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"History"


Foreign Correspondent Looks Beyond Plato’s Shadows

Foreign correspondent Matthew Brunwasser ’94 has filed stories from more than 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

It seems safe to assume that few Reedies are familiar with Dinko Valev, a hulking, bearded semi-professional wrestler-slash-amateur vigilante who now styles himself a folk hero in his native Bulgaria.

Have you seen Dinko’s proud emblem of his allegiance to the Bulgarian Orthodox church, a pectoral tattoo that’s as big as a T-bone steak?

Didn’t think so.

Have you beheld the jacked four-wheeler that Dinko rode out to the Bulgaria-Turkey border in February, to subdue 16 Syrian migrants (12 men, three women, and a child), forcing them to lay prone on the dirt as he likened them all to “dogs”?

Well, journalist Matthew Brunwasser ’94 has watched the video of Dinko’s assault numerous times, along with the clip of the Bulgarian TV news anchor calling Dinko a “superhero.” He’s also interviewed the thuggish grappler—in Bulgarian. And in his recent profile for the BBC, he unraveled the nuanced import of Dinko, tracing Bulgaria’s nationalism back to the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when the Bulgarians were ruled by Muslims and Christian Balkan states were clamoring for independence. He talked to an anthropologist who said they were “programmed,” he writes, “to view every representative of the Islamic world as a potential rapist and terrorist.”

Prof wins grant to study indigenous politics in Mexico

Prof. Dillingham will study the history of indigenous education and development in Southern Mexico.

Prof. Alan Shane Dillingham [history 2014-] has won a $6,000 summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue an historical study of incorporating native peoples into the national political and economic structures of Latin America.

Prof. Dillingham’s book project, “Speaking of Difference: The Politics of Indigenous Education and Development in Southern Mexico,” examines the relationship between indigenous peoples and modernization in the state of Oaxaca.

Last year, 43 male students from a rural teachers’ college in southern Mexico went missing after commandeering buses and traveling to Iguala, Guerrero, to hold a protest at a conference. Details of what happened to them are unclear, but an official investigation concluded the students were intercepted by local police, handed over to a local crime syndicate, and presumably killed.

Scholarship Honors History Prof

Prof. Ed Segel lectured on the French Revolution, Vietnam, and practically everything in between

Reed alumni have banded together to recognize one of the college’s most influential professors—Prof. Ed Segel [history 1973-2011]—by naming a scholarship in his honor.

A native of Boston, Segel graduated from Harvard in 1960 and earned his PhD at UC Berkeley before coming to Reed in 1973. His primary interests were diplomatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries, European history, and intellectual history in the European mode. He lectured on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, Beethoven, Vietnam, and everything in between, and made his mark on campus as teacher, scholar, mentor, pool player, parliamentarian, and lyricist.

“This scholarship is a wonderful thing and I’m very grateful to the alumni who established it,” Segel said. “I’m particularly glad that the alumni come from such diverse fields and I likewise hope that the recipients of the scholarship over the years would cover a wide range of interests and academic commitment.”

Reed's Oral History Project Wins Honors

Reedies have known for some time that Comrades of the Quest is a signal achievement. Since its publication last summer, the magisterial oral history of Reed, edited by John Sheehy ’82, has been devoured by Reedies on campus and elsewhere (check out these tidbits that were excerpted in Reed magazine). The book quickly became an invaluable tool for alumni to understand their school and their role in its history. Lately, however, Comrades and the Oral History Project—which produced the enormous treasure trove of interviews which are the basis for the bookhave received recognition in the wider world as extraordinary works of scholarship.

The Oral History Association has just named the Reed College Oral History Project as the recipient of its prestigious Elizabeth Mason Large Project Award, given for outstanding works of oral history. The awards committee found that the project had been completed at “consistently high standards of professionalism, ethics, and scholarly rigor,” and that it made “important contributions to the social and cultural history of education.”

Ordeal of Fortune

Grand, Band, Sand, Land, Gland: all words that contain the right letters but the wrong sound, as Zach Barron '12 discovered to his dismay on last Monday's Wheel of Fortune.

The agonizing video of Zach's bonus round gaffe—in which he reached the right answer a second after the buzzer—has gone viral in the last few days: