UConn History Professor Micki McElya has been featured in a New York Times article about the first time that women performed the changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery in 84 years. Last week,  Sergeant Porterfield and two other soldiers walked with her and participated in the sacred duty. According to Prof. McElya, “the images of the three female soldiers were a “visual marker” of the often unrecognized sacrifices that women and other marginalized people in the United States have made for the military.” 

Please read and share this excellent NYT article!

UConn Today has highlighted the recent and monumental research of UConn History Professor Cornelia Dayton. Professor Dayton has made groundbreaking recoveries into the lives of prominent African-born writer, Phillis Wheatley, and her free husband, John Peters. For years, scholars were unsure about where Wheatley and Peters had gone after they left Boston. Using legal papers from Essex County, Massachusetts, Dayton uncovered that Phillis Wheatley and John Peters spent 3 years in Middleton, MA, on a farm where Peters had been enslaved. For Dayton, this work challenges the myth that nothing, or very little, exists about the lives of people of color in New England.  Dayton’s research proves that in following “the small details,” we can arrive at new understandings of freedom, race, and gender that complicate what we think we know about the individual lives of people of color.

A job well done! Be sure to stay tuned for more developments, including a website! In the meantime, read the award-winning article in the September 2021 New England Quarterly and check out the @Wheatley_Peters Twitter!

 

 

 

Sending a huge congratulations to UConn History professor, Micki McElya, on receiving a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars Fellowship. This fellowship supports scholars in producing works that speak to broad audiences within and beyond the academy.

Professor McElya’s book, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation, fits within that goal of public scholarship. As a narrative and character-driven history, the book explores gender, race, and politics through the lens of the protests and participants in the 1968 pageant. Professor McElya is writing an intentional history that captures the complexities of the women involved in the protests and pageant by demonstrating just how beauty contests were sites of oppressive acts and liberating movements. In a fabulous UConn Today profile, Professor McElya describes that:

“The women who participate in these pageants are often written off in history books, their motivations are not made clear, and they’re even accused of potentially participating in their own oppression” and that “one purpose of this book is to show these women in the same fully-formed way, with clear motives and understandings, that the activists of the 1960s and 1970s get.”  

To find out more, read the full UConn Today article!

A job well done! We look forward to reading this exciting and groundbreaking work.