In her debut memoir, Dionne Ford takes readers along for an emotional ride as she crisscrosses the country to find her enslaved ancestors—and herself.

The day Dionne Ford turned 38 years old, she came across an old “family” photo on the internet, a picture she’d never seen before. It shows her great-great-grandfather Colonel W. R. Stuart, a wealthy Louisiana cotton broker; his wife, Elizabeth; Ford’s great-great-grandmother Tempy Burton, who was given to the Stuarts by Elizabeth’s parents as a wedding present; and two biracial-looking young women, assumed to be Tempy and the Colonel’s children.

The discovery prompted Ford to embark on a yearslong journey from New Jersey to Louisiana to Virginia and back again, searching for clues into the life of Tempy and her six children, plus whoever else she could find to uncover (and understand) her roots. Last April, she published Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, a compact yet expansive look at her trek back in time to search for her family history. And a trek it was.

“If you are going to look for your enslaved ancestors,” Ford writes in the book’s prologue, “you will have to look for the people who enslaved them. … This is a study in contrasts. Shadow. Light. Black. White. Joy. Pain. Victim. Perpetrator. You will find ephemera—editorials, photographs, wedding announcements—and atrocities—lynched uncles, your people as property in someone’s will, deed, or mortgage guarantee. You will also find the living— third cousins once removed, fifth cousins straight up, and descendants of the family that forced your family into slavery.”

The book’s title refers to a kind of pilgrimage, called sankofa by the Akan people of Western Africa. “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” writes Ford, who earned a B.A. in communications and media studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1991 and an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University in 2016. As she digs deep into the 19th century, she also contends with personal trauma: the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a close relative and the alcoholism that helped her cope. And she evokes a riot of emotion for readers, perhaps particularly Black readers, as she grapples with the history of slavery and the ways in which its aftermath affects generation after generation.

At the beginning of the book, you talk a bit about wanting your older daughter, Desiree, to embrace her roots. Did she? How did your research affect her, your other daughter, Devany, and your husband, Dennis?
This definitely affected my family. I took my girls with me on research trips, so they were a part of this journey. I do think that they both had a certain pride in just knowing about this side of their family’s history, and particularly about the enslaved women.

My cousin made this game for the kids to play that had all the ancestors on cards, and everybody always wanted to be Tempy. I felt like they already were positively internalizing their female ancestors’ lives. I think it’s always grounding for people to know as full a story as possible.

Throughout the book, you write about how language can fall short when you’re doing this kind of research—and writing about it. What advice would you give to other Black people who want to investigate their own family history? How should they get started?
Talk to your elders. Find a respectful way to let them know that you’re interested in your shared history, and you’d like to set aside time to just ask them some questions about it. They’re gone before we know it, so it’s so important.

Then get yourself some kind of group because it’s painful and hard if you’re dealing with people who were enslaved or oppressed, so working with other people who are also in earnest, who can be a support to you and you can support them, is great. The group AfriGeneas is for people who are of African descent. And if you also can find a research partner in your family, that’s really wonderful. Don’t be in a hurry, and be open-minded because you’re probably going to find a lot of things that you didn’t expect—and maybe that you didn’t want to, either.

Beyond personal reasons, why did you write this book?
James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In my experience, not only can nothing be changed until it’s faced, but somehow the more I try to avoid a thing, the more power it has over me. Something fundamentally shifted in me through this process of confronting my family’s history and my own. So, by organizing my experience into a narrative, I hoped to offer that to readers: the possibility for some fundamental shift by facing whatever it is in their life they would rather avoid.

Is there a particular ancestor that you now feel most connected with as a result of your research?

How did you choose what research to cite and discuss?
I chose to include things, in the end, that were specific to my story—if they were specific to Louisiana slavery, women in slavery, or my own story—but it was hard.

For example, I kept From Slavery to Freedom, [John Hope Franklin’s classic history of African Americans], because it dealt with the Sterling family, who had enslaved some of my family. There were so many wonderful texts that did help me get a better understanding.

What would you say has been the most unexpected response to your memoir?
I have had a couple of strangers—and friends, too— say that they really appreciated me talking about the sexual abuse. One woman, in particular, said that had happened to her and that after she read my book, she actually sought out a survivors group and went for the first time in her life. That was very humbling and moving, and I felt so grateful that anything that I could write might actually help somebody find a bit more peace or serenity.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on adapting my book into a limited series. There are things you can do visually that you can’t do on the page—things that I didn’t feel comfortable doing because it was a memoir, and I really wanted to stick to as much of the truth that I was able to back up as possible. Now I’m having a little bit more fun and envisioning what it would’ve been like for them living at that time. I’m also going back to the novel that I was supposed to write as my MFA thesis at NYU but had ditched so I could work on my memoir.

