HISTORY

III: THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW

Section A) From Federation to the 1980s
Section B) Towards a New Department

The Cramer era coincided with a series of rapid and fundamental changes, in the department, the university and the historical profession in general. Any given historical period is both a beginning and an ending, a time of continuities as well as of change. In our context, however, change outweighed continuity, forcefully, indeed in ways poignantly, in the 1960s and the outset of the 1970s. The retirement of Barnes in 1962 and Wittke in 1963 signaled the passing of some commanding personalities; then, one by one, the mid-century generation departed. Harvey Wish died, suddenly and prematurely, in 1968. John Hall Stewart ended a distinguished forty-year career by taking early retirement in 1969. Red Cramer himself was essentially forced out of the chairmanship in a dispute with the new post-federation administration in the fall of 1967, and he retired in 1973. Jack Erickson's health began to deteriorate rapidly in the late 1960s, and he died a few months after retiring in 1974. Only Marion Siney remained to remind us, to link us, and to grace us with the legacy and traditions of the mid-century period, retiring, as the Haydn Professor, in 1983. Other historians replaced them, of course. Some very good ones only stayed relatively briefly, for example Marvin Becker (1957-1963), Jack Greene (1959-1965), and Robert Lerner (1964-1967). But some came to stay, and formed the core of a new generation, whose task—and achievement—proved to be that of adjusting to a new era, both in institutional and in disciplinary terms.

A) From Federation to the 1980s

The 1967 federation of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology to form Case Western Reserve University, had, in and of itself, relatively little immediate impact on the History Department, apart from the new administration manipulating Red Cramer into resigning as chairman. The process of recruiting a new generation had begun prior to this event and continued after it. In 1965, Carl Ubbelohde came from the University of Colorado in American colonial history, and Thomas Esper was hired as the first ever full-time historian of Russia. Robert Jones also came in 1965 as a mainstay of the American history graduate program, and even though he left in 1971 the department was able to replace him, first in ethnic-immigration history with Daniel Weinberg and then in American social-legal history, first with John Wunder (1974-1978), then Jamil Zainaldin, and ultimately, in 1980, with Michael Grossberg. Bert Wyatt-Brown came in 1966 in American social-cultural history and as historian of the American South, and Michael Altschul came in 1967 in medieval history. In 1968 two senior appointments were made: David Van Tassel (as Wish's replacement) in American social-intellectual history, and Jack Roth in modern Europe and as new chairman of the department (Carl Ubbelohde had served as acting chair for most of the 1967-68 academic year). In 1970, Morris Rossabi joined the department in Chinese history. Wyatt-Brown eventually left Cleveland to go to the University of Florida in 1984, and Rossabi in 1986 was hired to an executive position with the China Institute in New York City. They were replaced by David Hammack (American urban-economic history) and Catherine Lynch (modern Chinese intellectual history), respectively. Barry Levy was on the faculty in American family history from 1980 to 1987, and Marion Siney was full-time to 1979 and part-time thereafter to her retirement in 1983. Otherwise the full-time departmental core in the 1970s and 1980s was eight members: four in American history (Ubbelohde, Van Tassel, Wyatt-Brown/Hammack, Wunder/Zainaldin/Grossberg), three in European (Roth, Altschul, Esper), and one in Asian (Rossabi/Lynch).

There were other new members of the department who had shorter stays. Here is where federation did have a major, and negative, impact in most cases. Robert Randall had come in 1964 in Latin American history but left in 1971. Paul Gottfried and Daniel Toft came in European history in 1968 but also left in 1971. James Friguglietti replaced John Hall Stewart (a former mentor) in French history in 1969 but left in 1976. None of these faculty were replaced. Indeed, some departures were the product of cuts unilaterally imposed by an administration alarmed at declining enrollments and burgeoning deficits, and indifferent or even hostile to programmatic needs or Roth's pleas for rational planning and priority-setting. The cuts went even deeper: Cramer was not replaced when he retired in 1973, nor was Erickson upon his illness and retirement in 1974, and no new authorization was possible when Marion Siney went on part-time status in 1979. As a measure of the situation, it is necessary only to realize that in 1970 the Department stood at 15 full-time members, an all-time high, and with promises or prospects for still further expansion. By 1976, it was down to 9.

The controlling context for this pattern was both local and national. Federation, predicated upon growth and stability, operated instead in an uncertainty bred of the Vietnam War era and in a decentralized university structure that invited intense turf battles between separatist "Case" and "Reserve" groups and attitudes. The undergraduate student body in Adelbert, Mather and Cleveland colleges (merged in 1972 to form Western Reserve College) dropped precipitously, from 2500-3000 in the 1960s to around 1000 by the 1980s; Case enrollments, on the other hand, rose dramatically, peaking at around 2000 by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus the ratio between the two colleges with respect to undergraduate student body size almost exactly reversed itself within a decade. While graduate enrollments remained relatively stable, government NDEA grants disappeared and the university ruthlessly slashed support in the humanities to prop up other fields and units; a number of humanities departments were forced to drop their graduate programs altogether. Budgetary stabilization was the overriding goal of most university planning, and the liberal arts were the most isolated and vulnerable of all the management units in this regard. Case Western Reserve University, in short, had both a structure and a profile that were doubly disadvantageous for fields like history: domination by the professional schools and by the engineering-applied sciences forces in Case, and an organization that left us underfunded and bereft of adequate mechanisms for planning or working with other units - even within the humanities, much less outside them.

Yet the department did more than complain, and did more than survive. It began to thrive. It is not an exaggeration to say that the past two decades have been on balance the most creative, the most innovative, and in a sense the most successful stage in its hundred-year history. A good part of this can be credited to the new educational revolution that has swept our discipline, along with many other ones. Unlike the revolution of the late nineteenth century, this one was not so much the matter of the creation of new departments, as the opening of new fields and methods of historical inquiry and discourse. The number of specialized scholarly journals, conferences, and organizations multiplied at a rate hitherto unthinkable, and in a variety of fields and methodologies hitherto unimagined. A new kind of social history, paying attention to non-elite groups, to women, children, the poor, and the elderly, and asking new, quantifiable questions of old materials, attracted enormous attention and broadened historical vistas; in turn it enlivened older traditions, for example the study of legal institutions and of science and technology, by putting and analyzing them in precise social context. Similarly political history was now enriched and informed by social history, and the histories of culture and of ideologies are being reexamined with a power, a freshness and a sophistication of impressively high quality. No period and no country was left untouched by such change, but much of the finest work was done on American history: Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor, Van Tassel's Aging and the Elderly and Aging, Death, and the Completion of Being, Hammack's Power and Society, and Grossberg's Governing the Hearth, are but a sampling of the contribution of CWRU historians to this scholarship and literature. Historians adapted for their own use many of the research techniques and methods of the social sciences (but happily little of their sometimes obfuscatory or self-important terminology), including the development of team projects and of databanks; but remained true to their calling as historians, that is to say narrating and analyzing patterns of change over time in the past and always with an eye for the particular, the individualist and the unexpected.

Despite the difficulties and decline that characterized the university in the first decade after federation, the department itself maintained an essential esprit and coherence, and laid the foundations for its own turnaround. And especially in the next decade it forged a distinctive identity on campus as perhaps the strongest or best of all the liberal arts departments; and it has made a distinctive mark nationally on the discipline and the profession as well. These achievements can be summarized and defined as systematic, and successful, programmatic innovation and prioritization.

