Updated August 16, 2025 from Conway, Arkansas.

Research

I finished a draft article manuscript over the summer about an episode in the history of right-to-work laws. Revisions are next. Then I’ll solicit some feedback before submitting to a journal.

On Campus

• Starting my eighteenth year teaching in the History Department at the University of Central Arkansas.
• Three classes on my fall teaching schedule
  • Hist 2302 America in the Modern Era (a survey of United States history after 1865)
  • Hist 4300 Seminar (the research capstone course for majors)
  • Hist 4340 Robber Barons, Radicals, and Reformers
• Continuing as Associate Chair of the History Department, chair the department’s Curriculum Committee, and departmental representative on the college Curriculum Committee.
• Starting first year of a three-year term on Faculty Senate.
• I’m working with colleagues on the Teaching Technology Advisory Committee to choose a new learning management system for the campus.
• Year two as Secretary for the Hudson Chapter of the American Association of University Professionals (AAUP).
• Committee member, Presenting Labor History, Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA).

Reading

I recently finished Christopher Cox’s biography Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn and Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses.

I’m currently reading Anti-Trust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age by Amy Klobuchar and re-reading The Stand to see if I find it as enjoyable now as the first time through in the mid-1990s.

Tools and Tech

I succumbed to the temptation and the power of influencers and ordered a leather cover and notebook inserts from paper republic. It is probably the nicest piece of leather I’ve owned. I haven’t made up my mind yet if the paper republic notebook inserts will work for me or if I’ll stick with my beloved Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. My current plan is to use a Leuchtturm for my bullet-journal-like planner and daily notebook and the paper republic inserts (or similar) for a research journal and blank pages for noodling.

Loss and a Milestone

July 31, 2025 was the first day since the middle of 2001 that we didn’t have a boxer dog in our house. Gibbs passed on July 30. He followed his sister, Abby, who died on March 19. My heart is still aching.

Over the summer I took my grandson on his first camping trip. He started kindergarten in the middle of August.