I’m a member of the New Jersey Reparations Council, too. The state has been dragging its feet on passing a bill to just study reparations, so the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice just said, “You know what? We’re not waiting for you. You guys take too long. We’re convening our own council.” And they invited me to participate. I’m really excited.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sierra McCleary-Harris is an associate editor of this magazine.

“My research is trying to unlock our history and how white supremacy and racism have shaped U.S. foreign policy in Africa, in addition to how Africans themselves have understood their own policies,” said Osei-Opare, an assistant professor of history at Fordham who is originally from Ghana. 

A historian who focuses on African and Cold War history, Osei-Opare studies the history of his native Ghana, particularly the Ghanian political economy, Black Marxists, and Africa-Soviet relations. He has written about race and foreign policy in several media outlets, including a recent opinion piece about anti-Black racism in Ukraine for The Washington Post—and in many academic journals. 

Two Prestigious Research Positions

Osei-Opare was recently awarded two research positions that will help him to complete his first book, Socialist De-Colony: Soviet & Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects, which will explore Ghana’s relationship with the Cold War. Starting this August, he will begin a two-year research leave from Fordham. During the first year, he will serve as a Mellon Fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. In the following academic year, he will serve as a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He plans on returning to teaching at Fordham in August 2024, after he finishes his book, which he called “one of the first history books to examine archival resources from West Africa, Russia, North America, and England.” 

An Unusual Perspective on the Cold War

The roots of his research began with his childhood in South Africa. He met two doctors from the former Soviet Union who often mentioned Vladimir Lenin, the founding leader of Soviet Russia, the world’s first communist state, and Osei-Opare grew curious about him. In college, he enrolled in courses that focused on Eastern European history. At the same time, he studied the life of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana—and eventually, he reached a surprising conclusion. 

“Nkrumah’s ideologies sounded very similar to Lenin’s economic policy and Soviet philosophies. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on that, and it just spiraled from there,” said Osei-Opare, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Over the past decade, he has continued to study how Ghana sought to refashion its political economy out of colonialism’s extractive model, along with the nation’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

“Now my research has broadened to look at the Cold War in general and Africa’s role in shaping the Cold War. People in the West think of the Cold War as something solely between the U.S. and Soviet Union. But in fact, Africa was one of the big players. I’m trying to push Americans to think about the role that Africans have played in shaping what we know as the Cold War, in addition to the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and race,” he said.  

A Shift in Student Understanding of African History

Since he joined Fordham in 2019, Osei-Opare has taught six courses related to his expertise and today’s world, including slavery’s long-lasting impacts and racism in the American educational system. 

His course Understanding Historical Change: Africa, which is a requirement for all students, has improved many students’ knowledge of African history, said Osei-Opare. 

“Many students come into the class without the best understanding of what Africa is,” he said. “Through this course, I have shown them how the idea of Africa as a wild, barbaric place is pervasive. I show them where these ideas come from, how Africans have fought back against these ideas, and why they still persist.” 

In 2020, the United Student Government at Rose Hill awarded him the Beacon Exemplar Award for his excellent work as an educator. In 2022, he also served as the keynote speaker at Fordham’s Diversity Graduation ceremony for Black students.

But for all the recognition he’s received for inspiring students, he says that his students are often the ones who inspire him. 

“I’ve come across some wonderful students at Fordham who have helped me think about my research and African history through insightful analysis and questions and whose own research interests have expanded my own expertise,” said Osei-Opare. “They have also challenged me to think about what it means to be a Black male faculty member at a predominantly white instituion higher ed institution and encouraged me to continue to push for an anti-racist institution.” 

He recalled some of his most rewarding moments as an educator at Fordham. After the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, several students wrote to him, thanking him for helping them to see things differently and discuss issues with a more educated perspective. And at the end of his course UHC: Africa, he said he saw a shift in his students, too. 

