MHS News
Current newsletterThe MHS Welcomes 13 New Fellows
The Fellows of the MHS approved the election of 13 new Fellows at a stated meeting on 2 November. The MHS welcomes its newest Fellows and looks forward to their involvement. Read more about these new Fellows below.
Andrew J. Bacevich, of Boston, is a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, where he has held an appointment since 1998. Professor Bacevich is a graduate of the United States Military Academy. While he was still in uniform, in 1982 he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in history. He served as an assistant professor of history at West Point between 1977 and 1980, and following his retirement from the U.S. Army he held positions at Johns Hopkins University between 1993 and 1998. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, including, most recently, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010). In February he was featured in a program in the Society’s Conversations series.
Lynne Zacek Bassett, of Palmer, is a scholar in the field of textile and costume history, specializing in textiles of early New England. She graduated cum laude in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 1983 and earned an M.A. in Design and Resource management at the University of Connecticut in 1991. Between 1990 and 2000 she held curatorial positions at Historic Northampton and Old Sturbridge Village. Since 2001 she has been an independent scholar and consultant to museums and private collectors. As a guest curator she has organized exhibitions at Historic Deerfield, the Mark Twain House & Museum, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art. She has published her research widely in periodicals, essay collections, and exhibition catalogs.
Paul Elias, of Cambridge, is a partner in J.M. Forbes & Co. After graduate work in science at Harvard he moved into business management at a series of science-related service companies. He completed mid-career coursework in accounting, finance, financial planning, and trusts, and was certified an investment advisor before joining J.M. Forbes & Co. in 2005. He participates in the Boston Family Office Group and serves on several boards, including the Massachusetts Nature Conservancy. As an active member or trustee of the J.M. Forbes Family Archives Committee, the Naushon Trust, and the Beech Tree Trust, Mr. Elias has played a key role in the deposit of Forbes family collections at the Society as well as in grants to support the processing of those holdings and other M.H.S. projects. He has also participated regularly in the Society’s Boston Environmental History Seminar.
John A.D. Gilmore, of Cambridge, is a lawyer practicing in Boston. A graduate of Harvard College, magna cum laude in American History and Literature, he earned the J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. Before becoming a sole practitioner in 2007, he was an associate, partner, or member of the law firm of Hill & Barlow (1974-2002) and a partner of the law firm of DLA Piper US LLP (2003-2007). Mr. Gilmore is a member of the Society.
Robert Hudspeth, of Claremont, California, is a research professor of English at the Claremont Graduate University. After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Texas and a Ph.D. at Syracuse University he taught at the University of Washington and at The Pennsylvania State University before becoming dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Redlands. Professor Hudspeth has devoted most of his scholarly career to the Transcendentalists, and especially to Margaret Fuller. He edited the standard six-volume edition of The Letters of Margaret Fuller as well as a one-volume selection, My Heart is a Large Kingdom. He was the thirty-seventh president of the Thoreau Society and is in the process of editing Henry David Thoreau’s correspondence for the series published by Princeton University Press. Professor Hudspeth took part in two of the Society’s scholarly conferences, on Ralph Waldo Emerson in 2003 and on Margaret Fuller in 2010. His contribution to the Emerson conference appeared in the resulting essay collection; his presentation at the conference on Fuller is now in press as an essay in that program’s volume.
David Lambert, of Stoughton, has been a staff genealogist at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society for more than eighteen years. In this capacity he has published articles in many of the most prominent genealogical periodicals, including the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, The Mayflower Descendant, The New Hampshire Genealogical Record, Rhode Island Roots, New England Ancestors, and American Ancestors. He is also the author, co-author, or compiler of five books.
Beatrice F. Manz, of Milton, is a professor of history at Tufts University, where she has taught since 1985. She took her undergraduate degree at Harvard and an A.M. in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan before returning to Harvard for her Ph.D., which she received in 1983. Professor Manz is an historian of the Middle East and Inner Asia; her major publications include The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (1989) and Power, Politics, and Religion in Timurid Iran (2007). As a member of the J.M. Forbes Archives Committee, Beatrice Manz has been instrumental in seeing that the Forbes family papers have been deposited at the Historical Society and supporting work on their preservation and access.
Timothy C. Neumann, of Deerfield, is the executive director of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association/Memorial Hall Museum, where he has worked since 1975. He graduated from Wheaton College (Illinois) in 1973 and earned the Ed.M. at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in 1975. As a candidate for the master’s degree he developed his own course of study focusing on cognitive development and its application in the museum environment. A one-line version of his organization’s mission statement has guided Mr. Neumann since he assumed his present position: “We believe that understanding the past creates better citizens and a better world.”
David J. Silverman, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an associate professor of history at The George Washington University, where he has taught since 2003. Prior to his present appointment, he taught at Wayne State University from 2001 to 2003. He took a B.A. in history at Rutgers University and an M.A. at the College of William and Mary before earning a Ph.D. in history at Princeton University. A scholar of early America and the history of the American Indian, Professor Silverman is the author of many articles and two books, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (2005), and Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (2010). His research fellowships include short-term grants from the Society in 1998 and 2010 and support from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium in 2003.
John Fielding Walsh, of Cambridge, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, is the associate director for design and production at Harvard University Press. In this capacity he has worked with the Society’s Adams Papers documentary editing project, overseeing production of dozens of volumes of this important series, since 1975. In 2004, he worked with editors at the project to develop My Dearest Friend, a selection of the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams. He also championed the Society’s project, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to digitize the printed papers of the Winthrop and Adams families. His contribution to this project included advising on contractors to convert the printed volumes to electronic format and working to assure the quality of the resulting text. Harvard University Press resources that he found underwrote the conversion process.
Neil Longley York, of Provo, Utah, is a professor of history at Brigham Young University. A graduate of BYU (B.A. and M.A.), he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978. Professor York focuses his scholarship on the American Revolution, with particular attention to Massachusetts. He is an editor, with M.H.S. Fellow Daniel R. Coquillette, of the five-volume Portrait of a Patriot: Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior, published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and editor of a second Colonial Society of Massachusetts documentary volume, Henry Hulton and the American Revolution: An Outsider’s Inside View. His articles include “Tag-Team Polemics” The ‘Centinel’ and His Allies in The Massachusetts Spy,” in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society and “Rival Truths, Political Accommodation, and the Boston Massacre,” in the Massachusetts Historical Review. Professor York is a member of the Society.
Mary Saracino Zboray, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and the co-author with her husband, Ronald J. Zboray, of four books and numerous essays on antebellum print culture and rhetoric. She has been a research fellow at Georgia State University and at the Schlesinger Library. She holds an M.A. in anthropology from the New School for Social Research and was a Smithsonian Fellow in the doctoral program in American Studies at The George Washington University. A frequent researcher at the Society, she took part in two of the Society’s scholarly conferences, “Entrepreneurs: the Boston Business Community, 1700-1850” and “Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts.” In each case, her contribution, co-authored with her husband, was published in the resulting essay collection.
Ronald J. Zboray, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh, his academic home since 2001. Before assuming his present position at Pitt he taught at Georgia State University and the University of Texas at Arlington. He also served as an editor at the Emma Goldman papers project. Zboray received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude in history, from the University of Bridgeport and his Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. He is the author of A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993) and the co-author, with his wife, Mary Saracino Zboray, of four books and many articles. The Zborays have taken part in two of the Society’s conferences, each time publishing an article in the resulting essay collection. Professor Zboray received a short-term research fellowship from the Society in 1994.