Tag: SMU Department of History

Research of new Dedman Dean Tsutsui spans Japan’s business, environmental and cultural history

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 14, 2010

Historian and author William M. Tsutsui began work July 1 as the new dean of SMU’s Dedman College, home to the humanities, social sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences.

A specialist in the business, environmental and cultural history of 20th-century Japan, Tsutsui holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Princeton universities. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Palgrave, 2004). He co-edited (with Michiko Ito) In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and has recently completed Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization.”I am honored and thrilled to have been selected as dean of Dedman College,” Tsutsui said when his selection as dean was announced on March 26. “The College has a world-class faculty, talented students, dedicated staff and a broad base of support in the Dallas community. I look forward to working with all these constituencies, and with President Turner and Provost Ludden, to enhance Dedman College’s achievements in teaching, research and public engagement. This is a historic moment for SMU, with a major campaign underway and the university’s centennial at hand, and a time of great opportunity for Dedman College.”

New Dedman role
Dedman College is home to the humanities, social sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences as well as the general education program that all students follow before declaring a major.

Tsutsui will take the lead in implementing a new general education program passed by the SMU faculty March 19.

As dean of Dedman College, Tsutsui will head the largest of SMU’s seven colleges and schools, with its more than 250 full-time faculty members, including 23 endowed professorships. About 40 percent of SMU’s undergraduates pursue their majors in Dedman College through more than 50 baccalaureate degree programs and their minors in more than 50 areas. Eighteen graduate programs in Dedman College lead to a master’s degree and 12 programs lead to a doctor of philosophy degree.

Tsutsui previously was associate dean for international studies and a professor of history at the University of Kansas. He also was director of the Kansas Consortium for Teaching About Asia in KU’s Center for East Asian Studies.

Degrees from Princeton, Oxford, Harvard
Tsutsui received a Ph.D. in history at Princeton University in 1995 and a Master of Arts in history there in 1990. He received a Master of Letters in Modern Japanese History from Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College in 1988 and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies in 1985.

Tsutsui also is the author of Banking Policy in Japan: American Efforts at Reform During the Occupation (Routledge, 1988) and Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (Princeton University Press, 1998). In addition, he is the editor of Banking in Japan (Routledge, 1999) and A Companion to Japanese History (Blackwell, 2007).

Awards for history research
He received the 1997 Newcomen Society Award for Excellence in Business History Research and Writing, the 2000 John Whitney Hall Prize awarded by the Association of Asian Studies for best book on Japan or Korea published in 1998, and the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award for non-fiction.

Tsutsui was a featured speaker July 10 at Chicago’s annual G-Fest, the world’s largest gathering of scholars and fans of Godzilla.

Prior to his positions as KU associate dean for international studies and a professor of history, Tsutsui was acting director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies and executive director of its Confucius Institute. He was named faculty fellow at KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, received a William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2001 and won KU’s Steeples Service to Kansas Award in 2001.

Tsutsui is married to Marjorie Swann, director of the Museum Studies Program and the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. She will be joining SMU as well.

Tags Dedman College, SMU Department of History, William M. Tsutsui

Culture, Society & Family Researcher news

Texas historical marker based on SMU research of women’s jury service

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 27, 2010

Andrea Norris Kline vows she will never complain about a jury summons.

She learned about Texas women’s hard-fought battle for the right to serve on a jury as a student at Southern Methodist University as part of an independent research project for Crista DeLuzio, associate professor of history. Kline’s research was used to establish a Texas historical marker honoring the women who fought for the right to serve on a Dallas County jury.

Texas women earned the right to jury service in 1954, 34 years after receiving the right to vote.

“I have a newfound appreciation and sense of pride in participating in our local government,” says Kline, now an eighth grade American history teacher in Lancaster, Texas.

19th century: Jury service was top priority
Voting and jury service were top priorities of the women’s rights movement in the 19th century, says Crista DeLuzio, who teaches women’s history classes at SMU.

“Activists believed that with voting, they would inherit the right to perform other civic duties, including serving jury duty. This assumption proved to be incorrect.”

The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote, but left granting women’s right to jury service to each state.

