Historical News
THE
FIRST ANNUAL American history award of the
Mississippi Valley
Historical Association went to Donald F.
Warner, professor of history
at Wisconsin State College. The
presentation of the one thousand
dollar prize was made on April 23 at the
annual meeting of the
association in Denver, Colorado. Dr.
Warner's winning entry, entitled
"The Idea of Continental Union:
Agitation for Annexation of Canada
to the United States, 1849-1893,"
will be published in early 1960 by the
University of Kentucky Press.
The Ohio Folklore Society held its
annual spring meeting on April
11 at the Ohio State Museum. Speakers at
the afternoon session were
D. K. Wilgus, Western Kentucky State
College, George List, Indiana
University, and John Ball, Miami
University. An informal jamboree
was held in the evening with outstanding
Ohio folklorists participating.
Members of the group were after-session
guests of Mr. and Mrs. Frank
T. Sayers at their Upper Arlington home.
At the business session the following
officers were elected for two-year
terms: president, George Kummer, Western
Reserve University; vice
president, Claude M. Simpson, Jr., Ohio
State University; secretary-
treasurer, Lorraine B. Furbish, Lakewood
Public Library; member-
ship chairman, Merrill Gilfillan,
Columbus; newsletter chairman, Anne
Grimes, Columbus. Dr. Ball was named
regional editor of Mid-West
Folklore.
The fall meeting of the society will be
held at Marietta College on
October 17.
At the University of Akron, Clara G.
Roe, professor of history and
chairman of the department of history,
will retire at the conclusion of
the summer session, and George W.
Knepper will become department
head in September 1959.
Two new men will be added to the
department in September. Edgar A.
Toppin, formerly of the State Teachers
College, Fayetteville, North
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THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Carolina, will become assistant
professor of American history, and
James Cassedy will become an instructor
in the same field.
Lawrence S. Kaplan, assistant professor
of history at Kent State
University, has been granted a Fulbright
award to lecture in American
history at the University of Bonn,
Germany, during the year 1959-60.
Dr. Kaplan, who served as civilian
historian for the department of
defense in Washington from 1951 to 1954,
is an authority on the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and the
United Nations.
George J. Blazier retired in June as
librarian and archivist of Marietta
College after forty-nine years of
association with the college. Under Dr.
Blazier's guidance the Marietta College
Library has more than doubled
its collections, many of which are
outstanding.
A native of Ohio, Dr. Blazier received
his A.B. from Marietta in
1914 and his A.M. from the University of
Michigan in 1918. He was
awarded an honorary doctor of letters by
West Virginia Wesleyan Col-
lege in 1953. He edited the volume Joseph
Barker: Recollections of the
First Settlement of Ohio, published by the college last year.
Dwight L. Smith of the department of
history at Miami University
has received a Miami University Research
Fellowship for the coming
year.
Frank L. Ikle will teach at the
University of California, Berkeley,
this summer.
At Muskingum College, David R.
Sturtevant has been promoted from
assistant to associate professor of
history.
The talk given by Sister Mary Patrice,
chairman of the history de-
partment at Notre Dame College of
Cleveland, before the high school
teachers of social studies of the
diocese of Cleveland on April 11, was
printed in the college's history
teachers' magazine. The title is
"Reappraisal of Methods in the
Social Studies."
Harold J. Grimm, chairman of the history
department at Ohio State
University, delivered the annual Thomas
Lectures at Otterbein College
on March 10 and March 17 on the subject,
"The One World of a
Community of Scholars." He also
gave two addresses at Miami Uni-
versity on March 25 and 26 as a part of
the university's sesquicentennial
HISTORICAL NEWS 305
celebration. His subjects were "A
Community of Scholars" and "A
Dynamic Scholarship." Dr. Grimm
attended the spring meeting of the
American Society of Church History and
participated in the sessions of
its council at Wake Forest, North
Carolina, April 16 and 17.
Portrait of America: Letters of
Henry Sienkiewicz, translated and
edited by Charles Morley, was published
in April by the Columbia Uni-
versity Press. This translation makes
these letters available for the first
time in English in book form.
John Krause read a paper, "Two
Demographic Types: The Pre-
industrial West and the Currently Less
Developed Populations," before
the Natural Resources Seminar at Boston
on March 9.
Andreas Dorpalen addressed the
In-Service Education Workshop of
the Columbus Public Schools on
"Germany Today" on March 21 and
"The Academy" of Ohio State
on "This Age of Isms" on April 12.
Francis P. Weisenburger has completed
his third year as a judge in
the Pelzer Award Contest sponsored by
the Mississippi Valley Histori-
cal Association.
John F. Cady, chairman of the
department of history at Ohio Univer-
sity, received the annual achievement
award of the Ohio Academy of
History at the April 4 meeting for his
volume entitled A History of
Modern Burma.
The library of Ohio University recently
acquired records of Athens
County covering education and other
local matters for the period 1820
to 1850.
Lynn W. Turner, president of Otterbein
College, received honorable
mention for his manuscript biography of
William Plumer in the second
annual Institute Manuscript Award
Competition of the Institute of
Early American History and Culture. The
biography will be published
by the institute.
The University of Toledo history
department reports the resignation
of Cecil Cody, who has been on leave
since 1957 in a Fulbright post in
the Philippines. Dr. Cody has joined a
social science research group of
General Electric.
Mikisi Hane, who holds the Ph.D. in
history from Yale and who has
recently returned from Japan where he
held a Fulbright grant, has been
appointed assistant professor of
history.
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THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Arvel B. Erickson, professor of history
at Western Reserve Univer-
sity, is the author of Edward T.
Cardwell: Peelite, published in April
as Volume 49, Part 2, of the Transactions
of the American Philosophi-
cal Society.
John Hall Stewart, president of the
Society for French Historical
Studies, served on the program committee
and the committee on local
arrangements for the society's fifth
annual meeting held in Cleveland,
April 3 and 4.