Northern Illinois University
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Statement on the History of Racist Violence in the United States

The NIU History Department endorses the American Historical Association’s June 2020 statement urging a reckoning with the United States' deplorable record of violence against African Americans, a record that stretches back centuries. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers stands within this sordid national tradition of racist violence. It is past time for Americans to confront our nation's past, using insights from history to inform our actions as we work to create a more just society.

Recent Faculty Books

• Emma Kuby, Ph.D. has published Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight Against Concentration Camps After 1945 with Cornell University Press.
• Valerie L. Garver, Ph.D. has published A Cultural History of Work in the Medieval Age with Bloomsbury Press.
• Anne Hanley, Ph.D. has published The Public Good and the Brazilian State: Municipal Finance and Public Services in São Paulo, 1822-1930 with the University of Chicago Press.

News

• Professor Rosemary Feurer co-authored an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune titled “Chicago Played a Big Role in Mother Jones’ Life. Why No Statue for Her?” and another in the Chicago Sun-Times titled “A Statue for Mother Jones Would Remind Chicago that Workers Built This City.”
• Professor Stanley Arnold was interviewed by Rockford NBC affiliate WREX for stories about voter registration and about the protests against police violence against African Americans.
• Professor Beatrix Hoffman wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on health insurance in the United States. She was also interviewed by Slate about the impact of previous epidemics on Progressive-era debates about collective health security benefits.

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Recent Awards

• Professor Emma Kuby’s book Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight Against Concentration Camps After 1945 has won the 2020 George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association for the best work on European international history since 1895. The book was also awarded the 2020 David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies; and the 2020 European Studies Book Award from the Council for European Studies.
• Recent History Ph.D. Heeyoung Choi has been awarded the 2020 Deborah Wong Research and Publication Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
• Professor Valerie Garver was awarded a Mercator Fellowship to spend a semester at the University of Heidelberg, where she will share her expertise in early medieval material culture with the research group on medieval material text cultures. Her edited volume, A Cultural History of Work: the Medieval Age (800-1450) (Bloomsbury Press), which includes her own piece on "Work, Skill, and Technology," is part of the multivolume work which won the 2020 Prose Award for multivolume reference in the humanities.
• Professor Beatrix Hoffman has received the 2020 Wilma Stricklin Award. The award recognizes exemplary leadership/service resulting in a more favorable campus climate for women.
• History Ph.D. candidate LeNieAdolphson has been awarded a Summer Short-Term Fellowship from the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) for her dissertation research on the history of Chicago's Provident Hospital. The BMRC is a Chicago-based association of libraries, universities, museums, community/arts organizations and other archival institutions. The fellowship is awarded to scholars, artists, writers and public historians to utilize the consortium's collections.

Department Events