Youngstown State University
On April 5, 32 YSU students set off for the History Club’s annual student trip. This year, they revisited Gettysburg National Military Park. The trip is sponsored by the Darling and Reeder Endowments in History, which provide a charter bus and a private tour of the park with a licensed battlefield guide. This year’s guide led the students to Culp’s Hill, where a Mahoning Valley regiment fought.
The Reeder and Darling Endowments in History partnered to sponsor a special guest lecture by Dr. Linda Gordon, a pioneering historian of women’s and social history. Her lecture, “The Much Misunderstood Women’s Liberation Movement,” reviewed the origins and goals of the movement and reflected on its legacies today. Dr. Gordon is a two-time recipient of the distinguished Bancroft Prize for history.
We are pleased to announce that the annual Reeder Distinguished Lecture in Nineteenth-Century History will be held the evening of April 17, 2025. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Dr. Joseph M. Beilein, Jr., and is entitled “From Ohio Schoolmaster to Missouri Bushwhacker: The Strange Civil War of William Clarke Quantrill.”
Dr. Joseph M. Beilein, Jr., is a professor of history at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College where he teaches history courses on the Civil War, Revolutionary America, Gender, and Military History. He has authored or edited five books including A Man By Any Other Name: William Clarke Quantrill and the Search for American Manhood (2023) and Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri (2016).
The Reeder Endowment is proud to fund a paid Student Research Assistant position for senior History/English major India Gatts at the Trumbull County Historical Society. Through her work, India is playing a vital role in preserving the history of Warren’s Pioneer Cemetery. She has cataloged hundreds of cemetery records and approximately 400 photographs. She is also working to digitize the cemetery index so that it is searchable and available to the public. Even more exciting, she is developing an interactive digital map of the cemetery. Beyond her archival work, India is conducting extensive historical research on Pioneer Cemetery, utilizing newspaper articlesand land deeds. TCHS utilized her research to develop a Halloween cemetery tour, engaging the community and raising awareness of the cemetery’s historical significance. She also wrote a short history of the cemetery for the Tribune.
India says: “Working with TCHS has provided me with an experience that I cannot find in the classroom. It has introduced me to the field of applied history and allowed me to take a forgotten piece of the community and revitalize the public’s interest in it. By the end of my project, hundreds of people that were left behind over time will once again be a part of the community.”
With the support of the Reeder endowment, Drs. Fluker and Lease led the YSU History Club on a free trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art where students spent a full day exploring. Favorite exhibits included “Imagination in the Age of Reason” and “Arts of Maghreb.”
In 1924, the Ku Klux Klan was gaining strength across the Midwest. But on November 1, the people of Niles, Ohio, organized a massive protest against the Klan. As the YSU history program observes the 100th anniversary of this protest, it is pleased to welcome Dr. Linda Gordon for a special lecture on the history of the rise and fall of the KKK.
Dr. Gordon’s lecture, “When the Ku Klux Klan was a Mass Movement” will be held Nov. 1 at 6:00 pm, at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor. It is free and open to the public.
For more information on the Niles protest, see p. 46 of Echoes.
Dr. Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University and two-time recipient of the esteemed Bancroft Prize in History. She is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and of multiple books including The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (2017).
With the support of the Reeder endowment, YSU students joined a bus tour visiting authenticated Underground Railroad sites in Trumbull County. The sites include the homes of local abolitionists, who bravely assisted Freedom-Seekers as they fought to reach Canada and gain their liberty. The tours are sponsored by the Trumbull County Historical Society and led by Dr. Amy L. Fluker, Associate Professor of History at YSU.
The Reeder Endowment is proud to support the ongoing Oakwood Cemetery Digitization Project. YSU HSS faculty and students have partnered with the Oakwood Cemetery Association and the Trumbull County Historical Society in an ongoing volunteer project to digitize more than 30,000 interment records held at the cemetery. Volunteers have scanned more than 18,000 records and YSU students have transcribed more than 4,000 records into a database. Our goal is to create a free, online, fully-searchable database of these records to help families, community members, and scholars better explore the rich history of the Mahoning Valley.
On April 6, 25 YSU students joined in a bus tour of the Gettysburg National Military Park on the first of what promises to become an annual trip. Students got the opportunity to explore the visitor center and museum and took a guided tour of the battlefield, sponsored by the Reeder Endowment.
One student shared their reflections on the trip:
I found the Gettysburg trip to be quite an enriching experience. Not only did this trip provide an opportunity to personally connect with a part of history, but also to the people within the community. It is one thing to read about these battles in a textbook, but to see that much of the town still engages with this piece of history was enlightening. Trips such as this one should be encouraged for the future, as it connects the budding historian with real life history—something beyond the page.
The annual Reeder Distinguished Lecture is right around the corner! Click “Distinguished Lecture” above to learn more about this year’s speaker, Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan.