Immediately upon federation the department realized that on both the undergraduate and the graduate levels, a "business-as-usual" or stand-pat policy was self-defeating, and that it was necessary to rationalize both its own procedures and its resources. On the organizational side, the activist agenda pursued by Jack Roth as chair met with only limited success, largely because of external forces—and attitudes—beyond our control or our powers of persuasion. Two in-house steps did, however, have important programmatic consequences. The position of graduate supervisor was created by Roth and Altschul in 1968, and evolved under Marion Siney and Bert Wyatt-Brown into the role of program director. In 1973 Ubbelohde and Altschul created the position of undergraduate advisor, to centralize the undergraduate advising system and to work with other advisors and the deans' offices to track patterns of undergraduate enrollments and career interests.

Such steps coincided with and helped facilitate major programmatic decisions. Led by Ubbelohde's and Van Tassel's inspired ability to foresee both market and educational trends, and by Van Tassel's magic touch in grantsmanship and fund raising, the department developed two pioneer master's level programs in the early 1970s: one in archival administration (in conjunction with the now defunct Library School and the University Archivist, Ruth Helmuth, and the Western Reserve Historical Society); and the other in museum studies (in conjunction with personnel in other University Circle institutions, particularly the Dittrick Museum of Historical Medicine). The traditional master's market for future or current high school teachers was rapidly declining, and these new "applied" programs opened up important fresh fields for employment and accounted for the bulk of the M.A. degrees awarded in the 1970s and 1980s.

Another basic decision was taken with respect to the doctoral program in 1974 when the department decided—in the face of diminishing library, faculty, and fellowship resources—to drop its Ph.D. program in European history to concentrate fully on American history, which also took on an important archives or museums component. Then in the early 1980s a major decision was made to commit to a bold new departure in doctoral work: Social Policy History, the study of social history within a policy context, and nominally a three-year program including a middle year of internship with an agency or institution in the metropolitan area. With financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and local foundations such as Cleveland, Gund, and Jennings, the Program has developed a large, lively and hardworking student body, with a genuine sense of intellectual community and shared experience; and graduated its first two Social Policy History Ph.D.s in 1988. The ultimate mark of recognition is that other major universities, having already copied or imitated the museums and archives programs, began to develop similar programs.

On the undergraduate side, change has been less obvious or spectacular, but equally as effective in its own way. The department dropped or revamped many of its old courses, and developed new ones on the 100-200 level, to attract and to accommodate the interests of a wide variety of students. The department also no longer looked upon its undergraduate majors largely as future or would-be secondary or college teachers, but developed courses and advising systems designed to respond to a variety of interests, most notably, by the mid-1970s, to a steadily growing interest in law. Teaching objectives and keynotes were flexibility, accessibility, and personalized attention. To further these ends the department developed rigorous and well-regarded independent tutorial, undergraduate seminar, and senior honors programs. Concurrently it created a sense of community among its majors through its History Club and its award-winning chapter of the national Phi Alpha Theta Honorary Society, which achieved high campus visibility by jointly organizing a large number of social and academic functions annually. In the mid-1980s an innovative group of majors founded an undergraduate journal in history and social sciences, the Mather Quad Review, to publish undergraduate papers and to fill the gap left by the other campus magazines which confined themselves to poetry and short fiction, and to science-engineering subjects. The result of all this was that undergraduates came to respect and to appreciate the department for its enterprising spirit, its high standards, its caring attitude, and the sense of the value of a liberal education that it effectively conveyed. The numbers of majors remained steady despite the overall decline in the total Reserve student body, and ranked close behind psychology and English as the most popular liberal arts major (but below the B.S. majors in business and the traditional premed favorites, biology and chemistry).

Limited resources, and the need to generate or to respond to change on both the graduate and undergraduate levels, worked to reinvigorate, rather than frustrate, the faculty. For example, Carl Ubbelohde branched out from early American history to constitutional, social policy, and Canadian history; David Van Tassel developed new courses and research interests in gerontology, biography, and American foreign policy; Michael Altschul spent as much time teaching ancient and Italian Renaissance, as the middle ages. Instances can be multiplied; and in every instance the sense of excitement and freshness that the faculty felt came across clearly to the student body. Over the years, the department has won more than its proportional share of awards and other recognitions for its teaching but, might it be suggested, not more than its fair share?

