A Bittersweet Goodbye

Happy New Year, and welcome back to Hope students, faculty, and staff!

The history department is gearing up for our semester, including offering new courses on Russian history and the history of peacemakers in the 20th-century United States. All of our faculty are looking forward to meeting new students and working with them on a great variety of research projects.

But this semester we are also saying goodbye. The hodge-podge bulletin board in the history department area on third-floor Lubbers is going away in a few weeks.

All the faculty in our department have a soft spot for this bulletin board. Over the years, we’ve put up random pictures, articles, and notices, and we’ve rarely taken things down. It has become a kind of primary source–a visual and documentary history of chance events from the last eight years or so. In the interest of archival preservation, here are a few of my favorite things on it:

A News from Hope article about how a playwright based his Scottish Fringe Festival play on a chapter in Dr. Marc Baer’s book dealing with a London theater riot.

A picture of alumna Alex Piper installing an exhibit at the Ford Museum, with a hand-written description in Dr. Baer’s almost-impossible-to-read handwriting.

A press release about Dr. Albert Bell’s 2013 book about Pliny the Younger solving a murder mystery in the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius.

The 2014 wedding program of alums Cory Lakatos and MacKenzie Anderson(complete with footnotes! Turabian rules!)

An advertisement for the Utah State history department. Why?

 

A Holland Sentinel picture of Dr. Fred Johnson when he was being interviewed about his 2010 book on Tupac Shakur.

A map of Lubbers Hall severe weather shelter areas. Fortunately, we’ve never had to use this.

And finally, the printout of the cover of my book, The Men and Women We Want. I still remember my excitement when my publisher sent it to me, and I immediately printed it out and slapped it up there.

We will definitely miss our bulletin board full of random moments from our past. But we are excited that our awesome office manager, Raquel Niles, will be creating a new display that shares stories from our blog on the theme “What Can You Do with a History Major?” In the meantime, you have a few more weeks to come take a final look before it all goes away.