By Lisa Yu Ding ‘08
Robert Bonner
During the 2005-06 academic year, Dartmouth’s History Department had the
honor of hosting Robert Bonner as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Joshua
Guild as the Chavez/Eastman/Marshall Dissertation Fellow.
Visiting Assistant Professor Robert Bonner joined the History Department
during winter and spring terms and taught classes on the American Civil War and
Black America since the Civil War, the introductory course on the United States
since 1865, and a first-year seminar on popular patriotism and war.
Unlike visiting faculty unfamiliar with Dartmouth, Professor Bonner lives in
Hanover and had become acquainted with the History Department through his wife,
Professor Leslie Butler. They have three sons, Will (age 7), Matt (age 4), and
Cameron (age 1). Though he often worked in the Baker-Berry Library for his
research, Professor Bonner admits that it’s much nicer having an office in the
department and getting to spend more time there.
Along with his two course-per-term teaching load, Professor Bonner also
worked on two books that he hopes to complete by the end of the summer. One is
The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the American Civil War
(Hill and Wang), a project about Civil War diaries and letters, for which he
was able to draw upon the resources of the Rauner Special Collections
Library.
The other book he is working on is titled Southern Slaveholders and the
Crisis of American Nationhood (Cambridge University Press), which,
according to Professor Bonner, deals with the broader topic of “taking the past
on its own terms and resisting the distorting effects of hindsight,” which ”has
been a major part of my re-evaluation of Southern slaveholders.”
Professor Bonner received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1989,
majoring in American Studies. Though he grew up in Tennessee, his interest in
Southern history “developed after I left home for college. William Faulkner,
Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Toni Morrison, and others helped me to
appreciate how this region has been haunted by history; fiction did as much as
history to focus my imagination on how the Southern past relates to the
Southern present.”
After receiving his B.A., Professor Bonner decided to take a couple of years
off from academics to work at the Admissions Office at Princeton, something he
very much enjoyed: “it was a nice experience, not being a student for a
while.”
Subsequently, Professor Bonner received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1996. His
dissertation was a study of proslavery politics and culture, for which he
conducted research in New Haven, at the Huntington Library in California, as
well as in several Southern states. Though his permanent position is at
Michigan State University, Professor Bonner has taught Civil War History and
African-American History at the University of Southern Maine and at Amherst
College.
He has already published a book called Colors and Blood: Flag Passions
of the Confederate South (Princeton University Press), which is about
Confederate flag culture and, by extension, popular Confederate patriotism.
Most recently, Professor Bonner received the 2005 John T. Hubbell Prize for the
best article on Civil War History for “Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the
Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze,” which examines transatlantic
nineteenth-century scientific racism. For the next academic year, Professor
Bonner has been awarded an NEH fellowship to conduct research on the Fugitive
Slave Law at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusetts.
Joshua Guild
Josh Guild hails from Brookline, Massachusetts, and has lived in New Haven,
Connecticut, for the last six years, working toward his doctorate in
African-American Studies at Yale University. Josh’s main fields of research
interest are Twentieth-Century African-American History, general
Twentieth-Century History, Urban History, and the African Diaspora.
After graduating from Wesleyan University and before enrolling at Yale, Josh
worked at a newly established charter school in Boston for two years. At the
charter school, he taught students in the fifth and sixth grades just about
every subject—Social Studies, Language Arts, Math, and Science. Josh said, “It
was probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do because I was a teacher at a
brand-new school, so I had to develop the curriculum as I went along. One of my
colleagues characterized it perfectly as ‘building a plane while you’re flying
it.’”
However, according to Josh, he did gain one important lesson from this
experience: “It gave me perspective on hard work. Whenever I get discouraged
about writing my dissertation, it’s something to remind me that working on the
dissertation isn’t so bad.”
Beginning in Fall 2005, Josh was at Dartmouth working on his doctoral
dissertation, entitled “You Can’t Go Home Again: Migration, Citizenship, and
Black Community in New York and London, World War II-1980.” He hopes to
complete the dissertation this coming fall.
“My dissertation examines black migration and the politics of community
change in the neighborhoods of central Brooklyn and west London during the long
postwar period,” said Josh. His wide range of sources include oral interviews
with migrants, which he used to argue that the Second Great Migration of
African-Americans from the South to the urban North was part of a broader
reshaping of the African Diaspora that also included the massive movements of
peoples from the Anglophone Caribbean to both the United States and Great
Britain after World War II. “The project ultimately situates these patterns of
black migration within the context of realignments of race, citizenship, and
national identity in the second half of the twentieth century."
When asked how much he liked working at Dartmouth, Josh exclaimed, “I love
it!” He credits the supportive colleagues and the new friends he made in the
History Department for the enjoyable time he had at Dartmouth. He also noted,
“I want to give a special shout-out to Leo Spitzer for letting me use his
office.”
This fall Josh will be heading to Princeton University to take up a position
in the African-American Studies division of the History Department. And, in the
long term, he sees himself publishing a book based on his dissertation and
going on to work on community history and popular history projects,
particularly in Brooklyn.
But, in the meantime, at least through the summer, Josh will be in Hanover
“working on my dissertation and watching the Red Sox.”
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