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Foley Fellows: Faculty to share research across the state

Five Washington State University faculty will be speaking around the state about their research in a new partnership of the Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service and Humanities Washington, a nonprofit that aims to foster thoughtful conversation and critical thinking.

For the next two years, WSU’s “Foley Fellows” will be among more than 30 speakers that provide free public presentations on science, politics, music, philosophy, spiritual traditions, and more in dozens of communities throughout Washington.

The collaboration is the brainchild of Cornell Clayton, director of the Foley Institute and himself a former member of the Humanities Washington speakers bureau.

“It just fits so nicely with the Foley Institute mission,” Clayton said. In addition to engaging students in public service, the institute educates students and the public on public affairs and supports academic research on public policy and democratic institutions.

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WSU Insider

Historian collecting stories, artifacts of Northern Cheyenne scouts at Fort Keogh in Miles City

Ryan Booth.When Ryan Booth began his research into Indian scouts who were recruited by the U.S. Army, he discovered only two military forts had complete records of the scouts: Fort Apache in Arizona and Fort Keogh at Miles City.

“Other places had scouts, but their records were lost or burned,” said Booth, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Washington State University in Pullman.

Many of the Indian scouts attached to Fort Keogh were members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. So in December, Booth traveled to Lame Deer to talk with the tribe’s Cultural Committee to present his dissertation topic.

“They liked it,” Booth said. “They gave me some contacts, and said I need to make a formal presentation to the tribal council, since I want to do oral histories.”

Booth is hoping to connect with the descendants of those scouts, to discover what motivated their family members to serve as scouts. He’s hoping he might even stumble across artifacts linked to those days.

“Historians live in hope of the possibility of somebody coming and saying, ‘Here’s this shoe box with a diary or letters we’ve had all these years,’” Booth said. “I think there’s a good possibility that might exist for scouts but nobody has ever asked.”

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Ravalli Republic

History professor emerita teaching in Kazakhstan on Fulbright Fellowship

Marina Tolmacheva.
Tolmacheva

Marina Tolmacheva, WSU professor emerita of history and an expert in Islamic and world history, has been awarded a four‑month Fulbright Fellowship to teach and consult on academic development at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Tolmacheva recently began teaching courses on Central Asian history in the context of world history to graduate and undergraduate students at KIMEP, a North American‑style independent university, formerly known as Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research. While in Almaty, she also is teaching graduate students in history at Al‑Farabi National University (KazNU).

“For my lectures, I’m drawing from my many years in teaching interdisciplinary and world history at WSU, as well as my research in broad Islamic cultural history, including women’s history and historiography of Central Asia,” she said. A native speaker of Russian, one of Kazakhstan’s official languages, she is teaching primarily in English.

Tolmacheva’s additional experience in academic development and assessment at WSU and universities overseas also informs her work with KIMEP administrators who are seeking to infuse a global perspective into their Central Asian Studies and General Education curricula.

“Whether it is consulting on matters of curriculum reform, developing student-centered pedagogy or interacting with colleagues and students, I want to help make positive change,” she said.

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WSU Insider

Hanford gives Tri-Cities a history like nowhere else. New WSU book series tell the tales

A new series of Tri-City area history books has launched with the story of the people whose homes, land and businesses were seized for a secret wartime project in 1943.

The Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities is using the oral histories it’s recorded as the basis of books that will tell the unusual history of the region as shaped by the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The first book—“Nowhere to Remember—Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland to 1943”—will be featured at a launch party 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the visitor center for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, 2000 Logston Blvd., Richland.

Robert Franklin.
Franklin
Robert Bauman.
Bauman

The book, edited by WSU history faculty members Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin, was written to academic standards but uses oral histories to make the history more accessible.

Franklin covers the tight bonds among early residents, and Bauman tells the story of the removal of those who lived on the land.

Other writers relate the experiences of women who lived in the region in the early 20th century and look at transportation to root the local history in the larger context of the American West at the time. » More …

Tri-Citians paid for a bomber in WWII. The pilot’s son has returned with his memories

Enthusiasm for buying war bonds at Hanford was flagging in 1944.

Workers had migrated from across the nation to the dust-blown, barren Eastern Washington desert for a World War II project so secret they didn’t know what they were building.

From the paychecks they earned for long days of work, they were urged to buy war bonds—another sacrifice for the war.

Robert Franklin.
Franklin

Workers were still buying bonds, but sales were dropping, said Robert Franklin, history instructor and archivist with the Washington State Tri-Cities’ Hanford History Project.

A new campaign rekindled their enthusiasm.

“Give a day’s pay and send a bomber on its way,” they were urged.

The 44,300 workers at the Hanford Engineering Works donated enough of their pay to cover the $300,000 cost of a B-17 Flying Fortress.

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