Jennifer Brooks, Associate Professor in History, received her PhD in history from the University of Tennessee. After almost a decade of teaching at a small civic arts college in northeast Tennessee, she joined the Auburn History Department in 2006. She teaches courses in the modern South, labor history, and contemporary history. Her first book explored the role of returning veterans in shaping the American South's postwar political landscape. Her current research focuses on labor and working class history in the Cold War era in the South.

Michael Melancon

History

Michael Melancon was born and raised in New Orleans, where he also received a BA in history from Loyola University. After various travels, he served in the U.S. Army where he learned to speak Russian and German. After a two year stint in Germany (1968-1970), he visited the USSR and decided to pursue graduate work in Russian history. During the 1970s he worked on his PhD at Indiana University, Bloomington. After a year of study in the USSR as a Fulbright Fellow and International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) Exchange Student at Leningrad State University, he began teaching at New Mexico State University and the University of Hawaii. His teaching career at Auburn began in 1984. His research focuses on aspects of pre-1917 Russian society and on the Russian Revolutions. His most recent book is The Lena Goldfields Massacre and the Crisis of the Late Tsarist State. After extensive research in Russia over recent years, with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, IREX, Kennan Institute, the Hoover Institution, and inside Auburn University, he is writing a history of the Russian Revolution, with a focus on the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were a radical group that initially allied itself with the Bolsheviks and then opposed Lenin's propensity for proactive violence and abandonment of democratic norms. This study bases itself entirely on formerly inaccessible sources and offers a new interpretation of the Russian Revolutionary phenomenon. His next project will be a history of late-tsarist Russian political culture (1861-1917).

Dr. Guy V. Beckwith has been inducted into the Academy of Teaching and Outstanding Teachers. He has been a member of Auburn's faculty for over 28 years, having joined Auburn's History Department on the tenure track in 1980. Dr. Beckwith helped create the university honors program, now the Honors College, and the curriculum for the innovative, team-taught Human Odyssey series (a science-humanities team-taught sequence focusing on the shifts in human perception resulting from discovery and invention). He played a major role in the development of Auburn's nationally recognized undergraduate and graduate programs in Technology and Civilization.

His publications include articles and reviews in such journals as The South Atlantic Quarterly, Technology and Culture, Issues in Integrative Studies, and Science, Technology & Human Values, and an anthology of readings in the history of technology, currently in its fourth edition. One of his lectures, on the role of mythology in ancient societies, was videotaped and broadcast to national audiences on The History Channel. In 1992, he spent a year as Visiting Honors Professor at the University of Central Florida, and received the Honors Medallion. In 1996, Dr. Beckwith was chosen for one of Auburn's Alumni Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Awards, and in 2003 he received the College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award in the Humanities.

On Thursday, April 3 at 4 p.m. in the Foy Ballroom, History Professor Dr. Joseph Kicklighter delivered the inaugural "Final Lecture." The Student Government Association, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Mortar Board sponsored this event as an opportunity for the Class of 2008 to recognize Dr. Kicklighter, a professor in the College of Liberal Arts, as the professor they feel is the most outstanding teacher at Auburn University. Student academic and campus leaders narrowed down a wide pool of nominees to five outstanding professors, then juniors and seniors across campus voted Dr. Kicklighter to deliver the inaugural lecture in this new program.

Dr. Kicklighter delivered this commencement-style address which was open to all students, faculty, and administrators. In his address, Dr. Kicklighter included words of advice and inspiration for students who just began their college career as well as those who are preparing to leave Auburn University for the final time.

The Final Lecture program was created to give all students the opportunity to participate in a teaching award given on behalf of the student body. For a professor to be nominated and voted on by students as the top professor at Auburn University is one of the highest honor students can bestow upon a faculty member.

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Dr. Jeff Frederick, Auburn alumnus and assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, will discuss his new book Stand Up for Alabama: Governor George Wallace, on Tuesday, March 4, at 3 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library at Auburn University.

George Wallace governed for nearly a quarter-century at a time when change was sweeping across the South. While previous historians have focused on Wallace's resistance to civil rights or his presidential campaigns, Frederick offer the most comprehensive assessment of Wallace's effect on the state of Alabama.

Frederick earned a PhD in history from Auburn University and specializes in the relationship between politics and society. He has published on a variety of topics including interest groups, female support for conservative politicians, NASCAR, southern governors during the civil rights era, and party politics in the South.

The lecture is sponsored by the Auburn University History Department, AU Libraries, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts, and the AU Bookstore. A reception will follow the program, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. For more information on the program, contact the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center at 334-844-4946.

Dr. Angela Lakwete, associate professor of history at Auburn University and author of Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America, will speak on Tuesday, February 12, 2008, at 3 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

In Inventing the Cotton Gin, Lakwete explores the myths surrounding Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and shows that gins existed for centuries before his 1794 invention. “Lakwete’s compelling and revisionist book on the cotton gin is a major contribution to the history of Southern technology,” notes Pete Daniel of the National Museum of American History. Inventing the Cotton Gin won the prestigious Edelstein Prize from the Society of the History of Technology in 2004.

The Discover Auburn series is co-sponsored by the Auburn University Libraries, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and the Auburn University Bookstore. This semester’s series will conclude on April 16 with Dr. Tim Dodge on “The Influence of Gospel Music on Early Rock 'n' Roll.”