In two other areas department members worked consciously to broaden and diversify their contributions (and thus enhance the image of the department) in local and national contexts. One area was in general or overall university and curricular matters. Ubbelohde, Wyatt-Brown, Altschul, and others labored valiantly in the cause of undergraduate curricular reform, and once in a while, even won a battle or two. Members of the department took leadership roles in a variety of committees and university programs: Grossberg in legal studies and law and public policy; Ubbelohde in the Global Currents and McBride Lecture series; Levy in the Armington Program on Values in Childhood; Rossabi and then Lynch in Asian civilizations; Altschul in the Undergraduate Scholars Program and the humanities program; Hammack in programs on non-profit organizations under the Mandel Center; and Van Tassel in gerontological studies and, in conjunction with the Law School, courses in family law that evolved, via John Wunder and others, into a substantial and permanent connection with the school as witnessed by Michael Grossberg's regular set of courses in American legal history and his joint appointment in history and in the School of Law. The History Department faculty, in short, became more visible, better known, and perhaps more respected, in more areas and activities of the university as a whole, than any of the other liberal arts departments, and than at any previous time in its own past.

The other major area revolved around contacts with high-school students and teachers. Van Tassel and Ubbelohde developed History Day in conjunction with the celebration of the bicentennial of the American Revolution in the mid-1970s, to generate and reward historical essays, projects, and performances of local junior- and senior-high students. So attractive was the idea, and so successful was its implementation in terms of enthusiastic response, that it became permanent, went national, and now comprises an elaborate set of local regional, state, and national competitions involving students and school systems in every state in the country. On a more modest scale the department developed a large variety of workshops and institutes for area high-school teachers, most recently a series of annual collaboratives sponsored by the History Teaching Alliance of the American Historical Association. In this regard, of course, such initiatives recall the work and tradition of the earliest days, in particular those of Bourne and Benton; but National History Day has had an impact that quantitatively and qualitatively outshines all other achievements—our own and, let it be said, anyone else's—in this field.

Two other special kinds of activities and individual initiatives begun in the late 1970s brought further luster to the department as a whole. Jack Roth organized a "Festival of Surrealism" to explore the manifestations of that movement in twentieth-century cultural history, literature, and the fine and performing arts. He got the major University Circle institutions to cooperate with him and remarkably, with each other, to mount an elaborate series of lectures, exhibits, and performances in the fall of 1979; and to cap it, a feature-length documentary film produced by the BBC and shown frequently since on public television and on campuses around the country. The other enterprise, David Van Tassel's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, was a far lengthier and even more complex project to bring to fruition, involving as it did the securing of funding from dozens of foundations and the writing of articles by literally hundreds of one-time and a few full-time authors, himself included. With his characteristic modesty and generosity, Van Tassel insisted that this was a departmental, not an individual, enterprise. Its completion and publication in the fall of 1987 met with enormous acclaim and some of the best coverage and publicity the Cleveland Plain Dealer had accorded the university in many years; and it has provided a stimulus and a model that historians in other universities and other cities, for example Chicago and New York, are seeking to emulate. A second edition of this major reference work appeared in 1996, as did an Encyclopedia of Cleveland Biography.

The level, range, and quality of all these activities should a priori be expected of a department two or three times our own actual size. In one crucial regard the department does reveal its true size, and from it gained a general national reputation or image as a good regional, but not (or not yet) outstanding national, department: placement and reputations of its Ph.D.s. As mentioned earlier there was a large number of somewhat marginal or inactive doctoral students by the mid-1960s, most of whom were then prodded into finishing up or dropping out over the course of the next decade. Skimpy or uncertain graduate fellowship support has made it difficult for the department to engage in effective or competitive recruiting on a national level. Naturally, more than a few of our alums have done very well, and others have deserved better than what they got. As described earlier, the very first Ph.D., Charles Hickock (1895) spent his academic career at Coe College. The second was Harold Eugene Davis, in 1933. His teaching career was split between Hiram College and American University, where he chaired the history department, headed the language center and Washington Semester programs, held concurrent appointments in the Schools of International Studies and of Public Administration, and served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He was the author of a number of highly respected books, including The Americas in History and Latin American Social Thought. Harold Davis retired in 1973 and died in September 1988.

Other distinguished alumni are still happily active and publishing, among them the historian of Caroline England, Martin Havran, chair of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia (Ph.D. 1957); the Florentine Renaissance historian, Anthony Molho, chair of the history department at Brown University (Ph.D. 1968); a number of modern European and French Revolution scholars, including Morris Slavin at Youngstown (Ph.D. 1961); James Stewart, Wallace Professor of American History and provost of Macalester College (Ph.D. 1968); and the American social-intellectual historian Susan Becker of the University of Tennessee (Ph.D. 1975). Others have had their careers in Ohio liberal arts colleges and played major roles in the Ohio Academy of History, including Wilson Hoffman (1963) at Hiram College and Carl Klopfenstein (1956) at Heidelberg. Some, especially in the depressed market of the 1970s, retooled and entered the corporate sector as lawyers or bankers, for example Gail Sindell (1973), James Kitson (1971) and Ian Haberman (1975). But most stayed in the academy, and many stayed close to home: for example, Thomas Campbell (1965), Allan Peskin (1966), Joseph Ink (1964) and Jeannette Tuve (1969) were mainstays of the history department of Cleveland State University.

Two even stayed at home. Lois Scharf took her Ph.D. with David Van Tassel in 1977, served as the executive director of National History Day, taught a wide variety of courses, including American labor history, women's history, and sports history, and has published three books, most recently Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism (1987). Ann Warren took her Ph.D. with Michael Altschul in 1980, served for most of this decade as faculty advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, taught courses on medieval history, twentieth century religious history, and twentieth century world leaders, published Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (1985), and was elected to membership in the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom. Both Lois Scharf and Ann Warren were adjunct associate professors in the department, and the department was immeasurably enriched by their presence. They retired from teaching in 1996 and 1992 respectively.

The argument has been made that such programs as Archives, and now the Social Policy History program, are the chief testimonies to the department's creative adjustment to the demands and opportunities for maintaining quality graduate work in an age of rapid market and educational change. To confine a sampling just to some doctoral students (the M.A. list would be too long) indicates that the Department does indeed have a strong basis for this claim. Wilma Slaight (1974) is the archivist at Wellesley College. Frederick Honhart (1972) is director of archives at Michigan State University, and Raymond Goerler (1975) is the archivist at Ohio State University. Judith Cetina (1977) is archivist of the Cuyahoga County Archives. Two others have been directly involved in departmental activities. Dennis Harrison (1975) is now the CWRU archivist; he had previously been curator of manuscripts of the Western Reserve Historical Society. His successor as curator was John Grabowski (1977), who has taught courses in Cleveland history for the department and who is now known as the managing editor, and thus co-author with his mentor Van Tassel, of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

The Social Policy History program began to produce a steady output of graduates. Its first two Ph.D.s exemplify its objective of training people for academic positions or for a variety of policy or managerial roles in agencies and institutions. David Twining (1988) began in American colonial history before entering the Social Policy History program to do his dissertation on health planning for Cleveland's poor in the 1960s-1970s. He was director of the Development and Alumni Relations Office of Western Reserve College, editor-in-chief of the College's Alumni Magazine, taught courses for us, and was director of the State of Ohio portion of National History Day. Sylvia Abrams' dissertation (1988) was on policies of local non-governmental agencies towards Cleveland-area Jewish refugees of the Holocaust. She is currently assistant director of Congregational and Educational Services of the Cleveland Bureau of Jewish Education.

