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On October 15, 2005, about seventy-five people gathered at the ENC Old Colony campus to celebrate the opening of the James R. Cameron Center for History, Law, and Government. The Cameron Center, which occupies most of the south wing of 162 Old Colony Avenue, is named in honor historian James R. Cameron who has served ENC since 1954. Fifty former students donated approximately $15,000 to help furnish the spacious offices and lobby. Upon entering the lobby, one immediately sees a display case with books published by ENC history professors, along with several impressive trophies won when Cameron was ENC's debate coach. On the opposite wall, a bronze plaque hangs honoring Cameron's fifty-plus years of service to ENC. 

At the celebration, Cameron made a brief presentation on the history and current direction of ENC's History Department. Donald Yerxa followed with words of appreciation for Cameron and explained the series of events which prompted the History Department to move to the Old Colony Campus.

Read Dr. Cameron’s speech  |  Pictures from the Cameron Center dedication  |  List of donors
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This past fall the ENC history department, with the generous support of alumni and friends, hosted two esteemed historians, David Hackett Fischer and Jon Roberts.  Both gave public lectures on their recent work and spoke in ENC history classes (see below).  On November 10, Boston University professor of history, Jon Roberts, spoke to students in Professor Yerxa's History of Science and Christianity course (co-taught with ENC physics professor Karl Giberson) on the reception of Freudian thought in American religious circles prior to World War II. That afternoon he gave a public lecture, entitled “The Inward Turn in American Protestant Thought, 1870-1940,” to about 40 students, faculty, and staff. Roberts, who heads graduate studies for BU's History Deparment, is author of the Brewer Prize-winning book Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (Wisconsin, 1998) and coauthor of The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, 2000). He is currently writing a history of psychology and Protestant thought in the United States from 1870 to 1940.

On December 6th, ENC hosted Brandeis University historian, David Hacket Fischer.
Like Roberts, Fischer spoke to an ENC history class (see below). Students in Professor Yerxa's Seminar in the Work of David Hackett Fischer spent the semester working through several of Fischer's books. The highlight of the course was Fischer's visit to the seminar and informal supper in the Cameron Center, giving ENC students the incredible opportunity of interacting with one of America's most prominent historians. Fischer ended his day at ENC with a public lecture in the Mann Student Center Auditorium to an audience of about 120 people. His topic was "Deep Change: Rhythms of American History." Fischer is author of several widely acclaimed books, including Historians' Fallacies (Harper, 1970), Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989), Paul Revere's Ride (Oxford, 1994), The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and theRhythm of History (Oxford, 1996), and Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (Oxford, 2005). His Washington's Crossing (Oxford,2004) won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for History.

ENC's History Lecture Series has brought many prominent historians to the campus over the past ten years. Frequently these scholars visit classes, providing our students with opportunities to hear and converse with some of the top scholars in the field without ever having to leave the ENC campus. That said, ENC history students also take advantage of lectures in the Boston area  In the summer of 2005, professor Stephens created an extensive online calendar of Boston-area lectures, which has served as a handy guide for our majors.  This Fall semester ENC history students attended lectures at Boston University (Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel) and Bentley College (prominent historian of early America Pauline Maier).  In addition, junior history major Luis Rodriguez led a group of studetns to the Adams historic site, which is just a few blocks from the ENC campus.  (Read Rodriguez’s account here.)  We believe the combination of small classes at ENC's Cameron Center, major on-campus lectures, and incredible off-campus intellectual and cultural activities offer ENC students unparalleled opportunities for studying history in a Christian liberal arts context.

Past ENC History Department Lectures
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Professor Carla Lovett presented research from her dissertation at a Boston University colloquium on November 1st.  Entitled “Secularization Theory Re-examined: Religion in Working-Class Vienna, 1875-1914,” Lovett’s paper focused on the deteriorating state of working class religiosity as a result of increasingly dire priest-to-parishioner ratios. The specific emphasis of distinguishing between “believers” and “belongers” mirrors new directions currently pursued in social histories of religion for European contexts.

In addition, Lovett was tapped to be the coordinator of the bi-annual Conference on Faith & History Student Research Conference taking place at Oklahoma Baptist University in September 2006. Directly preceding the general CFH Conference, the student conference is intended to provide an opportunity for students to judge their own work within the context of their peers as well as to meet like-minded students from across the country. At the same time, the conference enables students to gain encouragement and suggestions from professionals, receive information about graduate schools and programs, develop relationships with professors in their field, and become initiated into the work of the organization.

Lastly, Lovett created two new courses for the spring and summer of 2006. The first, a socio-political history of modern France since 1789, will run as an upper level readings seminar for history majors and honors students during the spring semester. Themes will include the legacy of the French Revolution, the modernization of France’s politicalinstitutions, the industrialization and urbanization of French society, the complicity of Vichy France, the impact of decolonization, the dilemma of Americanization, and the challenges of European integration.

