Skotheim Lectures
The Skotheim Lectureship was established in 1978 by then-president Robert Allen Skotheim and his wife, Nadine. Income from the Sivert O. and Marjorie Allen Skotheim Endowment for Historical Studies provides funds to be used annually to bring a distinguished lecturer in historical studies to Whitman College.
Skotheim Lectureship Guests
April 1, 2024 Moon-Ho Jung, University of Washington, "Reckoning with the US Empire"
April 27, 2023 Ryan Tucker Jones, University of Oregon, "Russia, The Destruction of the World's Whales and the Nature of the Twentieth Century"
April 20, 2022 Dr. Paolo Squatriti, University of Michigan, “Weeds and the Carolingians: a History of Bad Plants and Early Medieval Empires.”
October 25, 2021 Jeff Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine, "China and the World in Two Years of Global Crisis, Tales of 1900 and 2020"
April 1, 2021 Blair Kelley, North Carolina State University, “The Promise of the Black Working Class”
February 18, 2021 Natalia Molina, University of Southern California, (video recording available to members of the Whitman Community)
April 11, 2019 Sam Moyn, Yale University, “Humane: Rethinking the Forever War”
April 12, 2018 Kyle Longley, “LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval”
Oct. 12, 2017 Tim Stapleton, “The African Experience of the First World War (1914-1918)”
Sept. 21, 2017 Keith Watenpaugh, “I Am a Historian of the Middle East and then the Wars Came: On Professional Responsibility in the Face of Mass Violence and the Flight of Millions”
March 2, 2017 Greg Grandin, “ALT-REALISM: Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, and the Subjective Tradition of American Diplomacy”
Sept. 29, 2016 Holly Brewer, “‘Inheritable Blood’: Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire”
March 9, 2016 David M. Kennedy, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: An American Life in the ‘American Century’”
Nov. 12, 2015 Brett L. Walker, “Natural and Unnatural Disasters: 3/11, Asbestos, and the Unmaking of Modern Japan”
Feb. 26, 2015 Leonard Smith, “Geography, Sovereignty, and Drawing the Boundaries of Syria after World War I”
Sept. 22, 2014 Robin Fleming, “Why Bones Matter: Writing the Lives of People who Never Appeared in Texts”
April 24, 2014 Christopher B. Krebs, “Caesar 2.0: Enlivening Caesar and his Gallic War”
Oct. 24, 2013 Erich Gruen, “Did Ancient Identity Depend on Ethnicity”
April 8, 2013 Julia Clancy-Smith, “Barbary Coasts: How Mediterraneans Came to Be”
Oct. 18, 2012 Frank Costigliola, “Personality and Presidential Transitions: The Case of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman”
April 27, 2012 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Deciphering Denial: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians,
1789-2009”
Feb. 17, 2011 William H. Beezley, “Indians, Anthropologists, and Calendar Girls: Mexican Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism”
Nov. 11, 2010 Melvin Small, “Antiwarriors: Vietnam and Iraq”
Oct. 29, 2009 Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora and the Emergence of the Modern World”
April 16, 2009 Joseph Esherick, “China: The Revolution is Dead! Long Live the Revolution”
Oct. 16, 2008 Robert Stacey, “Writing the History of the Jews of Medieval England: Why it Matters”
April 17, 2008 Alfred W. Crosby, “Humanity and Infectious Diseases”
April 26, 2007 Joan Wallach Scott, “Cover-Up: French Gender Equality and the Islamic Headscarf”
Sept. 21, 2006 Herbert S. Klein, “The Origins of Ethnic Politics and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia”
April 6, 2006 Juan Cole, “Shiite Politics and America’s Future with Iraq”
Oct. 6, 2005 Carol Gluck, “Past Obsessions: World War II and Memory”
Feb. 17, 2005 Patrick Geary, “Nationalisms Medieval and Modern”
Sept. 16, 2004 Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Professionals and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890-1954”
April 14, 2004 Stephen G. Rabe, “U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Tale”
Oct. 16, 2003 Edward A. Alpers, “Creolization and Identity in the African Diaspora”
Oct. 24, 2002 Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, University of Pittsburgh, “Re-thinking the Qing: Eighteenth-century China in an Early Modern World”
Oct. 9, 2001 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, State University of New York, “Can a Eugenic Policy be Morally Right and Politically Correct?”
Sept. 28, 2000 Michael P. Adas, Rutgers University, “Fatal Hubris: America’s High-Tech Quest for the Perfect War from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf”
April 27, 2000 Louis A. Pérez, University of North Carolina, “Cuba and the United States: The Cultural Sources of the Cuban Revolution”
Nov. 18, 1999 William Cronon, University of Wisconsin, “Kennecott Journey: An Introduction to Environmental History”
April 22, 1999 Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago, “Locality and Identity in East Asia, 1900-1945”
April 20, 1998 James M. McPherson, Princeton University, “An Oregonian in the Civil War: Roswell Lamson of the U.S. Navy”
Feb. 18, 1997 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Portland State University, “Confessional Ambiguity Along Borders: Popular Contributions to Religious Tolerance in 16th Century Germany”
Feb. 5, 1996 Suzanne Lebsock, University of Washington, “A Murder in Virginia”
Feb. 21, 1995 Robert Allen Skotheim, The Huntington Library, “The 1994 Elections and the Culture Wars”
Feb. 15, 1994 Peter Duus, Stanford University, “Remembering the Empire: Post-War Japanese Reflections on World War II”
Feb. 9, 1993 E. Bradford Burns, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Past as Present: Poetry, Poverty, and Politics in Latin America”
Feb. 4, 1992 Lloyd C. Gardner, Rutgers University, “The Costs of Victory: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam”
Feb. 5, 1991 Norman Itzkowitz, Princeton University, “Psychological Aspects of the Conflict Resolution with Special Reference to the Middle East”
Nov. 2, 1989 D. W. Meinig, Syracuse University, “The Great Columbia Plain and After”
Feb. 22, 1988 Gerald Strauss, Indiana University, “More Light on the Reformation: What the New History is Teaching Us”
Feb. 25, 1987 Paul Kennedy, Yale University, “The Changing Shape of Great-Power Politics in the Twentieth Century”
Sept. 30, 1986 Anne Firor Scott, Duke University, “Ladies of the Club: Unlikely Revolutionaries”
April 22, 1986 Robert L. Middlekauff, The Huntington Library, “Legends of the Founders”
April 22, 1985 Jonathan D. Spence, Yale University, “The Play’s the Thing: Juliet Capulet or Du Liniang?”
April 23, 1984 Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati, “The Relocation of the Japanese-Americans in Historical Perspective”
Sept. 15, 1982 Frederick Rudolph, Williams College, “Stephen Penrose’s Williams College in the 1880s”
Oct. 20, 1981 Kermit Vanderbilt, University of California, Los Angeles, “Vernon Louis Parrington and the Making of American Literary History”
Sept. 16, 1980 Thomas J. Pressly, University of Washington, “The Late 1960s and Early 1970s in Historical Perspective”