diversity, and encourages students to demonstrate the same curiosity, determination, and open-mindedness that Marjorie Lamberti championed decades earlier.

 

 

What is digital history? The American Historical Association offers the following explanation:

On one level, digital history is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collection efforts. On another level, digital history is a methodological approach framed by the hypertextual power of these technologies to make, define, query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past. To do digital history, then, is to digitize the past certainly, but it is much more than that. It is to create a framework through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a major historical problem. [Click here to learn more.]

Like many institutions, Middlebury is embracing the emerging field of digital history, which has important implications for public history and the dissemination of information to a popular, rather than academic, audience. While scholarship remains the foundation of the discipline, the creation of history within a digital context requires equal attention to accessibility. The digital world provides a wider audience than the discipline has perhaps ever enjoyed, and the field of digital history provides an opportunity for historians to present scholarship in an accessible way.

The  rise of digital history at Middlebury trains students to write for both public and academic audiences. As students, we want to impress our professors with sophisticated arguments and language, and the latter is often to the detriment of the former. A digital platform allows students to hone their scholarship with a focus a clarity rather than erudition. Professor Kathryn Morse, who will co-teach the digital course “Vermont Life‘s Vermont” in fall 2018, considers these courses an experiment in how to present information outside of an academic essay, a skill that will serve students both within and beyond the world of academia. “Vermont Life‘s Vermont” will explore Vermont and its cultural, historical, and environmental meanings, and contributes to an interdisciplinary effort to explore digital and collaborative methods of teaching, research, and publication.  The full course description is below:

HIST/AMST 445 Vermont Life’s Vermont:  A Collaborative Web Project

Students in this course will work collaboratively to build an online history project aimed at a wide audience.  Since 1946, Vermont Life magazine has created particular images of the landscape, culture, and recreational possibilities in the state.  Our goal will be to construct a website that examines the evolution of these images and the meaning of the state over time, paying particular attention to consumerism, the environment, tourism, urban-rural contrasts, local food movements and the ways that race, class, and gender influence all of these.  The course is open to all students and requires collaborative work but not any pre-existing technological expertise.  Morseand Newbury.  3 hrs. seminar.  HIS AMR.

Explore the following links to see examples of past digital work by Middlebury students across several departments.

The American Studies Web Museum: An ongoing project to create museum exhibits about localized aspects of American History that can be used as curricular resources.

Dances with Avatar: A winter term course taught by Professor Morse that explored stories of colonial invasion, military conquest, and environmental exploitation in the films Dances with Wolves and Avatar.

BiHall View: A website created by Jake Faber ‘16.5 to appreciate and reflect on the landscape seen from Bicentennial Hall.

By Drew Jacobs

I recently spoke with Chris Rominger, a History major at Middlebury College who graduated in the Spring of 2008. Chris came to Middlebury in 2004 interested in history. His first semester he took a class with Professor Burnham, which solidified his interest in the major. While he mainly studied European history in High School, he quickly fell in love with the history of the Middle East while at Middlebury. He took Intro to the Modern Middle East with Professor Armanios his freshman spring and soon declared as a History major. In 2004, Chris explained, the Middle East was quite topical and always in the news. Chris also found he loved studying a region so different from his own. He especially enjoyed the focus on discussions and writing within history courses at Middlebury. He believes this focus makes history a more interactive, fluid, and ongoing study. These beliefs have helped to shape his career post-graduation.

Upon graduation, Chris began work for the Arab American Association of New York, a non-profit organization assisting with adult education, advocacy, and social services for immigrants from the Middle East. He worked there for three years, first as an English teacher and later as Associate Director. While he thoroughly enjoyed teaching, Chris missed studying and writing about history in a college setting. As such, he got back in touch with some Middlebury History professors for advice on graduate school and a potential career as a History professor. He explained how Professor Armanios, his college advisor while at Middlebury, was especially helpful at this time. She explained how academia is a tough business to break into, but happily wrote letters of recommendation for Chris when he was applying to graduate school. Ultimately, Chris was accepted to CUNY Graduate Center and is finishing up his Ph.D. this Spring.

