History Department

Faculty Scholarship

Prof. Henry Chan published three articles: Political Assassination and the 1911 Revolution: A Comparative Perspective in Asian Profile, Dr. S.Y. Teng (1905-1988) and His Contribution to the Development of Chinese Studies in Postwar America in the Journal of Chinese American Studies, and Memory and Imagination: Cathay in Ibn Battuta's (1304-1368) Rihla in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Ancient and World History, Shanghai, China, 2005.

Prof. Paul Harris presented a paper entitled "The Abolitionist Legacy in Methodist Missions to Africa" at the July 2007 meeting in New Haven, CT, of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity.  On the same trip, he spent two weeks researching the Methodist's mission to Liberia at the Methodist archive in Madison, NJ. 

Prof. Harris chaired a session on "'Saving the Orient?' Twentieth-Century Missionary Encounters in Asia" at the Organization of American Historians convention held in Minneapolis in March, 2007.  A paper by Dr. Harris entitled "What Color is Civilization? The 1895 Congress of Africa," was presented at the meeting of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania in February, 2007.

Prof. Steve Hoffbeck published an article titled Instamatic Memories: The Beatles in Minnesota in the Spring 2007 issue of Minnesota History (The Quarterly of the Minnesota Historical Society).  To read a condensed version you may visit:  www.mnstate.edu/publications/frontpage.html

Prof. Hoffbeck's "Swinging for the Fences: Black Baseball in Minnesota," was selected to receive a Sporting News-Society for American Baseball Research Award (SABR) for expanding the knowledge and understanding of baseball.  Prof. Hoffbeck was presented the award at the SABR National Convention on June 30, 2006 in Seattle, Washington.  

"Swinging for the Fences," a 320-page hardback with 50 photographs, chronicles the struggles and triumphs of 16 black ballplayers over a span of 150 years.  Edited by Hoffbeck and written by a team of nine historians, sports journalists and baseball experts, it was released last year by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. 

Black baseball in Minnesota sounds like an oxymoron, particularly since only 759 blacks lived in the state in 1870 when an amended U.S. Constitution gave black men the right to vote in federal elections.  But according to Hoffbeck's research, that's also when a former slave named Prince Honeycutt, who served as a mess boy for the Union Army in the Civil War, followed his commander, Capt. James Compton, to Fergus Falls, Minn., and started a baseball team.  The book starts there, and ends in the modern era of baseball with a chapter on the rise and fall of the Minnesota Twins' Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett written by Minneapolis Star Tribune sports writer Jay Weiner.  In between are stories about Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Earl Battey along with some obscure names like "Rat" Johnson, Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe, Toni Stone (a black woman infielder with the Indianapolis Clowns) and Bobby Marshall, who in the first two decades of the last century was among the most celebrated athletes in the nation. "It's an epic story about manhood, brotherhood and fatherhood, a lost part of Minnesota history," said Hoffbeck, whose last book, "Haymakers," earned a Minnesota Book Award in 2001.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) was established in Cooperstown, New York in 1971. Its mission is to foster the study of baseball past and present, and to provide an outlet for educational, historical and research information about the game.

Prof. Margaret Sankey recently published her book entitled, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion; Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain.