The Reeder Endowment in History
Youngstown State University
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.
Please join us for the keynote lecture at the tenth annual History across the Humanities conference, “Have Pastport, Will Travel: Public and Personal Histories” with Dr. Tiffany L. Knoell. This special event is sponsored by the Reeder Endowment and the Trumbull County Historical Society.
Tiffany L. Knoell, Ph.D. Dr. Knoell is an associate teaching professor with the department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. She studies temporal tourism, silent cinema, popular music of 1900-1940, cultural history, animation before television, popular history, nostalgia, and science fiction. She teaches topics courses on Time Travel, Science Fiction, American Mythologies, Global Animation, and Popular Culture and Media in addition to Introduction to Popular Film. Dr. Knoell is the area chair for Popular History in American Culture for the Popular Culture Association National Conference and is also the co-host of “Silent Film Fridays: Where the Films are Silent but the Hosts are Not” weekly on Twitch. She can be found online at tlknoell.net.
Join us at Westside Bowl at 6:30 pm for the conclusion of our speaker series “Labor: Then and Now.” Our expert panel will discuss the ways in which Ohio’s labor market is tilting in favor of workers. They will share their insights on how Ohioans can continue to create a state where all workers thrive.
Speaker Bios:
Dr. AJ Sumell, Professor and Lead Negotiator for YSU-OEA
Michael Shields, Senior Researcher and Economist at Policy Matters Ohio
Dr. Tanisha Pruitt, Education Research at Policy Matters Ohio
This event is free and open to the public. Come early for food, stay late for games!
Mark your calendars for the inaugural event of the 2023 Reeder Speaker Series: “Better Understood by History Than by Logic: Federal Indian Policy and the Pokagon’s Experience”
This event is free and open to the public. It will be held November 2 at 6:00 pm, at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor.
Dr. Alex Wesaw is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians (federally recognized in Michigan and Indiana), where he serves as the elected Treasurer of the Tribal Council, Treasurer of the Tribe’s gaming enterprise (Four Winds Casino Resorts), and is the Chairman of the Pokagon Development Authority, an economic development arm of the Band. Dr. Wesaw serves nationally as a board member of the Indian Gaming Association, a board member of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and a delegate to the National Congress of American Indians. In 2022, Dr. Wesaw was recognized as one of 40 leaders under 40 years old in the United States by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development.
Additionally, Dr. Wesaw is also the Director of the American Indian Relations Division at the Ohio History Connection managing the relationships between the organization and more than 45 federally recognized tribes with connection to the lands now known as Ohio.
Finally, Alex holds a PhD in City & Regional Planning from The Ohio State University, a master’s degree in public administration from Ohio University, and a bachelor’s degree in communication also from Ohio University.
Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker was among 20 college and university educators named a Visiting Research Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was selected to participate in the Summer Institute on the Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath, hosted by the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City, July 9-21, 2023. The Institute focused on how visual media expressed and shaped popular views on the Civil War, before, during, and after the conflict. It included seminars led by noted historians, art historians, archivists, and museum curators, as well as hands-on workshops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the New York Historical Society. During the Institute, Dr. Fluker refined her forthcoming article on the Civil War paintings of George Caleb Bingham.