History

I am a transplanted Westerner and grew up in Idaho and California. I earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees at San Jose State University in California, and my doctorate at Washington State University in Pullman, under the tutelage of my hero, Sue Armitage, a pioneer in western women's history. I taught at San Jose State University, Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and Gonzaga University before joining the History faculty at Belmont in the fall of 2003.  I teach 18th and 19th century U.S. history courses, as well as courses on Latin American history and Women's history.  I also teach the second of the History Department's three-course methods sequence, “Writing History,” and have taught ILCs with colleagues from Biology, English, Music, and Art. I am the author of Domesticating the West. The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class (Nebraska, 2005), and am currently working on projects involving women and Middle Tennessee during the Civil War, and women in the nineteenth-century American West.

I am an avid sports fan and spent a good deal of my young life at the Oakland Coliseum watching the A's and Raiders during their glory years.  My husband is a Tennessee grad, and we travel to Knoxville to cheer on the Vols, though the Pac-12 will always be first in my heart - GO COUGS! We have two grown daughters, attend the symphony and theater as often as time permits, and enjoy traveling, visiting historic sites, and the peace and solitude of the mountains.

I love history - and have since I was a little girl.  I love teaching history and helping students understand there is much more to its study than the memorization of names and dates.  My goal is for students to understand the world around them - and the best way to do that is to study history.  "Understanding" doesn't necessarily mean "agreeing with" - a hard lesson for students to learn, but once they do - the world is their oyster!  As the great philosopher Aristotle wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Think about it - and take a history class!!

Selected Recent Publications and Presentations

"Adelicia Acklen: Beyond the 'Belmont' Legend and Lore," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 75:1 (Spring 2017): 2-43.

“Methods in Teaching Region and Diversity in U.S. Western Women’s History,” The History Teacher 46:2 (February 2013): 215-230.

“The Civil War Diaries of William Lawrence and Kate Carney: A Research Note on Under-Utilized Sources,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 73:1 (Spring 2014): 52-73.

The Wide Northwest, by Leoti L. West. New Introduction by Brenda K. Jackson. 1^st edition, Spokane, WA: Shaw & Borden, 1927; reprint ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 

Domesticating the West: The Re-Creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 

“Interruption of the Even ‘tenor of our way’”: Middle Tennessee Women in Occupation and Reconstruction,” Southern Association of Women Historians Triennial Conference, Charleston, SC, June 2015

“’For the Sake of the Cotton!’ PlantationWomen in 1864 Civil War Louisiana,” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 2015

Born in the heart of the Bluegrass in Lexington, I grew up in Paducah, Kentucky. As a child I visited Nashville many times so when I joined the Belmont faculty in 1987 it was sort of a homecoming.  Between Paducah and Belmont I attended The Ohio State University receiving my doctorate in History in 1989. My major field in history is Modern France and I researched my dissertation on criminal justice in nineteenthcentury France in Paris and in Brittany while on a Fulbright Research grant in 1983-1984.  I also have a secondary field in the history of Modern Japan.  At Belmont I teach courses in the history of both nations including ones on the French Revolution, Modern France, The Samurai, and Modern Japan.   World History, Modern China, and a Survey of East Asian history are also part of my teaching repertoire. 

I have published book reviews, an article on Napoleon Bonaparte for Humanities Tennessee, and contributed entries to a historical dictionary on World War II France.  Besides giving papers at history conferences such as the American Historical Association, French Historical Studies, and AsiaNetwork, in 1993 on behalf of Humanities Tennessee I traveled around the state presenting the life of Napoleon. My horizons as a teacher expanded when in May 2008 I took my first trip to Japan as part of Belmont’s Study-Abroad program.  Since then I have led three study abroad trips to that country.  One of my greatest joys as a teacher is to take students on these trips and watch everyone learn more about Japan, the Japanese, and themselves.  Moreover, in 2010 through a Japan Foundation grant I was able to spend time in Uji and Kyoto conducting research into Japanese Tea Culture. Currently I am reading about French views of Japan’s culture during the Meiji Era in an effort to combine my interests in Japan and France.

When I am not doing history, I enjoy reading classic novels, gardening, watching foreign films -- primarily French and Japanese ones -- and listening to jazz.  Most of all, I enjoy the time spent with my husband (a heartless Anglophile), our son, Richard, and with parents, siblings, friends, and students.

I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  I earned the B.A. in History from Florida Atlantic University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from The Ohio State University.  A Fulbright Scholarship allowed me to pursue dissertation research in London during 1983-1984.  I arrived at Belmont University in 1987. I teach courses on medieval history, early modern England, the history of Ireland, and the history of baseball.  I also teach a section of the First Year Seminar titled "Denying the Holocaust: How we know what isn't so." I am the author of The Merchant Adventurers of England: The Company and the Crown, 1474-1564 (University of Delaware Press, 1993) and co-author of A History of England, sixth edition, two volumes (Prentice Hall, 2014). In the classroom, I hope my students will see the past as a place where, as G.M. Trevelyan says, there once walked "men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."

