Seth Blumenthal, Michael Holm and Jonathan Koefoed Win Dissertation Fellowships
The winners of this year’s Robert V. Shotwell Dissertation Fellowship are Seth Blumenthal, Michael Holm, and Jonathan Koefoed.
The fellowship is named after Robert Shotwell, father to one BU alum and grandfather to a current student, and brings the quality of persistence to this scholarship. Graduate students are known for procrastination, taking longer and longer to complete their dissertations. Bob Shotwell’s notable tenacity has illustrated how being persistent can lead to the satisfaction of completion. Born in Los Angeles, during the 1920s, he almost finished college at the University of Southern California; WWII recruiting officers enlisted his skills as a photographer, leaving him a semester short of graduation. Almost 60 years later, he returned to receive his degree, the oldest graduate in the history of the Marshall School of Business. In between the war and graduation, he was an entrepreneur in the printing and copier industry and is now engaged in several projects relating to history, his favorite subject. In Camden, Maine, where he resides, he leads a project to refurbish a historic theater and has established the Cole House for history teachers at Montpelier, General Henry Knox’s house in Thomaston, Maine.
Seth Blumenthal
Bridging the Gap: Nixon, New Politics and the First Youth Vote, 1968-1972, argues that young Americans, the 1968-generation, provided a limit to the conservative realignment Richard Nixon envisioned but also revitalized the Republican Party after the 1960s. As president, Nixon struggled to implement his law and order conservative policies on youth problems such as marijuana and campus disorders while he acquiesced to youth-friendly congressional members on other issues such as the draft, environmental protection and lowering the voting age. Young liberals also motivated Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign that secured the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1972. Thus, Nixon cultivated his own youth cadre, Young Voters for the President (YVP). Carefully targeting non-students to join this 400,000 member organization, YVP leaders utilized both grassroots organization and Madison Avenue’s modern advertising techniques to pry increasingly independent young voters and the “sons and daughters of the silent majority” from previous Democratic strongholds such as urban, ethnic enclaves and the Sunbelt.
Michael Holm:
America in the World: Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War, examines the origins and influence of American exceptionalist ideology on the foreign policies of the Truman administration from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the outbreak of the war in Korea in 1950. I argue that the ideological threat posed by the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War ignited Americans’ historical consciousness and cultural self-perception of their nation as the world’s savior – that the Cold War did not change Americans; the Cold War made them more themselves. Analyzing the influence of language and ideas on President Truman’s foreign policy, this study demonstrates how American exceptionalist ideology – to a far greater extent than national interest – manifested itself in every major foreign policy initiative during the early years of the Cold War as the U.S. set out to create a new world order.
Jonathan Koefoed :
Cautious Romantics: The Transcendental Trinitarians and the Transatlantic Romantic Discourse, argues that between 1800 and 1860 there is a vast and overlooked intellectual discourse in antebellum America. I call this discourse Cautious Romanticism as these influential artists, literary critics, professors, writers, and clergymen don’t fit into the historical narratives and categories available. Intellectually they were American Romantics, but they rejected the American Transcendentalists religious innovations and liberal optimism. Religiously, the Cautious Romantics also don’t fit into our established understanding; they were simultaneously critical of Old School Calvinism, Unitarianism, Evangelicalism, and Transcendentalism and they came from various religious denominations. Using letters, personal journals, and published sources, I contend that these intellectuals were a distinct, Romantic discourse that transcended intellectual genre, gender, religious denomination, or politics. By taking this approach, I provide a new perspective on the well-known artists Washington Allston and Thomas Cole by placing them in a larger historical and intellectual discourse beyond Art History. I also provide a more complex perspective on certain Catholic convert intellectuals, like Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, who are almost always seen simply as Catholic. Finally, numerous under-researched and even unknown figures like Richard Henry Dana Sr., James Marsh, Sophia Dana Ripley, and George Allen find their proper place in the American intellectual narrative.
