November 05, 2007

Society's Annual Meeting - brief report

The State Historical Society of Missouri held its annual meeting on Saturday, November 3, in the Reynolds Alumni Center on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus. Doug Crews, Columbia, is the newly elected president of the Society. Crews is executive director of the Missouri Press Association. Columbians Henry Waters and Al Price were reelected as vice presidents, and Widget Ewing was reelected to the board of trustees. Missouri Supreme Court Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. was newly elected as the first vice president.

Dick Franklin, a former Missouri House member and educator from Independence, received the Distinguished Service Award and Medallion. The award recognizes outstanding service to the Society and the state of Missouri in the promotion and dissemination of knowledge concerning the history of the region. Franklin served as the State Historical Society of Missouri president from 2004 to 2007. He is a member of the board of trustees for the Public School Retirement System of Missouri as well as the Jackson County Historical Society.

Joseph M. Beilein Jr., a resident of Columbia, was awarded the Lewis E. Atherton prize for a master’s thesis for “‘The Presence of These Families is the Cause of the Presence There of the Guerrillas’: The Influence of Little Dixie Households on the Civil War in Missouri,” and Amahia Mallea, a member of the history faculty at Drake University in Des Moines, was awarded the Atherton prize for her doctoral dissertation, “Rivers Running Through: An Urban Environmental History of the Kansas Cities and the Missouri River.” Both Beilein and Mallea completed their work at the Mizzou campus.

The Missouri Symphony Society and Columbians Carol Grove, Megan Boccardi, and Daniel J. Wescott were announced as winners of Brownlee Fund grants during the business meeting. The Society’s Brownlee Fund annually provides cash awards for individuals and organizations proposing to make contributions to the history of Missouri and its citizens. Twenty applicants were announced as recipients of grants at the Society’s meeting.

Other prizewinners included Stephen Aron, professor of history at UCLA, who was named the winner of the Missouri History Book Award for American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State, and Dennis Boman, a teacher at St. Louis University, who received the Eagleton-Waters Book Award for Lincoln’s Resolute Unionist: Hamilton Gamble, Dred Scott Dissenter and Missouri’s Civil War Governor.

Lee Lowenfish, historian, writer, broadcaster, jazz commentator, and journalist, presented the luncheon address, “‘A Consistent Player and a Consistent Christian’: The Midwestern Roots of Branch Rickey’s Idealism and Racial Progressivism, 1904-1942.”

posted @ 9:59 AM
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