I am married to Dr. Cynthia Bisson, who also began her teaching career at Belmont in 1987. Our son, Richard Bisson, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and is studying nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin.  The latter regards his father's ignorance of science as a source of endless amusement.  I am a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Miami Dolphins.  Having lived to see the Birds win their eleventh World Series in 2011, Dr. Bisson has hopes of seeing the Fins win a third Super Bowl before "he rests in peace, ‘e's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible...."  As the last line suggests, I am also a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Selected Recent Publications 

A History of England, Volume 1, sixth edition (Prehistory to 1714).  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2013.

A History of England, Volume 2, sixth edition (1688 to the Present). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2013.

Dr. Daniel Schafer is Professor of History at Belmont University.  Born and raised in Chicago, he pursued an undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan.  Before coming to Belmont in 1996 he taught for several years at Truman State University in Missouri.  As a scholar Dr. Schafer is particularly interested in the role that the non-Russian nationalities have played in Russian and Soviet history, particularly the Muslim peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia proper.  His research focuses on the history of two Muslim groups in Russia, the Tatars and Bashkirs, who live throughout the former Soviet Union, but especially in a region stretching from the Volga River eastward to the Ural Mountains.  He is currently working on a Tatar-English dictionary, which he hopes will assist other scholars in mastering Tatar, which is the second-most spoken language in Russia.

Dr. Schafer's teaching load includes an introduction to historical methods and historiography, a two-semester sequence on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, a research seminar on the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Islamic intellectual history, surveys of Central Asian and Middle Eastern history, and an introduction to environmental history.  He also teaches the First-Year Seminar and Linked Cohort classes.  He works with students on campus as an advisor to the interfaith Rumi Club and has travelled with students on study abroad trips to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China.  He currently directs the annual Belmont travel-study program in Turkey.​

I grew up mostly in central Illinois. From there I spent several years in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Midwestern State University. After that I moved to Nashville, finishing a PhD in history at Vanderbilt University. I came to Belmont in 2008.  I study the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, and I tend to focus on political thought along with American philosophy and literature after the Civil War, including the intersections between those things. I'm currently at work on a book manuscript, "The Imagined Civil Rights Movement." In it I offer a few answers to the questions of how it is that so many people have come to reference or claim the movement, and why they consider their claims legitimate. I've written several shorter pieces: book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. I'm a regular blogger at the Society for United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) and a contributing writer for the Humanities Tennessee's Chapter 16. 

 At Belmont I teach several courses, among others American Thought and Culture after the Civil War, the African American Experience after 1865, 1920s America, The United States in Depression and War, and a course on what others have thought of us called "International Vistas: the US Viewed from Abroad." I'm very active in general education too, teaching First Seminar and Learning Communities courses for first year students. In my classes, I try to get my students to think across traditional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, to take risks and follow their passions. I want to develop in my students a love of ideas, cultivating what the American historian Richard Hofstadter one described as the "playfulness" and "piety" that comes with the intellect. I figure that kind of life should equip students for whatever path they ultimately choose.

Outside of the classroom I enjoy reading good fiction, listening to music, cooking, and working with my hands: puttering around the house and yard, occasional shade-tree mechanic jobs, the kind of momentary satisfactions that come with fixing or making something. I'm also a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, but I feel conflicted about that, as any moral human being ought to do. 

Selected Recent Publications/Activities

 "A Note on 'Difficult' Texts: Reading with Philosophers and Historians, Again,"S-USiH Blog (February 2018)

"Nietzsche's Uses and Abuses Part Three: Where the Rubber Hits the Road,"(USIH Blog, September 2017)

 "Politics, Nostalgia, and the Strange Estrangements of the American Political Tradition," Society 55:2 (April 2018): 153-156

"Encountering the Southern Other: Imagining the Civil Rights Movement as Travel Narrative," Patterns of Prejudice 49:5 (December 2015): 522-545. 

“Vastations and Prosthetics: Henry James, Sr. and the Transatlantic Education of William and Henry James,”  chapter four in Martin Halliwell and Joel Rasmussen, eds. William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2014, 81-96.

“Ralph Ellison, Irving Howe, and the Imagined Civil Rights Movement,” Society50: 1 (January 2013): 10-15.

“Esthetic Sensitivity: The Sublime Architectures of Paul Conkin’s Puritans and Pragmatists” Historically Speaking (January 2012): 24-26.

“Barack Obama and the American Island of the Colorblind” Patterns of Prejudice, 45: 1&2 (April 2011): 119-132.