Chris has been writing his dissertation on migration from Tunisia around the first World War period. Specifically, he examines how the experience of travel affected one’s political beliefs, cultural affinities, and day to day life. He has researched North African soldiers, political dissidents, Tunisian Jews and more peoples. Chris even took a year off from school to travel to Tunisia to further both his research and his Arabic. Chris recently accepted a position to teach Middle East and French history at the University of North Florida starting next Fall. He credits the Middlebury College History department for helping him to discover his passion for history.

By Drew Jacobs

I recently spoke with Professor Febe Armanios about her new book, Halal Food: A History. In Spring 2013, Professor Armanios began teaching a class here at Middlebury about food in the Middle East. There existed very few classes like this in the country. In preparing a syllabus for that class, she found many publications on Kosher food and Christian conceptions of food as laid out in the bible. Yet, no extensive work had been completed on the Islamic food rules. One year later, an editor reached out to her about writing a potential book on food in the Middle East and the book project was born. Professor Armanios began research in the Spring of 2015 with her husband and co-author Bogac Ergene, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Vermont. The two were awarded a Fellowship at Harvard Law School in the Fall of 2015 where they consulted a variety of legal and historical documents at the Law Library, specifically regarding conceptions of permissible (halal) and impermissible (haram) food in Islam. Throughout our conversation, Professor Armanios repeatedly mentioned the influence of Middlebury College on her work. The book was inspired by a Middlebury History class (HIST 352); several Middlebury History majors served as research assistants; and maps in the book were created by a Middlebury alum.

In short, the book focuses on the Islamic rules surrounding food as described in the Quran and other religious texts. Professors Armanios and Ergene examine how Muslims interpret these laws in their everyday lives. Most Muslims might be familiar with the basic Islamic food rules- for example the prohibition of pork and alcohol, and the insistence on the slaughter of animals in a particular, ritualistic way. Yet through their research, Professors Armanios and Ergene found various debates over the rules and regulations for Islamic diet and food preparation, in different parts of the world.

Specifically, the book highlights food rules according to various Islamic legal schools, which often vary by geography. For example, Indonesia and Malaysia have more flexible rules concerning seafood, as they are surrounded by vast bodies of water and their economies rely on largescale fishing industries. Places with less access to fish or seafood can afford to be more restrictive about the permissibility of seafood. In all, different types of seafood are either prohibited, disapproved, or permitted depending on the specific legal school, extant interpretations, and the geographic setting.

Another theme throughout the book is how developments in the modern world have changed Halal rules, particularly due to the growth of manufactured and packaged food and factory-style animal husbandry. With the rise of canned and processed foods, for instance, it is more difficult for Muslims to be sure of what they are eating and how their food was made. In fact, all religions and peoples now struggle with this dilemma. Whether one is a vegan, vegetarian, Jewish, or Muslim the rise of processed foods has made the task of abiding by strict food rules much more difficult. For example, Jell-O is made from gelatin, which is essentially broken-down cow and pig bone and cartilage. Pig is forbidden for Muslims (and Jews) to eat, yet this prohibition not immediately obvious when one looks at a package of Jell-O. Other ingredients are also considered suspect like trace amounts of alcohol in various food preservatives (e.g. vanilla extract). The question of animal slaughter also poses complications. In traditional Islamic practice, slaughter is to be done by hand, with the animal facing Mecca, and the animal’s blood must be completely drained. In the context of mechanized slaughter of chicken today, however, some Muslims—and Jews as well—are considering whether a machine-slaughtered animal is legally permissible. Additionally, questions of animal ethics, with regard to factory breeding of other animals, have raised concerns among Muslims who seek to eat halal food that comes from ethically raised and humanely treated animals.

Ultimately, Professor Armanios explained her three-year effort of researching and writing this book as challenging yet rewarding. Through her research, she travelled to the Middle East and to Europe to consult primary sources and also to see how local vendors prepare and package halal food. Halal Food: A History has quickly garnered rave reviews, while Professor Armanios is already working away on her third book.

I recently spoke to Amanda Brickell Bellows ’08, a historian of the United States in a comparative and transnational perspective. She currently teaches at Hunter College and The New School and works as a historian at the New-York Historical Society. Professor Bellows returned to Middlebury this past January to teach a survey course about human bondage, entitled Introduction to Global Slaveries: From Ancient Greece to the Present.