“Before class began, I asked students to send me three words that come to mind when they think of Africa. At first, they submitted words like ‘dark continent,’ ‘safari,’ and ‘animals.’ At the end of the semester, new words popped up: ‘socialism,’ ‘Pan-Africanism,’ ‘Black consciousness,’ ‘colonialism,’” he said. “There was a shift in seeing Africa as a place where you go and see animals to a place where humans with ideas live and exist.” 

Last summer, Saul Cornell, Ph.D., the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, weighed in on U.S. Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. At the heart of the case is a 1911 law that says New Yorkers who carry a concealed firearm outside their home must demonstrate a special need for self-protection. 

Gun-control activists want to keep this law because it will prevent some people from carrying guns and committing violent acts, said Cornell. However, National Rifle Association conservatives want to get rid of this law so more people can carry guns without having to give a reason, he said. The court is now trying to decide whether or not this law violates the Second Amendment. 

Cornell, a historian whose work has been widely cited by legal scholars, said that history supports the notion of needing a reason to carry a gun. However, conservative justices who will decide the case are claiming their decision is based on historical precedent, yet willfully ignoring actual historical facts that support the regulation of guns, he said.

“To understand the constitutionality of a law, we need to ask three questions: What does that law mean to Americans today? What does it mean to the courts? And what did it mean at the time that it was written and enacted?” Cornell said in this faculty mini-lecture filmed in March. “In most cases, the answers to those questions do not overlap at all. And in the case of guns, the disjuncture between those questions is, in some ways, wider than almost any other area of American law.”

In the video, Cornell explains his role in the court case, which follows a cascade of shootings across the country: in New York, most recently in a Buffalo supermarket and a New York City subway car, and in Texas, the tragic shooting in Robb Elementary School, where 21 people were killed—19 of them children. 

The final decision from the court may arrive this June, said Cornell, who also recently wrote an opinion piece for Slate on the matter. 

“Given these horrific events, it is hard to fathom how the U.S. Supreme Court could be contemplating striking down a century-old New York gun regulation,” he wrote in the May 19 Slate piece, “but based on the oral argument in the case, this unthinkable reality seems almost inevitable unless the court comes to its senses … and recognizes the long history of gun regulation and enforcement in America, including limits on public carry.”

“It’s common for historians and the general public to say that there are little to no sources about women from the past. There’s actually a ton of material, but it hasn’t been integrated into the way that we tell the history of the city,” said Gribetz, an associate professor of theology who was recently awarded a $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on her book. 

“I want to shift our focus away from the usual suspects—King David, Emperor Constantine, Sultan Salah ad-Din—and toward the many women who made contributions to the city,” she said. 

Jerusalem: A Feminist History will serve as a historical account of the city from Biblical times to the present—a period that spans more than 3,000 years. Instead of focusing on the city’s male leaders, it will highlight women from all social classes, from the queens of Jerusalem to enslaved women and servants from wealthy households, said Gribetz. 

A Heroine from the First Century

Among the featured women will be Helena of Adiabene, a first-century queen. A native of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Helena converted to Judaism and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When she arrived, the city was suffering from famine. She used her wealth to import figs and other agricultural products from nearby countries. Thanks to her philanthropic efforts, she became a beloved figure in Jerusalem, said Gribetz.

“Helena is a woman from outside of the city who becomes a hero within Jerusalem. In the many centuries after her death, Jews and Christians continue to tell stories about her,” Gribetz said. “She’s actually a relatively minor character in the first century, but she helps us see new things about the city’s history.”

The city of Jerusalem itself is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, Gribetz said. 

“In our earliest written sources about Jerusalem, people imagine the city as a sister, mother, partner, or widow. That personification of Jerusalem often happens when the city is in danger of coming under foreign rule or destruction in times of war,” Gribetz said. 

New Insights From Tombstones and Old Records

Gribetz said the inspiration for her book emerged during her first years at Fordham, when the Center for Medieval Studies asked her to teach a course on medieval Jerusalem. 

“I kept noticing women in ways that I had never thought about, in terms of Jerusalem’s history,” said Gribetz, who taught the course for several years, beginning in 2016. “At a certain point, I realized that the way I constructed my syllabus was in line with this very standard narrative of Jerusalem’s history, but there were many other ways to tell that history.”

In the following years, she received research grants and support from Fordham, including the theology department’s Rita Houlihan grant, which allowed her to research topics that led to her book. She is currently living in Jerusalem, where she is interviewing scholars and locals, participating in city tours, and studying texts at libraries, museums, and archives. The texts include funerary inscriptions on tombstones from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, as well as other archaeological remains, including from synagogues, churches, and mosques. 