By 1998 the SPH program had graduated nearly twenty Ph.D.s. All of those who sought full-time positions found appropriate work for which their Ph.D. program prepared them well. Not all of these jobs were in history departments, not surprising considering the academic job market of the 1980s and 1990s. But all allowed our graduates to do history in a serious way at a time when history was not thriving as a field.

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B) Towards a New Department of History

In 1967, change had come upon a department and a university that were fairly traditional and not always fully equipped, structurally or temperamentally, to respond in the most effective ways. As already described, the process and the consequences of federation did not always work out to the best interests of the humanities fields. Budgetarily and organizationally they were cut off from their natural and necessary links to their colleagues in the sciences. And we also remained separated from our own historian colleagues in Case.

The humanities elective program in Case Institute of Technology had been organized as a Division (later Department) of Special Interdisciplinary Studies, and the college hired a number of fine historians. DSIS (later DIS) was divided into two programs, one in American studies and the other in the history of science and technology; both had graduate programs. In 1961 the program in the history of science and technology became the first in the United States to offer a Ph.D. in history of technology, a field that was subsequently to grow to maturity in this country. The program was promoted with extraordinary efficacy by Melvin Kranzberg, who also managed around the same time to found the Society for the History of Technology and Technology and Culture, then the world's first (and today the leading) society and journal of the field. Kranzberg hired a succession of fine scholars, including the distinguished scholar of eighteenth-century science Robert Schofield; Edwin Layton, who pursued a highly successful career as a historian of engineering at Case and then Minnesota; Reese Jenkins, who left in 1978 to head the Thomas Edison papers project; historian of technology Darwin Stapleton, who left the university in 1986 to head the Rockefeller Archives; and historian of science Alan Rocke, who replaced Jenkins. Carroll Pursell, who later returned to the university as the Davee Professor, also taught in the program briefly in the early 1960s. The program was severely damaged by the decision of Schofield to move to Iowa State University in 1979 (Kranzberg and Layton having departed years earlier); Stapleton's departure in 1986 then left Rocke as the remaining member of the program.

The program in American Studies was graced with the fine teaching of Morrell (Bo) Heald, later named Samuel and Virginia Knight Professor of the Humanities in recognition of his scholarly eminence; John Culver, who had been in the old Cleveland College unit for a time in the 1940s before joining Case; Park Goist in American cultural history; Gene Wise in methodology; Stephen Brobeck in modern political-economic studies; Robert Welker in U.S. intellectual history; and Linda Kirby (and later Roberta Wollons) in women's studies. Stapleton also contributed to the American studies curriculum. Together, these two programs constituted a lively, congenial, and nationally prominent community of scholars. Unfortunately, neither program was well supported by the administration in these years; as was the case with the history of science and technology, American studies faculty slots were not preserved when Wise and Brobeck left and when Culver and Welker retired. Equally unfortunately, for complex reasons the relationship between the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and the History Department was never really warm. This was true even after DIS was transferred administratively from Case to Western Reserve College in 1967, and physically to the History Department's home in Mather House in 1978.

An effort by then-provost T. Dixon Long to merge the two departments in 1977 was bitterly opposed, and ultimately defeated by vote of the faculty senate, but the issue arose again eight years later. The WRC dean at that time, Carolyn Elliott, argued persuasively that budgetary difficulties then troubling the university mandated the need to carefully rationalize resources; at her urging the DIS faculty voted to merge with the History Department, a prospect that was equally welcome to the latter's faculty. The necessary approvals were secured from the various faculty bodies, including the senate, and from the trustees. The new enlarged Department of History came into existence with the beginning of the 1986-87 academic year.

Instead of two fairly small departments, there was now one department that was fairly "large" by College standards and scale. The full-time members of the history program were Altschul, Esper, Grossberg, Hammack, Levy, Lynch, Roth, Ubbelohde, and Van Tassel; in American Studies were Goist, Heald, and Wollons; history of science and technology consisted only of Rocke. Ubbelohde chaired the new department, as he had the old one from 1973-1976 and again from 1980. He became interim dean of humanities and social sciences in 1987, and David Van Tassel was appointed chair for a second time (he had been chair previously from 1976 to 1980). Other faculty reported to and worked with the chair as program directors: Hammack or Grossberg for Social Policy History, Goist and Rocke for the American Studies and History of Science and Technology programs respectively. Discussions ensued as to programmatic development, resource allocation, and teaching patterns. The department now had four discrete doctoral programs (American Studies; History; History of Science and Technology; Social Policy History); a large number of master's programs including Museum Studies and Archival Administration; and two undergraduate majors, history and American studies, each with large numbers of optional tracks or concentrations within them. The new department was still undersized for such an ambitious agenda, and some of these programs were to some extent overlapping and thus capable of programmatic integration.

The program in American Studies lost Stapleton in 1986 and then Heald to retirement in 1988; neither slot was immediately refilled. In 1991 Goist sought and received permission to move to the theater department; as a historian of the theater and an aspiring playwright, he felt more affinity to his new literary colleagues. The following year Wollons moved to Indiana University-Gary. The History Department had thus effectively lost leadership of the American Studies program by the departure of its core faculty. American Studies at CWRU continued, however, on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, with Goist remaining as program director and directing an inter-departmental steering committee. Several Americanists on the History Department faculty continue to participate enthusiastically in this program.

Together with the loss of an in-department program in American Studies, a decision was made in the early 1990s to dispense with the department's master's degree programs in Museum Studies and Archival Administration. These programs, although successful and popular with actual and potential student clienteles, were never properly supported by sufficient personnel and financial resources; it was particularly difficult to provide graduate students with tuition remission. The department faculty was concerned that the two master's programs had been having the effect of bleeding limited resources from the Ph.D. programs in science and technology and social policy history.

On the undergraduate side there were three programmatic additions in the late 1980s. A program in history for secondary education certification, in conjunction with John Carroll University, was designed to respond to what was expected to be a newly-growing market for high school teachers. Also, a new major in history and philosophy of science and technology was begun at this time, conducted conjointly with the philosophy department. The architect of this major was philosopher of science Robert Rynasiewicz, who unfortunately left the university soon thereafter. However, Rynasiewicz's replacement, Colin McLarty, proved to be a fine instructor in philosophy of science as well as a sophisticated historian of mathematics. The only difficulty was that there were extremely few students who wished to follow this curriculum. The great bulk of the undergraduate majors were, and continue to be, traditional history majors. Fortunately, the number of students following the history major experienced gradual but substantial rise, under the leadership of undergraduate adviser Altschul, and in the early 1990s by the administrative contributions of an energetic new faculty member, Kenneth Ledford.

The third undergraduate initiative of this time was a thoroughgoing revision of our basic survey courses. On the American side this meant a creative rethinking of how U.S. history ought to be taught, and resulted in a more strongly topical and social-historical presentation of the material. Even more radical revisions were carried out on the European side. In place of a traditional "Western Civ"-style survey, then-chair David Van Tassel suggested a new thematic emphasis on world history during the last two centuries. Led by Michael Altschul and Ann Warren, and supplemented by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the department carried out an extensive program to develop this initiative, whose product was a highly effective new course entitled "introduction to modern world history."

The university experienced a general revitalization after the arrival of president Agnar Pytte in 1987. One of Pytte's mandates was to concentrate on graduate programs that were regionally dominant and nationally visible, and to provide such programs with new resources to enable them to meet their potential. Two graduate programs in the History Department were judged, both internally and externally, to meet this criterion: social policy history and history of science and technology. As has already been related, the SPH program had been created in the early 1980s, principally by Carl Ubbelohde and Michael Grossberg, and was reinforced by the hire of the prominent U.S. urban historian David Hammack in 1984. Hammack continued to build this graduate program in the late 1980s and 1990s with energy and commitment. The program was further enhanced by the hire of urban historian and methodologist Janice Reiff in 1988. On the European side, Angela Woollacott arrived in 1988 to supplement our offerings in British and women's studies, and Germanist Kenneth Ledford was hired in 1991 not only to replace retiring Thomas Esper, but also to reinforce the department's long-established presence in the history of law (Ledford had been a practicing attorney before becoming Ph.D. in history).

To revitalize the program in history of science and technology, the administration granted the department permission to hire the finest historian of technology it could find. Thus it happened that Carroll Pursell, who had taught here for two years in the early 1960s but had then spent two decades at the University of California-Santa Barbara, returned in 1988 to Cleveland. Pursell was soon thereafter awarded a new endowed chair, the Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professorship in history, and was given authorization to hire an additional historian of technology. Miriam Levin, a historian of French culture and technology, thus came to the department the following year (her arrival also helped to provide needed continuity anticipating the retirement of Roth in 1991). Fortified by a multi-year Mellon Foundation grant to provide support for graduate students, the newly renamed Program in History of Technology and Science grew apace in the succeeding years.

Like the parallel Social Policy History program, the program in History of Technology and Science grew apace after the arrival of Pursell and Levin. The first Ph.D. graduate, Arwen Mohun (1992), had followed Pursell here after receiving her master's degree from Santa Barbara. Her dissertation was on the development of mechanized laundries in the United States. Following receipt of the doctorate, she was hired on the tenure track at one of the best programs for history of technology in the country, the University of Delaware. A total of six students received Ph.D.s in the first decade of the revitalized program.

Under the leadership of a new chair, Michael Grossberg, three additional young faculty members came to the department in the early 1990s, to replace the retiring Carl Ubbelohde and the departing Roberta Wollons and Janice Reiff. American social and cultural historian Catherine Kelly was hired on the tenure track in 1993, after serving two years in the department as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow; and Jonathan Sadowsky was also hired tenure-track the same year. Sadowsky was nominally Reiff's replacement as a specialist in historical methodology, but his additional expertise in African history and the history of medicine were well calculated to provide support both for our offerings in world history on the undergraduate side, and medical history on the graduate level. The third new faculty member arriving at this time (1992) was Kimberley Phillips, whose specialty in African-American history provided needed curriculum and scholarly visibility in that growing field.

The department continued to change in the mid-1990s. After serving as chair for three years, in 1995 Grossberg accepted a call to a full professorship at Indiana University and the editorship of the American Historical Review; Grossberg's replacement as chair was Alan Rocke. Further complicating the affairs of the department were the nearly simultaneous departures of Catherine Lynch and Kimberley Phillips. The department was extremely fortunate in 1996 and 1997 to win the services of noted American legal and environmental historian Ted Steinberg on the associate professor level, and of Asianist Elisabeth Köll and African-Americanist Rhonda Williams on the beginning tenure-track level. Also in 1997 two further decisions were reached that further enhanced the department's staffing. One was to bring John Grabowski of the Western Reserve Historical Society, into the department on a half-time basis. A second move brought a closer affiliation of the Dittrick Medical History Center to the College of Arts and Sciences. The latest of a series of major changes came in 1998, with the retirement of David Van Tassel, marking the end of an era in the department's history.

In a real sense, a new department emerged by a kind of federative and collaborative process that was analogous, on the micro-level, to the macro-level federation of Western Reserve and Case Institute themselves—but assuredly in speedier and more consistently constructive ways. Just as assuredly, a new profile and identity will take shape in this department, as still another new generation of teacher-scholars is coming forward. Some have already arrived, in the 1980s and 1990s; more will come in the years ahead. They will make, and write, their own history in the second century of existence of the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University.

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