A reception will follow the program, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. For more information on the program and the series, contact the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center at 334-844-4946.

January 17. 2008

Dr. Larry G. Gerber, professor of history at Auburn University and author of The Irony of State Intervention: American Industrial Relations Policy in Comparative Perspective, 1914-1939, will speak on Thursday, January 17, 2008, at 3 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

“An important and unduplicated contribution to the historical literature on U.S. industrial relations,” according to one reviewer, The Irony of State Intervention compares the labor histories of Great Britain and the United States between World War I and the Great Depression and argues that in the development of industrial relations policies, ideology was secondary to economic realities.

Gerber’s lecture is the first spring semester lecture in the Discover Auburn lecture series.

The series is co-sponsored by the Auburn University Libraries, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and the Auburn University Bookstore. Other “Discover Auburn” programs scheduled for the semester include Angela Lakwete on “Inventing the Cotton Gin: Alabama Perspectives” on Feb. 12 and Tim Dodge on “The Influence of Gospel Music on Early Rock 'n' Roll” on April 16.

A reception will follow the program, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. For more information on the program and the series, contact the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center at 334-844-4946.

January 14, 2008

Dr. David Carter, associate professor of history at Auburn University, will speak on President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the civil rights movement on Monday, Jan. 14, at 3 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

The lecture is a part of AU’s Martin Luther King Jr. Week activities, a series of events and programs held January 13-23, 2008, to pay tribute to and explore Dr. King's legacy of leadership and service.

In addition to essays and articles on grassroots civil rights movements in North Carolina and Mississippi and on noted activists Andrew Young and Julian Bond, Dr. Carter is the author of a forthcoming study from the University of North Carolina Press examining shifting relationships between the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement in the three years following passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The lecture is sponsored by Auburn University Libraries and the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts. A reception will follow the program. For more information on the program, contact the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center at 334-844-4946.

Auburn University will hold a memorial service at 4 p.m. Nov. 28 in the University Chapel for W. David Lewis, Distinguished University Professor, who died Sept. 28. Lewis served for 35 years in Auburn University's Department of History, where he founded an internationally recognized program in the history of technology. In 2005 the Johns Hopkins University Press published his most recent book, "Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century." Lewis played the leading role in building the Auburn University Libraries' history of flight collection.

Jimmy Carter Legacy Discussed by Writer Gaillard

November 14, 2007
On November 14 at 3 p.m. in the Auburn University Draughon Library’s Archives and Special Collections Department, author Frye Gaillard will discuss his new book, Prophet From Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy.

Gaillard, author of more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from civil rights to southern music, first profiled the former president for the Charlotte Observer in the mid -1980s. Expanding his research to survey Carter’s role on the national and global stage in his post-presidency years, his new book interprets the former president’s life and work.

Praised for its insight and honesty, Prophet from Plains has been described as a “warts and all portrait of a politician who still stirs strong feelings among his detractors as well as adulation among his supporters.”

Dr. David Carter of the Auburn University Department of History wrote the introduction for Prophet from Plains and will speak at the program on the 14th.

The program is co-sponsored by the Auburn University Libraries, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and the Auburn University Bookstore. AU History department chair Dr. Tony Carey will introduce the speakers and moderate discussion.

Copies of Prophet from Plains will be available for purchase and signing. Refreshments will be served following the program. For more information please call 334-844-4946 or go to www.auburn.edu/cah.

September 22, 2007

A reception to honor Joseph Kicklighter, professor of History and History Department undergraduate program officer in the College of Liberal Arts, is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 22, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Alumni Center. Kicklighter has been teaching at Auburn since 1975. All alumni, faculty and staff are invited to attend to honor Kicklighter and support the Dr. Joseph Kicklighter Endowed Professorship in History. The endowment was established in 2006 to ensure that future generations of AU students experience the ideals of student service and a passion for learning that Kicklighter embodies. For more information, contact Olivia Davis at 844-1483 or oad0001@auburn.edu.

September 17, 2007

Auburn University will recognize Constitution Day on Monday, Sep. 17 at 4:00 p.m. with a lecture by Jeremy Black titled “Framing the New Nation: Responding to the International Challenge, 1775 to 1815,” in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter in England, is an expert on post-1500 military history, 18th-century British history and international relations. Professor Black is a prolific author whose books include “War: Past, Present, and Future” (2000), “War in the New Century” (2001), “America as a Military Power, 1775-1882” (2002), “The British Seaborne Empire” (2004), and “Rethinking Military History” (2004).

His latest book, “George III: America’s Last King,” is a comprehensive biography of King George, as one reviewer notes “a literate and carefully crafted portrait of the well-intentioned man who was our last sovereign ruler.” Refreshments will follow the lecture, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. Black will also visit a number of classes and be available to students during his visit.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Congress held its final meeting to sign the Constitution of the United State of America. A law sponsored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVA) requires schools receiving federal funds and all federal agencies to conduct educational events about the Constitution on or about September 17.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Auburn University Office of the Provost, AU History Department, Army ROTC Department, Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts, AU Libraries, and the AU Bookstore. For more information, call 334-844-4948.