“Our literary sources often focus more on men than women, so we have to get creative with the kinds of sources that we use to reconstruct history,” said Gribetz. “But there are still many ways to find traces of these women.” 

‘This History Belongs to Many Different People’

Through her book, Gribetz said she aims to push back against the idea that we’re limited in the kinds of stories we can tell. 

“If we’re creative with the questions we ask and the sources that we use, then we can tell history in a way that incorporates the stories of a much broader segment of the population, whether it’s in Jerusalem or in other cities or contexts,” said Gribetz, who has also written Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

Gribetz will spend the coming few years writing the book, which will be published by Princeton University Press. In addition to exploring the history of women in Jerusalem, Gribetz said she also hopes that her book weaves together the stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and shows that the city’s diversity is a strength, rather than a liability. 

“I would like to think that my book may help encourage people in all these different communities to appreciate what a beautiful thing it is to share such a deep history with the city, rather than to compete over who has exclusive claims to it,” Gribetz said. “I hope that my book conveys how complicated, interesting, and beautiful this history is, and that this history belongs to many different people.”

“Many people don’t believe the Middle Ages are interesting. They only learn about that period through books, TV shows, and popular culture. But there’s so much influence on our world today that we don’t really see,” said Campagna, a master’s student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who is studying medieval studies. “Transcribing records—even property records, as boring as that may sound—is part of understanding how our modern world came to be.” 

Campagna grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where she loved reading historical novels with her father. But she said she never considered history as a legitimate career path until college. 

“My history classes opened my eyes to a different way of seeing the world,” said Campagna, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020. “And Fordham has one of the best centers for medieval studies in the country. I met some incredible faculty and got involved with the community, and things took off from there.”

Signs of the Medieval Period at Rose Hill 

Campagna is a project manager for Medieval New York, a Fordham-based website that identifies how the medieval period has influenced modern-day New York City. Since last summer, Fordham students have been developing itineraries that highlight parts of the city that are inspired by the European Middle Ages, including dozens of Gothic churches, as well as remnants from the pre-colonial period that are still visible today. When complete, the itineraries will feature audio guides and augmented reality recreations of New York City during what we commonly view as the “medieval period” on the website, said Campagna. 

“A good example is the Met Cloisters, a medieval art museum in Manhattan that’s partially composed of old structures from Europe. So you have this combination of the Middle Ages and medievalism sitting in an old-growth forest in the middle of present-day New York City,” said Campagna. 

The medieval period also reveals itself on Fordham’s campus, she added. 

“Keating Hall is an example of medieval-inspired architecture. Fordham, Columbia, and City College of New York all have this super Gothic style with buildings meant to remind us of castles,” Campagna said, adding that Gothic style is characteristic of the Middle Ages. “A lot of people associate the Middle Ages with the birth of the university as we know it, like Oxford and Cambridge, but also with a certain kind of scholarship and history that we see as legitimate. We still pull from that architectural style in order to call back to that time and project a certain image of authority.” 

Surprising Findings on Women in Medieval London

Campagna is also involved with Medieval Londoners, an online catalog of all identifiable people who lived in London during the Middle Ages. She collects and organizes data and then uploads it to the main website, which is accessible to the general public. 

“It’s a collective biography. This is pretty popular in medieval studies because you often don’t have a lot of information about one individual. But if you have a little bit of information about a lot of people within a certain social group, you can learn about what their lives might have been like by looking at all of them in aggregate,” Campagna said.    

The Medieval Londoners project inspired her undergraduate thesis, for which she studied the lives of elite women who lived in medieval London. 

“Through archival records, I saw that when a wealthy husband died, his wife often took over their business. If she married again, her new husband could take over that business. But he needed her input because of her experience and skills,” Campagna said. “It was exciting to me that women were so involved in the economic system during this time.” 

Her current master’s thesis also draws from life in medieval London. For part of her thesis, she is creating a crowdsourcing project called Get to Know Medieval Londoners, where she will train volunteers to transcribe medieval property records and collect data that will be used to better understand life in the medieval period. The data will then be uploaded to the Medieval Londoners website, which is open to the public. 

“The goal is less about the actual research, and more about collaboration and accessibility. In this country and across the world, there’s all this incredible research that only other scholars will read. I think it’s valuable to make sure that this research has a wider purpose, instead of being hoarded inside the academic system,” said Campagna, who will defend her master’s thesis this summer. 