Kline used U.S. census records, newspaper archives and Texas legislature records to document the history of jury service in Dallas County.

In Texas, as well as in much of the South, women campaigned for educational opportunities, rights for married women and access to public positions after the 19th amendment was ratified.

First Texas resolution was defeated
By the 1930s, however, the Dallas Business and Professional Women’s Club, The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Women Voter’s League made fighting for the right to jury service a priority. The first resolution brought before the Texas Legislature was defeated in 1949. In 1953 the Texas Senate passed a resolution to bring women’s right to jury service to vote as an amendment on the November ballot.

Kline’s study documents ongoing battles by Dallas County women to be added to the jury pool in a timely way. Women were not officially added to the Dallas County jury pool until August 1955.

“Most of us want to create our own place in history,” Kline says. “We make decisions that seem right for us and our community. Little do we know about our influence on future generations. These women made the decision to openly, actively and proudly take their place in Dallas history.”

Kline and DeLuzio worked with the Dallas County Historical Commission to draft a proposal for a historical marker to be place on the east side of the Old Red Courthouse, now a county historical museum in downtown Dallas. The marker was unveiled October 30.

On the day of the dedication, Kline’s students noticed she was dressed for a special occasion. After she explained the importance of jury service and her role in creating the maker, Kline’s eighth-graders gave her a standing ovation. &#8212 Nancy Lowell George

Related links:
Crista DeLuzio
SMU Department of History
Old Red Courthouse
The Handbook of Texas: Women and the law

Tags Andrea Norris Kline, Crista DeLuzio, Dedman College, SMU Department of History

Culture, Society & Family Researcher news

Precedent for America’s move toward restitution for human rights abuses

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 9, 2009

A growing global movement to apologize and make restitution to victims of human rights abuses is now gathering steam in the United States, but it won’t be a first for the country, says the president of The Western History Association.

“In reviewing the history of reconciliation in the American West, I’ve found three examples of government restitution — where we acknowledge we’ve participated in human rights abuses and offered either an apology, restitution, reparation or all three,” says Sherry Smith, associate director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU and an SMU history professor.

Sherry Smith, SMU history professor

The state of Montana granted posthumous pardons to Germans and Austrians convicted and imprisoned under repressive sedition laws during World War I; the U.S. government paid reparations to the heirs of Japanese Americans relocated to incarceration camps during World War II; and in a landmark native-lands case, Arizona returned 6,000 acres to the Hualapai tribe in the 1940s and the U.S. government set up the Indian Claims Commission.

“These are tiny steps considering the magnitude of the problem. But they helped turn the corner of deep injustice,” Smith says. “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

The global move toward reparations and restitution has largely evolved since World War II, beginning with Germany after the Holocaust, Smith says. Since then other nations and some private corporations have apologized or offered reparations to reconcile the past.

Increasingly, governments are responding to victims’ rights groups that are demanding reconciliation and restitution for slavery, war crimes and other institutionalized abuse.

Most recently, the U.S. Senate in June passed a resolution apologizing for slavery — although it didn’t offer any monetary reparation.

Navajo Indian mother and children in door
of hogan. Credit: David deHarport, Natl Park Service
Historic Photo Collection

“The United States is in the beginning stages of this movement,” says Smith, noting that historians have been a critical part of the process as they collect victims’ testimony and verify abuses through documentation.

“To the extent reconciliation includes chronicling and teaching the sometimes troubled past, historians are central to that,” says Smith.

While Smith isn’t drawing moral or ethical conclusions, she did say “the work that historians do can have social justice implications. We need to tell the stories of abuse and keep retelling them as part of the reconciliation process. But victims also need more than words. They want acts, too.”
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Smith will address “Reconciliation and Restitution in the American West” at the Western History Association’s annual conference in October in Denver. More than 900 association members from museums, universities and government agencies attend the conference. — Margaret Allen

News coverage of Smith’s analysis:
Physorg.com
Science Codex
Medical News Today
Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
R&D Magazine
ScienceBlog

Related links:
Sherry Smith
The Japanese American Legacy Project
The Montana Sedition Project
Annenberg Public Policy Center: Slavery reparations?
The Western History Association
Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Tags Dedman College, Sherry Smith, SMU Department of History