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Presidential archivist gives insight to history majors

Posted by :jprokop On : April 8, 2013
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Kaylyn Peterson/Copy chief Tom Branigar, class of ‘74, shares his experiences from working in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library from 1977-2008. He showed his coffee mug celebrating the library’s history.

Kaylyn Peterson/Copy chief
Tom Branigar, class of ‘74, shares his experiences from working in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library from 1977-2008. He showed his coffee mug celebrating the library’s history.

The decision of what to do after graduation is always a tough one. New graduates often follow their passion, and that is exactly what one alumnus did.

Tom Branigar, a 1974 Linfield graduate, shared his experiences of working in the presidential archives from 1977-2008, as well as the changes made to the record keeping process during the years, April 4 to a small number of history majors and other faculty.

Branigar took his passion for history from a history minor to working in the presidential archive at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan.

“I was at the right place at the right time,” Branigar said. “It was a great honor to get to work at the Eisenhower Library.”

After finishing his degree at Linfield, Branigar attended Western Washington University, where he pursued his masters in Archives and Record Management. It was just as he finished his degree at Western Washington University when the news of three job openings at the Eisenhower Library reached him.

“[The Eisenhower Library] had Western Washington graduates work for them before, and so they knew the reputation of the school and the archive program. So I was lucky to be there at the time I was,” Branigar said.

Branigar had access to documents from the Eisenhower administration, and he explained that George Washington set up a rule that the presidential records of any given president were the personal processions of that president.

“George Washington took a very British idea and made it his own,” Branigar said.

It wasn’t until Jimmy Carter’s presidency that this would shift the ownership of the records to the federal government. This caused a divide in the collection of documents today.

Branigar said that much has also changed since the introduction of digital documents.

“Its a whole new age, and there was actually an incident when a bunch of documents had been destroyed, but since it was originally sent by email, they were able to recover them,” Branigar said.

According to Branigar, the main users of the Eisenhower Library are graduate students writing their dissertations, historians writing biographies and government officials.

While Branigar worked for the Eisenhower Library, he became an expert in the Eisenhower genealogy.

“In Germany, Eisenhower is like the last name Smith in America, everyone has it. So I have a lot of people who think they’re related to President Eisenhower,” Branigar said.

Branigar said that the most interesting document he came across was one he referred to as “the smoking gun” memo. This documented the destruction of all the files from Eisenhower’s transitional head quarters at the Commodore hotel in New York.

Kaylyn Peterson/Copy chief

Kaylyn Peterson can be reached at linfieldreviewcopy@gmail.com.

 

Professor emeritus of history explores novelist’s life

Posted by :jprokop On : February 27, 2012
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Dr. Richard W. Etulain, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, came to Linfield on Feb. 22 and discussed the life of novelist Wallace Stegner, who Etulain believes to be the most important writer of the American West since John Steinback. Christina Shane/Staff writer

A collision of history and literature occurred Feb. 22, as students and scholars gathered in the Austin Reading Room of the Nicholson Library to hear a special guest lecture on a novelist’s life.

Thanks to the Ken and Donna Ericksen Endowed English Department Fund, nationally recognized scholars such as Dr. Richard W. Etulain, professor emeritus of history at the University of New
Mexico, are brought to Linfield’s campus.

Etulain gave his lecture, “Wallace Stegner: Wise Man of the American West,” bringing Western American history to life through the literary works of Wallace Stegner, who Etulain considers“ Our most important writer [of] the American West since John Steinbeck.”

Etulain has had an extensive career combining history and literature as he has been both president of the western History Association and the Western Literature
association.

“Professor Etulain straddles the fence between the two disciplines,” David Sumner, professor of English and environmental  studies, said when introducing the historian.

“I was trying to ride two horses at one time,” Etulain said.

So was his fellow historian and novelist, Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historiographer of the twentieth-century American West—who was the main subject of Etulain’s lecture.

Etulian’s lecture was teeming with academic stories—many of which were personal experiences with Stegner himself. In 1995, Etulain published “Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature,” which features intimate conversations between the two scholars.

His interviews encompassed not only historical and literary discourse, but also addressed environmentalism—a philosophy that Stegner reinforced in many of his novels.

“I thought the most interesting part was the fact that Stegner was fairly successful despite not publishing
novels under one specific genre,” freshman Summer Yasoni said.

Dr. Etulain addressed those who are familiar with his work and desire more information, as well as those who had never heard of him, which represented a fair amount of those who attended.

Roughly one-third of the audience raised their hand when asked if they had previously known the works of Stegner.

“I tried to show Linfield students and faculty members how much [Stegner] has contributed to our understanding of the American West,” Etulain said.

Etulain’s most recent work, “Abraham Lincoln and Oregon Country Politics in the Civil War Era,” is expected to be published next year.

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Christina Shane/Staff reporter
Christina can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com

Scholar shares Sufi history

Posted by :jprokop On : November 14, 2011
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Category: Culture

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Latif Bolat, a native of Turkey, gave a presentation about the history and development of Sufi philosophy, poetry and music, followed by a concert in which he played some of the music mentioned in his lecture Nov. 10 in Ice Auditorium.

In the pre-concert lecture, Bolat explained the origins of Sufi mysticism and its parallel but separate existence to orthodox Islam.

He told stories about Sufi’s first poets, its first martyr and the people who helped to develop its philosophy.

He also illustrated the differences between Sufi mysticism and mainstream Islam by comparing the buildings, lifestyles, methods of worship and views on music of the two denominations throughout history.

Bolat began the concert by giving an in-depth description of the development of Sufi music, which he called “troubadour music” and compared to the troubadours of Europe.

He said the Sufi word for troubadour translates literally as “the one who is in love,” a reference both to the musicians’ love for their god and to their tendency to start off as shepherds who have their hearts broken by young women.

“This is why there are 40,000 brokenhearted love songs,” Bolat said. “So many young men would begin making music for this girl, and then realize their true beloved was up there, not this woman who married someone else and had eight babies. There’s a Sufi saying that goes, ‘If you lift a stone, there’s a mystic poet under there.’”

Bolat read Sufi poetry in Turkish so that the audience could hear the sound of the language before rereading the poems in English.

He performed several Sufi songs and encouraged the audience to sing along with the refrain of one of them.

Two of the songs were 800 years old, while two others were about the bombing of Hiroshima and Robin Hood figures in Turkish history.

For the last part of the concert, Bolat put on a slideshow of Turkish landscapes. He accompanied the slideshow with more Sufi music.

Bolat has performed in concert halls, community centers and universities around the world and has led cultural tours to Turkey for the past 10 years.

“I like traveling,” Bolat said. “In order to host cultural tours, people get to learn every single stone of the places they visit. I enjoy getting to know places so well.”

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Sharon Gollery/Culture editor
Sharon Gollery can be reached at linfieldreviewculture@gmail.com.