Dismantling Academic Stereotypes

Campagna’s research is intertwined with the digital humanities, an academic field that uses the latest technology to answer traditional scholarly questions. She is among a growing group of students who are merging medieval studies with the digital humanities, said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., associate professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

“Grace is one of the first students in our program to have a formal minor field in digital humanities and to be writing a thesis squarely on a digital topic,” Paul said. “Her work is very exciting and cutting edge and points the way not only to the future of projects like these, but also the humanities.” 

Campagna said she appreciates how the digital humanities make research more accessible to a 21st-century audience. 

“I was really drawn to that format of researching history. It’s very collaborative and accessible, not just one person sitting alone in a library with a lamp, poring over old manuscripts,” she said, chuckling. “I want to keep working with medieval documents, possibly for a digital humanities center, and present them in a way that is interesting and accessible—where people can actually learn something from them.” 

As such, Fordham University in London will be offering a series of virtual lectures and classes next semester that will reflect both traditional and contemporary aspects of the city, the U.K., and Europe, said Mark Simmons, interim head and director of academic affairs there. The offerings will be available to all full-time Fordham undergraduates.

“We will be creating an immersive experience, a multidisciplinary approach to what London is about today, one that ranges from subjects on gender and identity in modern Britain to a Bollywood take on Shakespeare to parallels of Brexit in U.S. politics,” he said.

The array of 3-credit courses includes several English courses that delve into the Romantics as well as the Modernists; a history course on 20th-century Europe; a political science course on European politics; and business courses on ethics, legal frameworks, and global investments, as well as a marketing class on global sustainability. There will be virtual tours of the city’s modern and contemporary architecture, and another tour that looks back at the Victorian era. Virtual internships will continue to be on offer next semester.

In addition, two learning series will give students a taste of what Fordham London has to offer.

A one-credit weekly seminar titled Britain Today will feature an ensemble Fordham London faculty on subjects that range from modern UK history and government, media’s role in the U.K., London’s arts and theater scene, the landscape of religion in today’s Britain, and London’s role as a world financial capital.

Simmons said that the seminar provides a sampling of courses on offer at Fordham London but would be interesting to others as well.

“For students who wanted to learn about London this would give you a flavor of British society,” said Simons.

The London Business Speaker Series is a certificate program curated by Meghann L. Drury-Grogan, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media management at the Gabelli School of Business. The program will run weekly from Feb. 8, to be held every Thursday around lunchtime in New York. The series will tap into established Gabelli School partnerships, including the London offices of Ernst and Young, Bloomberg, and Accenture.

“The program will showcase the relationships we’ve been able to build here in London with various alumni and other established ties that will give students a global experience,” she said. “There will be a plethora of different perspectives that give students who can’t study abroad, for whatever the reason, a chance to learn about the U.K. Now that we have the opportunity of putting on these virtual events, we hope to continue this into the future.”

Geoff Snell, who teaches the architecture courses, said he plans to prerecord his tours during daylight hours and deliver the lectures live.

“When we had to go live this past spring we learned what worked and what didn’t work,” timing-wise, he said. “We want everyone to be engaged with the material.”

Snell’s course, like those in all the disciplines, includes a healthy dose of the contemporary juxtaposed with the modern. The skyscrapers of London’s business district, such as the Shard and the Walkie Talkie, are featured alongside St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Pancreas Station, and other Victorian masterpieces.

“We’ll be jumping from art deco to Christopher Wren to the Gherkin, all different styles, but like so much else in London, every architectural style has something to do with what went before,” he said. 

Students should register for classes by Dec. 4; those who had applied to study abroad for the Spring 2021 semester have priority for registration.

Eighty years ago today—on September 30, 1939—Fordham competed in the first live televised broadcast of a football game. NBC sent two iconoscope cameras (recently patented by RCA), an announcer, and a crew to Randall’s Island Stadium, where the Rams beat Waynesburg College, 34–7. The game was shown on W2XBS (now WNBC, Channel 4). An estimated 500 people saw the broadcast, possibly including some early television set owners. The majority of TV viewers saw the game at the NBC pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. (Five months after beating Waynesburg, the Rams made history again, playing in the first live TV broadcast of a college basketball game, in which Fordham lost to the University of Pittsburgh at Madison Square Garden.)

Football came to Fordham in fall 1882. Fordham defeated Seton Hall in its first-ever contest and went on to win six of seven games in its first season.

The team’s nickname, the Rams, was born in 1893, during a football game against the United States Military Academy at West Point. Students came up with a cheer: “One dam, two dam, three dam, Fordham!” It was an immediate hit, but Jesuit faculty members frowned on the slightly vulgar chant, saying such behavior was unbecoming of Fordham gentlemen. Students quickly substituted “ram” for the offending word. Suddenly Fordham had its mascot.

In fall 1936, Fordham football’s famed linemen, the Seven Blocks of Granite—John Druze, Al Babartsky, Vincent Lombardi, Alex Wojciechowicz, Nat Pierce, Ed Franco, and Leo Paquin—helped the Rams dominate the sport and capture the attention of the nation.

Lombardi, FCRH ’37, of course, would go on to greater fame as a head coach in the NFL and an icon of American culture. (The Super Bowl trophy is named the Vince Lombardi Trophy.)

On Saturday, September 28, the Rams pleased Family Weekend visitors with a 23-16 win over the Richmond Spiders at Coffey Field.

A documentary—narrated by New York Giants announcer Bob Papa, GABELLI ’86, and featuring rarely seen archival footage—traces the rich history of Fordham football from its roots in the 1880s to its emergence in recent years as one of the nation’s top programs at the Division I FCS level. See the opening of the film, below.

To purchase a DVD of the film, which is available for $50, call the Fordham athletics ticket office at 855-RAM-TIXS.

Throughout the weekend, 35 members of the Class of 1968 participated in the Thomas More College Oral History Project, which was supported by Fordham faculty and run by a team of students spearheaded by Nutting, a professor emerita of history at North Seattle College.

The project, including audio recordings and transcriptions of the interviews, was published on the Fordham Libraries site last August. It highlights the kind of reminiscences often shared at college reunions—favorite classes, lifelong friendships, and defining moments—from a group of women who saw beyond the boundaries of expectation, both at Fordham and beyond.

‘A Real Blessing’

Nutting, a Washington Heights native who later moved to the Bronx, told stories both hilarious—like the time a professor threw a bologna sandwich out a classroom window—and moving.

“A real blessing occurred when Fordham decided that it would open its gates to women here at Rose Hill,” she said of the college, which opened in 1964 and closed a decade later. “If I had not come here, I would not be the kind of person I am,” she added. “Intellectually, socially, politically, religiously, Fordham transformed me.”

Nutting said that one of the most powerful memories she has of her time at TMC is of taking a Greyhound bus through the American South with Lorraine Archibald, her only African-American classmate.

After working together in Mexico and living with a local family as part of a Fordham program one summer, Nutting and Archibald were forced to take buses home because of a national airline strike. Out of fear for Archibald’s safety, they decided that Nutting would get off the bus alone to get them snacks at a rest stop in Texas.

“I was coming back,” she said, “and all of a sudden I was surrounded by what I call ‘good ol’ boys’ who wanted to know why I was sitting with that … they used the n-word. And I lost my Irish temper in a way a New Yorker can lose a temper.”

Nutting’s response defused a tense situation, but the long bus ride home “profoundly changed me,” she said.

She also recalled taking a course with legendary media critic Marshall McLuhan, who held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham at the time. “He taught us about the global village and he talked a lot about looking at the rear-view mirror as you go forward. Those two lessons became really important as I moved forward in history, and particularly as I taught history, because you need to have that perspective when you’re heading in a new direction.”

‘She Expected Great Things of Us’

Barbara Hartnett Hall, a Bronx native who discovered TMC when a recruiter came to her high school, also told her story as part of the project. She did not always think of higher education as a realistic possibility, but after receiving scholarships from New York state and from Fordham, she was able to attend.

“I felt like the luckiest person in the world,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that that world was going to be open to me.”

Now a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig in Fort Lauderdale, where she practices land use and environmental law, Hall recalled being intimidated by the academic options at TMC. She signed up for 18 credits in her first semester before meeting with assistant dean Patricia R. Plante, Ph.D., who encouraged her to drop three credits. “‘You’re in New York City,’” she said Plante told her. “‘You know, this city is an education. You have to take advantage of it.’”

“She was pretty amazing,” Hall said of Plante, who later became the first woman dean of TMC, “because she treated us like she expected great things of us and that we were capable of it.”

