This year’s J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship was awarded to Patrick J. Rael, an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. The fellowship committee was impressed by his proposal on “African American Thought and Identity in the Antebellum North.” During his fellowship tenure he will make use of a wide range of sources at the Library of Congress. He plans a book-length study of black public speech in the northern states from the 1820s to the start of the Civil War. In particular, two areas of concern to be researched are the nature of black identity in the antebellum North and the origins of the black protest tradition in light of recent scholarship.
Hugh R. Slotten received the 1998-99 Aerospace History Fellowship offered by the AHA in conjunction with the National Air and Space Administration. Dr. Slotten earned his doctorate in history of science from the University of Wisconsin at Edison in 1991 after graduate degrees in meteorology and history of science. Slotten has been a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. His past publications were about regulation of radio broadcasting. Dr. Slatten’s fellowship study will be on communication satellites, broadcasting, and policy decision making in the United States, 1958-88. His research will focus on the introduction of international satellite technology resulting from the Satellite Act of 1962 and decisions on domestic broadcasting in developing cable television especially in the 1970s and 1980s.
