Since its introduction last November, Eastern’s online master’s degree program in history has reignited student interest in this vital area of the humanities. Currently, there are 131 graduate students from across the nation enrolled in the program. “It’s been a tremendous success,” says Larry Cebula, professor of history and a member of the graduate committee.

The EWU history department pivoted to only offering a MA in history online because enrollment numbers were dwindling for the in-person program. The success of the on-line only program has shown those dwindling numbers aren’t due to a lack of interest in the degree, Cebula says.

“An MA in history has always been a really valuable degree. There’s a lot of people in Spokane, Washington state, and across the country who got their MA in history on campus from Eastern and leveraged that,” says Cebula. “There are degree recipients leading offices at the state department, archivists around the Northwest —  including at the MAC — and a number of people in the state archives, people doing historic preservation, and some people went on to get their PhDs. But a campus-only MA limited our reach.”

Theresa Mitchell, a Massachusetts native with a dual career in environmental non-profit management and as a writer specializing in historical nonfiction, is among the program’s first class of students.

“Throughout my professional life, what was missing was formal training as a historian,” Mitchell says. “I want to approach future work with proper credentials, instead of ‘merely’ writing about the past, as would a journalist.”

Mitchell says she searched for a year before discovering EWU’s online master’s degree program. She describes it as a “great fit,” and praises the diversity of points-of-view she encounters. “The caliber of my fellow students inspires me to do my best,” she says. There are “many teachers, some military, some retired, younger folks—all of whom compose insightful posts on discussion boards where I continue to learn from them about facets of the past interpreted in new ways.”

The master of arts in history has always been a strong program. But it has also been a small one. Now it doesn’t have to be. According to Cebula, there is a strong demand for online master’s programs in history because there are so few others offered. The program is structured as a fixed course sequence of nine classes, which are balanced between world and American history.

One unique feature of the EWU online offering is its compressed classes. Typically graduate classes in history run over a 10-week period, but those for Eastern’s degree are only six weeks long. Shorter terms, however, doesn’t mean less demanding requirements, Cebula says. “This is not less, this is more,” he says. “These students work really hard.”

For students like Mitchell, the hard work is part of the attraction. “The curriculum perfectly suits my learning objectives. The coursework is challenging and I’m grateful for intelligent, kind, and compassionate professors invested in their students’ success.”

The final project for the program is not the typical thesis. Instead, students will assemble a portfolio from their coursework, one that “they will be able to leverage” in their careers, says Cebula. “They leave the program ready to go.”

EWU’s Assistant Professor of History and Director of Social Studies Education, Jacki Hedlund Tyler, published her book Leveraging an Empire – Settler Colonialism and the Legalities of Citizenship in the Pacific Northwest.

The book evaluates Oregon’s exclusionary laws related to national issues of slavery, immigration, land ownership, education, suffrage, and naturalization and examines the process of settler colonialism in the Pacific Northwest between 1841 and 1859.

This past Fall, Professor Tyler presented on her book in the reoccurring segment “Past as Prologue” with the Northwest Public Broadcasting, at the Western History Association annual conference, as well as on the panel “Battles for Belonging: Race, Citizenship, and Exclusion in the Pacific Northwest and Nazi Germany” hosted by Oregon State University and sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Some Praise for Leveraging an Empire:

“This is one of the first works of historical scholarship to explicitly take up the question of settler colonialism in the Pacific Northwest. By bringing together race and gender Jacki Hedlund Tyler offers an intersectional analysis that is also a useful contribution to the region’s scholarship. Scholars working on the American West more generally will also appreciate her argument about the influence Oregon had on the rest of the country.”—Coll Thrush, author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place

Sponsored by EWU’s Department of History, World War I at 100 will give the campus community an opportunity to learn more about one of history’s most devastating conflicts.

Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019
Screening of “Gallipoli” (1981)
By Peter Weir, starring Mel Gibson
2-4 p.m. | Patterson 128

Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019
Panel Discussion on The Legacies of the Great War
2-4 p.m. | Patterson 128

Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019
Screening of “Black and White in Color” (1976)
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
2-4 p.m. | Patterson 128

Photo: From the Photograph Collection IX (COLL/966), United States Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections; some rights reserved.

By Vickie Shields

Michael Conlin, PhD, is a professor of history and current president of the United Faculty of Eastern (UFE). I recently caught up with Professor Conlin, to discuss his new book, One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching toward the Civil War.

VS: Why was it important for you to take on this subject matter at this time?

MC: The American Civil War still looms large in the national consciousness. Some of the issues it has raised still remain to be resolved, i.e., the discrimination and ill-treatment of African-American, and the places of liberty and race in our national identity. I was struck by the plasticity of nationalism and national identity in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) era of the United States. Both slaveholders and abolitionists claimed the mantle of the Founders and both groups did so perfectly legitimately. 

VS: Why is our understanding of the period leading up to the Civil War important to understand in the context of the American Revolution?

MC: It demonstrates the centrality of slavery to American national identity right from the beginning and persisting in important ways up to the present day. The Founding Fathers bequeathed a mixed legacy to subsequent generations. On the one hand, they justified their rebellion against the British monarchy on the grounds of natural rights. They also took effective steps to limit and even ban slavery in some areas: e.g., the end of American participation in the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory in 1787, and the gradual abolition of slavery in the Northern states (1780 to 1803).

On the other hand, all 13 original states were slave states. Many of the political and military leaders of the United States were slaveholders. The new United States government took several steps designed to protect the right of certain Americans to own some of their fellow human beings, culminating in the various protections for slavery in the U.S. Constitution. This fundamental tension between liberty and oppression was present throughout the American Revolution and has persisted to the present day.

In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, white Southerners grounded their defense of slavery, which culminated in the secession and rebellion of 11 states in a perfectly legitimate understanding of the historical legacy of the American Revolution. At the same time, antislavery Northerners and enslaved Southerners advocated abolitionist measures hearkening back to same American Revolution.

VS: What did you discover about the contradictions inherent in our Founding Fathers, Washington, and Jefferson?

MC: Both Jefferson and Washington neatly personified this fundamental tension between liberty and slavery, between freedom and oppression. Jefferson was the author of several thoughtful denunciations of slavery. In the mid-19th century, Abolitionists used the stirring words from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, as well as his misgivings about slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, to claim the mantle of the Sage of Monticello. Jefferson also took concrete antislavery actions as a statesman. Jefferson was largely responsible for keeping slavery out of the Northwest Territory via the Northwest Ordinance (1787) and Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1807. Washington freed his slaves at great cost to his heirs and privately expressed dismay with slavery.

At the same time, slaveholders in the mid-19th century claimed that Jefferson and Washington were one of them: a benevolent slave master who looked after his slaves in a paternalistic way. In fact, both Jefferson and Washington cruelly exploited the labor of their slaves complete with harsh punishments, chronic deprivations, and division of nuclear families by slave sales. Despite their high-minded public rhetoric and private misgivings, they profited handsomely from the misery of their slaves.  Of course, Jefferson also had a coerced sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. While Washington did manumit his slaves, he only did so after he had died so that he benefited from their labor for his entire life. Moreover, he did this privately. Had the Father of his Country freed his slaves in a public and noteworthy fashion his example would have been a powerful one for other slaveholders to follow. Lastly, Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 into law and hounded a fugitive slave, Ona Judge, to the fullest extent permitted by the law and then some.

In the end, the words and deeds of these two slaveholding Founders offered something for both opponents of and advocates for slavery in the mid-19th century to make use of when they argued about the place of slavery in their understandings of American national identity.

VS: Your book takes on the concept of “competing histories” and bias in memory of historical events. Why is this approach important?

MC: Historians are constantly revising history. Oscar Wilde famously said, “the one duty we have to history is to re-write it” and he was correct. History is not one grand narrative. Instead, it is a bunch of competing narratives that contradict each other (and sometimes themselves). I argue that the “history wars” of the 1840s and 1850s over slavery and the Founders is quite similar to the “history wars” fought in the 1990s and 2000s over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution or the recent brouhahas over Common Core and the AP history test. The act of remembering and misremembering (and forgetting) historical events is ongoing. What is included is important but what is left out is sometimes more important. It is important for us to remember that history is not dead and dusted. History is not static. It is alive and dynamic. I like to say that I and my colleagues in the EWU History Department “make history” every day.

VS: For fun, I am told you and Emeritus History Professor Dick Donley had the same doctoral advisor. Tell me about that.

MC: Dick Donley was one of Robert W. Johannsen’s first graduate students and I was one of his last. Our time at the University of Illinois was separated by 32 years! We both have fond memories of his mentorship and the University of Illinois library (the third largest academic library in the U.S.). Although I did not meet him until the end of my first quarter at EWU, we have become fast friends and good colleagues. Dick has kindly read One Nation Divided by Slavery and my current book project tentatively entitled Constitutional Conflict. Dick has a sharp eye for awkward syntax and a mastery of the historiography even as an emeritus professor. He is also is more gentle than our PhD advisor, who once returned a chapter of my dissertation with the comment “It reads like an encyclopedia article.” He did not mean that as a compliment!

Former U.S. Ambassador Thomas D. Boyatt delivers his lecture on The 100 Years Wars of the 20th Century in Hargreaves Hall on the Cheney Campus of Eastern Washington University.