Hall also shared memories of her time as co-founder and captain of the women’s basketball team. The women wore uniforms designed by a teammate’s older brother. “They seemed cool then,” she recalled of the outfits, “but they were funny when you look back.”

In talking about her time at TMC and afterward, Hall recalled walking into many new and unknown situations, including in the workplace. “I think there were a lot of firsts in our generation” she said, “and Thomas More was just one.”

‘My Life Was Suddenly Changing and Expanding’

Like Hall, Marie Farenga Danziger was born and raised in the Bronx, and saw a previously unthought-of opportunity arise with the opening of TMC.

She said that coming back to the Rose Hill campus for Jubilee last year gave her “this instant recall of my very first day at Fordham in September 1964. I remember walking up that path, in particular, focusing on the lovely trees on each side of the path and somehow knowing that my life was suddenly changing and expanding, and I was enormously excited.”

As a junior, she took the transformative step of studying abroad in Paris for the year, an opportunity that had drawn her to Fordham when looking into colleges. Despite having never flown on an airplane before leaving for Paris, Danziger became worldly during her year abroad, traveling throughout Europe and becoming fluent in French.

“It changed the rest of my life,” she said of the experience. “It made me the person I am today.”

Other formative experiences Danziger had at Fordham came from her time as the social chair for the Horizons club, which invited notable speakers to campus. In that role, she brought famous figures like Helen Hayes, Salvador Dalí, and Sidney Lumet to Rose Hill. This kind of cultural exposure made Danziger “feel that there [was]this wider world out there, and maybe, maybe, I had a bit of access to it.”

Danziger, who retired from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government just before the 2018 reunion, was touched to discover that several of her fellow alumnae still remembered her speech as class salutatorian in 1968. The speech, which came on the heels of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, referenced the movie Zorba the Greek, in which the title character teaches a young man how to dance in the face of sadness and violence.

“Fordham taught us to dance,” she said. “It certainly did that for me.”

Nutting expressed the same sentiment with a different metaphor: “I have told many people in my life that Fordham gave me wings,” she said.

“I want to see you soar,” she told the student interviewers. “In 20 years, I want to find out what you have done with your lives. And one of the things that you’re going to find out as women is that there are going to be some really difficult choices. Make them the best way you can … and you’ll find that you can do that.”

Jubilee 2019 will take place on the Rose Hill campus on May 31 through June 2.

—Adam Kaufman contributed to this story. 

Titled “The Historiographical Journey of La Malinche,” the paper states that the historical narrative projected “contradictory constructions of La Malinche” that reflect the attitudes of those who wrote her story and reveal biases of ethnicity, gender, and class.

The paper received a Highly Commended award from the Dublin-based Global Undergraduate Awards in 2018, an honor bestowed on the top 10 percent of entries out of thousands of submissions from hundreds of colleges and universities. The awards program recognizes top undergraduate work from around the world and aims to connect students across cultures and disciplines.

A Variety of Perspectives

For the paper, Anthony examined books and texts from the 1500s to the 21st century and found the portrayal to be initially respectful, but progressively derogatory as the centuries passed, culminating in a Victorian-era publication that portrayed La Malinche as something of a “loose woman.” It wasn’t until recently that she received sympathetic treatment, with the publication of Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin’s Choices (University of New Mexico Press, 2006), which provided a 21st-century feminist view of her.

Anthony said that La Malinche was far more than a translator; she was akin to an adviser to Cortés and an intimate confidant. She had two children with him and yet her “importance was denigrated,” he said, and treated historically as though she “didn’t have any agency and was a hanger-on.”

“I think part of the reasons I was drawn to the stories was to see these different perspectives,” he said. “It’s also interesting to see how much control she wielded as the sole source of meaning for Cortes”

He said the different characterizations of La Malinche speak to the changes in society, and noted how looking at her through various lenses provided him with a clearer picture of the writers’ political motives.

“This research was pivotal work for me because it helped me with feminist perspectives,” said Anthony, whose work in the past focused primarily on general indigenous perspectives.

Looking Through the Lens of Native Peoples

Last spring, at Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s research fair Ars Nova, Anthony presented “Aztecs in Nuremberg: The Humanist Interpretation of the Conquest of Mexico,” which examined the humanist interpretation of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He noted that 16th-century scholars from Europe viewed the experiences of the Aztecs through the lens of ancient Greece and Rome.