As an undergraduate at Middlebury, Professor Bellows was drawn to the flexibility of the history major, which allowed her to explore literature, art, and foreign language in her studies. Her senior thesis, a study of representations of Russian serfdom and American slavery in nineteenth-century literature, inspired a dissertation and finally book manuscript, Visualizations of Slavery and Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1861-1915, currently under review for publication. Professor Bellows first noticed parallels between Russian and American bondage while studying under Middlebury professors John McCardell, an expert on the Civil War era, and James West, a scholar of imperial Russia. She remarks of her research, “My interest in serfdom and slavery developed at Middlebury, where I took courses not only about slavery and serfdom, but also about Russian and Southern literature. I noticed interesting similarities between the ways in which Russian and Southern landowners wrote about these two contemporaneous systems of bondage. American slavery and Russian serfdom were abolished just four years apart, but no scholar has yet published a monograph contrasting the post-emancipation periods in the United States and Russia. My book manuscript, examines this era through a cultural lens as the first comparative analysis of mass-oriented depictions of African American slaves and Russian serfs.” The breadth of resources that first drew her to the discipline of history are on display in her book manuscript, which draws from literature, advertisements, paintings, and illustrated periodicals.

After graduation from Middlebury, Professor Bellows entered an investment advisory firm, but soon realized her desire to return to academia. With the counsel of her Middlebury advisors, Professor Bellows considered many graduate programs, and ultimately embarked on a history Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, she began a post-doctoral fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, New York City’s oldest history museum, and began teaching part-time at The New School and Hunter College. This fall, the New-Historical Society will mount the exhibit entitled Black Citizenship in the Jim Crow Era, which Professor Bellows helped design. Her involvement with the New-York Historical Society has allowed her to delve into public history and explore the unique challenges of crafting historical narratives for a nonacademic audience. Having completed her dissertation just two years ago, Professor Bellows has already taught at three universities and works at a prominent history museum. She suggests that, because universities and museums are hiring more graduates outside of the tenure track, young historians tend to be contemporaneously involved at a number of institutions.

Of her passion for academia, Professor Bellows remarks, “Teaching at a university or college gives you the opportunity to study what you love and to discuss exciting ideas with colleagues and students on a daily basis. As an academic, every day is different and interesting! You might spend your time digging through centuries-old documents in the archives, debating the significance of a historical event with colleagues, speaking publicly about your research at conferences, or writing articles and books. Academics enjoy variety, flexibility, and independence.” To Middlebury history majors considering graduate school, she advises, “I would encourage students to think expansively about career options and the ways in which they can use their historical skills. Those with doctorates in history can teach at the college or high-school levels or work as consultants, editors, curators, archivists, librarians, writers, foundation directors, and so much more!”

By Drew Jacobs

I recently spoke with Steve Brown, a recently retired Middlebury History alum from 1964. Steve worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army from 1985-2008. Steve had top level security clearance and was primarily responsible for the U.S. Southern Command, an area including South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. At Middlebury, Steve particularly enjoyed European History and spoke highly of the knowledgeable professors. He wrote his thesis on U.S. Agricultural Foreign Policy. Steve felt that the valuable process of gathering information from a variety of sources, forming an argument, and coherently writing his findings to be especially helpful for his career with the Army.

In his work, Steve wrote studies on the prominent issues within his countries of expertise. Specifically, he spent a great deal of time studying Chile and Haiti. As a History major at Middlebury, Steve learned to identify patterns of conduct and development throughout time. With the Army, Steve looked for similar patterns of behavior by people in certain countries. He strove to identify what was important to these individuals, what were the chief issues in these nations, and any other significant information which the U.S. Government should be aware of. Steve worked collaboratively with Governments throughout South and Central America. When asked for any transformations in his work throughout his more than 20 years with the Army, Steve responded that the mission of the Army changed with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. No longer did the Army employ this Cold War, anti-communist rhetoric.

As such, throughout the 1990’s Steve worked largely in drug reduction work throughout the Americas. He worked in unison with the DEA to cut down on the drug trade and related crime. Steve also worked as a civilian analyst on teams that went into Granada and the Bahamas to help strengthen the national police forces in these nations. Ultimately, Steve gained a greater interest and knowledge of foreign affairs and military work through his studies as a History Major at Middlebury. He continued this interest and his studies into foreign nations during his two decades as an analyst with the Army.