The second new course, a socio-cultural history of the former Eastern Europe, will take place during a three week trip to Romania and Hungary in May 2006. With a particular emphasis on the society and culture of the region since 1945, class lectures and readings will supplement the highlight of the trip – a two week immersion experience in Sighi?oara, Romania. Students will live with local families, learn Romanian, work with orphans, gypsies, and the elderly, and conduct oral histories in the area. The course will culminate with visits to Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria to broaden students’ perspectives of central Europe and to experience the deep contrast in standards of living between it and the west. 

Read Professor Lovett's summary of the European travel course she led in 2005
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ENC history professor Donald Yerxa taught two new courses in fall 2005.  One, an advanced, reading-intensive seminar examined the work of one of the most important and creative American historians, David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University. The course culminated with a visit and lecture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fischer in December 2005.  Yerxa also team-taught a seminar on the History of Science and Christianity with ENC physics professor Karl Giberson.  The course explored the interaction of two of the most powerful forces in history—science and Christianity—from the Middle Ages to the present. 

Yerxa has also had several items published recently, along with some others that will appear in print soon. Two review essays, “The Return of Universal History” and “The Evolving Debate,” appeared in Books & Culture (July/August 2005) and Science & Spirit (January/February 2005), respectively. His essay, “David Hackett Fischer's Liberty & Freedom in Historiographical Perspective,” was published in the September/October 2005 issue of Historically Speaking.  His review of Michael Ruse’s The Evolution-Creation Struggle appeared Science & Theology News (October 2005), and his review of Elizabeth A. Clark's History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn will appear in a forthcoming issue of Fides et Historia. His interview of British military historian Richard Holmes appears in the November/December 2005 issue of Historically Speaking. Yerxa's interview with NYU historian Tony Judt, author of the highly acclaimed Postwar, is set to appear in the January/February 2006 issue of Historically Speaking, and two other interviews (with Bryan Ward-Perkins and David Hackett Fischer) will appear in forthcoming issues of that publication. He has also been commissioned to write two essays for Books & Culture.

Yerxa was honored when prolific British historian Jeremy Black dedicated his book, Using History (Oxford University Press, 2005), to him. Yerxa also wrote a jacket blurb for Clark Reynolds's biography of Admiral Jocko Clark, On theWarpath in the Pacific (Naval Institute Press, 2005). He has been asked to write jacket blurbs for Jeremy Black's forthcoming America since 1960 (Reaktion Books), and Derek Wilson's Charlemagne (Random House).
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On October 15, 2005, Stephens presented a paper,"'The mob was to kill a Wesleyan': Wesleyan Perfectionist Missionaries in Virginia and North Carolina, 1847-1851," at a University of Florida conference, "Rethinking the History of the American South: A Conference in Honor of BertramWyatt-Brown."  The paper will appear in a forthcoming festschrift to Wyatt-Brown.  In early November 2005, Stephens was invited to chair a session entitled “Loving Segregation to Death: Reverend James Lawson and Nonviolent Direct Action in Moderate Nashville”at the Southern Historical Association's annual meeting in Atlanta, GA.  And he will comment on a session on “Rethinking the Bible Belt: Modernization, Culture, and Religious Transformation in Twentieth Century America” at Boston College's Conference on the History of Religion, March 2006.  Stephens also composed two pieces for Historically Speaking: "Tell about the South: The 2005 Conference of the St. George Tucker Society" and an interview with Philip L. Fradkin, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself.  Stephens also recently served as a manuscript reviewer for the University of Alabama Press. 

The latest issue of The Journal of Southern Religion, of which Stephens is associate editor, is now online at http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume8/Front8.htm.  The new issue includes an article by Andrew Moore, "Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Protestantism, and Race in Civil Rights Era Alabama and Georgia; a special forum on Paul Harvey's Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era; a feature review of Edward Blum's Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898; and 15 other book reviews related to the latest monographs on the subject of religion in the American South.

Professor Stephens' forthcoming book with Harvard University Press has recently received attention in two publications.  In early January 2006 the Olathe News (Olathe, Kansas) ran a cover story on the his project.  This followed a winter 2006 story that appeared in MidAmerica Nazarene University's alumni publication, The Accent. 

In addition, Stephens has been busy creating new courses.  In the fall he taught America in the Vietnam War Era (HI346).  This reading seminar focused on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of U.S. in the turbulent 1960s.  Students’ work culminated in papers on a variety of topics: the influence of British rock on America culture; the political career of RFK; the impact of television on sixties society; and the media and the Vietnam War.  The final research projects showed a high level of depth and analytical skill and made a fitting capstone for the course. 
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