“My favorite historians of this period can read the Aztec language, look at their writings, and contextualize those,” said Anthony, who is double majoring in history and classical languages and literature with a minor in Latin American and Latino studies.

He noted that Aztecs were far from a homogeneous culture, but instead represented a variety of cultures and languages, not unlike Europeans.

“Studying the Aztecs showed me how many different sides of the story there are,” he said. “That’s crucial to understanding history and not getting bogged down by your preconceived beliefs.”

A Fresh Focus on Museums

Over the last few months, Anthony has been busy applying for graduate schools and thinking about his final project for his senior year. He’s been accepted to one doctoral program already, and he’s waiting to hear from others. Research-wise, he said he’s been concentrating on how museums display Aztec art and culture.

Museums often contribute to an “American exoticism” of indigenous cultures, he said, more often telling the story of the ancient cultures through the prism of U.S. sensibilities. He also noted that the way museums acquired such treasures needs to be highlighted in order to truly understand their colonial context.

“I want to look into how all these explorers in the 1800s discovered these artifacts and acted as if they were the sole owners,” he said.

He added that he sees his final project as a continuation of the work he started in his junior year and wants to examine, as he did with the 17th-century humanists, how contemporary historians and museums understand their holdings.

“In many ways, they emphasize that the so-called discoverers are heroes, as if discovering Aztec art were a form of finding Atlantis,” he said. “We need to see how, in some ways, the culture is unknowable and fundamentally different from the West, not something to exoticize.”

2019 Competition Is Open

Assistant Dean Josie Gregoire, who coordinates FCLC’s participation in this program encouraged other students to apply for the awards this year.

“We are so pleased and proud of all of our Fordham students who submitted their best work to the international Undergraduate Awards program; over 50 Fordham students submitted their best work last year! In 2018, for the second year in a row (and Fordham’s second year of participation) FCLC has a second Undergraduate Awards Winner,” said Gregoire.

“This year’s competition is now open and we encourage all students to submit their work.”

America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

These are the critical questions at the core of five upcoming events: A joint conference between faculty from Fordham and Ben-Gurion University and the four-part In Dialogue Series on Polish-Jewish relations, hosted by Fordham, Columbia University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

The faculty conference will take place from October 7 to 8 on the Lincoln Center campus. Fordham and Ben-Gurion scholars from Israel will present “Appropriation in (and of) the Premodern World,” in which they’ll address how people from different cultures and religious communities appropriated each other’s ideas, texts, legal practices, spaces, art, and material culture.

“Because we wanted to be inclusive with interreligious encounters and exchanges, we came up with this idea of appropriation: how different cultures use and appropriate different sites, texts, or traditions, and make it their own,” said Magda Teter, a Fordham history professor and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies.

The four-part series will examine Polish-Jewish relations from the 15th century to the modern age. Discussion topics include the Jews’ belonging and exclusion throughout history, nationalism and antisemitism in the aftermath of World I, and how perceptions from the past have changed over time. The series will culminate with a full-day symposium on the post-WWII era at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

“Jews have always been a minority group, living scattered for centuries,” said Teter. “So this certainly raises some of the larger questions of rootedness, belonging, of who belongs to what story, how history is told, and the ramifications for social inclusion and exclusion.”

Related to the series is a conversation between Teter and David Stromberg—a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem, and one of the inaugural Fordham-New York Public Library Research Fellows in Jewish Studies.

The events obviously hold appeal for scholars interested in European, Jewish, and Polish history, said Teter. But even for those who are oblivious to Polish or Jewish history, the discussions may still be quite relevant.

“We are living in an era where we’re witnessing the questions of how American history is told,” said Teter. “Who belongs to the rubric of American history? Who is an American? Who is not American? In that way, there might be some parallels.”

All events are free, but registration is strongly encouraged.

“Appropriation in and of the Premodern World: The First Annual Conference of Fordham and Ben-Gurion Universities”: October 7-8 at McMahon Hall

“In Dialogue” on Polish-Jewish Relations:

Part I: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the period of the partitions. October 4, 2018, 6 p.m. at Fordham Law School

Part II: Polish-Jewish relations of the interwar period. November 15, 2018, 6 p.m. at Fordham University, Lincoln Center

Part III: Polish-Jewish relations during WWII. February 21, 2019, 6 p.m. Location TBD

Part IV: Full-day symposium on the post-WWII era. May 5, 2019 at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research