Alum News, Pre-Class of 2007

Paul Comaroto ’06 was one of 43 applicants out of 480 nationwide selected by the U.S. Air Force for officer training school in 2007.

Mark Jones ’91 had his book manuscript on the construction of childhood and the making of a middle class in early twentieth-century Japan accepted for publication by the Harvard University Asia Center.

James Jung ’98 wrote in August 2006:  “I'm still in the Navy JAG Corps and have been stationed in Japan—I'm practicing defense law for the Navy in Yokosuka.”

Kevin Logan ’97:  “Many of my closest friends remain '97 Dartmouth History majors, and we still see each other frequently.  Frighteningly, all of us have become lawyers now, but our professors at Dartmouth instilled in all of us a life-long love of history even if—speaking especially for myself here—we did not quite have the intellectual tools as overwhelmed undergraduates to understand much of what we were taught.  But the connection to the Department remains very strong.  We sometimes find ourselves talking about individual lectures that we attended over ten years ago, and we read some of the more accessible books that our favorite professors have published.  So we love to receive the Department Newsletter, and especially the recommended reading section.  I am sure that many members of the faculty think that these recommendations are silly, and a bunch of busy lawyers are not going to read some obscure academic text about this or that.  But I can tell you that these recommendations are greatly appreciated—at least among my friends.  It is a wonderful way of reviving in our minds the wonderful courses we enjoyed as undergraduates.  More than anything else, the Dartmouth History Department made us readers, and we still try to supplement the material from our favorite courses.”

Mark Nackman ’65:  “I did a Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia (Eric McKitrick was my advisor) that got published in 1975 as A Nation Within A Nation: The Rise of Texas Nationalism, 1821-1861 (Kennikat Press).  It all got started as a senior thesis with Harry Scheiber at Dartmouth in 1965.  McKitrick encouraged me to follow my instinct on the Texan mystique, declaring with a wry smile:  ‘All stereotypes are true.’  I taught the American History survey courses at Hunter College (1969-74) while a graduate student, then spent two years crisscrossing the country on a Columbia Oral History project and two more years at the University of Washington (Seattle) as an Assistant Professor before taking over the family business (Admatch) in 1978.”

Ellen Glaser Rafshoon ‘86:  “I was awarded a Ph.D. in American history in 2001 from Emory University.  My specialty is U.S. foreign relations.  From 2001 until 2007 I was a visiting professor at Georgia State University and at Oxford College of Emory University.  In 2007 I was hired as an assistant professor of history at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA.  I am very excited to be one of the college’s first History hires and am helping the school to develop its curriculum.  This is the first new four-year liberal arts college Georgia has established in nearly forty years and is designed to meet the suburban population growth, driven partially by heavy foreign immigration.  In addition to teaching, I am still writing on a freelance basis.  An essay of mine (using my maiden name) was published in a recent book titled The Elephant in the Playroom: Ordinary Parents Write Intimately and Honestly About the Extraordinary Highs and Heartbreaking Lows of Raising Kids with Special Needs (Penguin/Hudson Street Press, 2007).  I'd like to add that I remain inspired by the outstanding teaching of Dartmouth's history faculty.  Hope all is well for everyone I knew.”

Ruhamah (Ruthie) Shek ’02 accepted an offer last summer from the Associated Press to do research and support work for its Strategic Planning team.

Kevin Stansen ’06 took a position as a Fixed Income Analyst at a hedge fund called SAC Capital.

James Zug ’91:  “This might be a record for the History Department. More than sixteen years after I handed in my senior History thesis in Reed Hall in May 1991, it has been published. The Guardian: The History of South Africa's Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper was published in October 2007 by Michigan State University Press in the U.S. and Unisa Press in South Africa.  The Guardian was a multi-racial political radical Cape Town weekly that ran from 1937 to 1963. The only anti-apartheid newspaper at the time, it was banned three times by Pretoria and put on trial for treason.  While teaching at a school in the far northern Transvaal in 1992, I came into contact with an archive in Cape Town that wanted to publish my thesis. So at age twenty-three I had a book contract—boy, that was easy. I lived in Cape Town for two years and interviewed every former staff member of the Guardian newspaper I could find and visited libraries and archives around the country and in England. I rewrote the thesis. The archive asked Michigan State to co-publish. The archive got subsumed by the Robben Island Museum, and they closed their publishing wing. Michigan State almost closed its press. One saga after another. Time went on: freelancing, kids, other books (www.jameszug.com), including one about John Ledyard, Class of 1776, and now, seventeen years after I sat in my senior seminar with Gene Garthwaite trying to guess whether Martin Guerre really had returned, the odyssey has ended.”