Historical News and Notices

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• Historical News and Notices

THE ASSOCIATION

The Blassingame Award Committee, composed of Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut, chair; Bertis D. English, Alabama State University; and Françoise N. Hamlin, Brown University, is calling for nominations for the John W. Blassingame Award, established in 2004 to honor distinguished scholarship and mentorship in African American history. In order to nominate a candidate for the award, a letter describing the person’s accomplishments should be sent by email to berrys@thesha.org by June 1, 2024, when it will be forwarded to committee members. Two supporting letters should accompany each nomination.

For nominations involving a primary role of mentoring, the committee particularly welcomes letters from students, either graduate or undergraduate. Nominees from all areas of the academic community, including those from community/junior colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and research universities, are welcome. Nominees will be considered based on distinguished careers as mentors of African American studies, personal scholarly accomplishments, or some combination of both qualities. The award consists of a $1,000 stipend, and is awarded every third year. The next award will be given at the 2024 annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Junior Scholars Workshop is a program to support and encourage advanced graduate students and recent graduates working in all fields of southern history, as well as to provide a space for SHA members to connect outside the annual meeting. Workshops take place on Zoom. The papers will be circulated in advance, and the hour’s program will consist of a brief introduction by the author and comments by two senior scholars, with the rest of the time devoted to audience questions and discussion. For updates on the schedule of papers, please visit https://www.thesha.org/workshop. To register to receive the precirculated papers and the Zoom link, please fill out the form at https://forms.gle/zbm1yM1f6aAFfHKKA. The Junior Scholars Workshop is sponsored by the SHA Professional Development Committee.

OBITUARY

Charles Pierce Roland, Alumni Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Kentucky, died at the age of 104 on April 12, 2022. A noted historian of the American South and the Civil War era, he served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1981.

Born in Maury City, Tennessee, on April 8, 1918, Roland was the son and grandson of educators. He spent two years at Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee, before enrolling at Vanderbilt University in 1936. There he studied under Frank L. Owsley and graduated in 1938. He taught high school before joining the National Park Service in 1940. Inducted into the army in January 1942, he rose to the rank of captain in the 99th Infantry Division, saw combat in Belgium and Germany, and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He returned to the National Park Service after World War II. [End Page 471]

Roland first pursued graduate studies at George Washington University in 1947 but soon enrolled at Louisiana State University, where he worked first with Bell I. Wiley and then with Francis Butler Simkins; Roland received his Ph.D. in 1951. Recalled to military service during the Korean War, he assisted the chief historian of the army in Washington, D.C., on the U.S. Army in World War II series. In the fall of 1952, Roland joined the Department of History at Tulane University, remaining there eighteen years before moving in 1970 to the University of Kentucky, where he taught until retirement in 1988. Roland supervised eighteen doctoral students, nine each at Tulane and Kentucky. One of them, V. Jacque Voegeli, recalls Roland’s “sensitivity to history’s unintended consequences” and how he “shunned the occupational temptation to treat the past as a morality play,” preferring to emphasize “the complexities of human motivation and action in a manner that conveyed humane values, inspired hope, and cautioned against cynicism or unrestrained optimism” (“Foreword,” in Charles P. Roland, My Odyssey through History: Memoirs of War and Academe [Baton Rouge, 2004], p. xiv).

The first three of Roland’s eight books dealt with the Civil War era. Louisiana Sugar Plantations during the American Civil War, his revised dissertation, appeared in 1957 (Brill); The Confederacy, part of...