News and Features

FSU alumnus Dr. Bryan Banks was in Tallahassee in late February for the 50th Annual Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Conference and took time to speak with us about his time at FSU and his career since graduating.  Dr. Banks received both his Master’s (2011 with Dr. Rafe Blaufarb) and Ph.D. (2014 with Dr.

            While working on his doctorate degree at the University of Iowa, Paul Renfro was captivated by the story of two young girls who went missing and the language around their disappearance. People saying, “this shouldn’t happen here,” and notions of racial and regional innocence sparked his interest.

In an interview discussing his new book, The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome (Cornell University Press, 2019), James Palmer explained the long road to its publication. Palmer, currently an assistant professor in the History Department at FSU spent the better part of the 2010s researching and writing the book. James Palmer was also emphatic about the importance of history for our society today.

Adjusting to remote learning or working from home can be a hard transition. If you are used to working in the library, a coffee shop, or an office, finding yourself at home brings new distractions.

Although FSU’s classes have transitioned to online instruction methods, there are still plenty of ways for history majors and other students in history classes to get their history fix—whether it be for scholarly research or personal interest.

John Cable was traveling with a band in Athens, Georgia. The bass player, majoring in Social Science Education, brought numerous books to their room. Dr. Cable grabbed one and began reading. This is how his love for history started.

FSU hosted the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era (CRE) February 27th-29th, celebrating the golden anniversary of the history conference. The 50th anniversary began with a reception held at the DoubleTree Tallahassee, where scholars of the Revolutionary era came to meet from across the globe.

With over 200 copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, it is easy to fall down the rabbit hole at FSU’s Special Collections.

            Another day, another coronavirus update, another twitter hashtag, another meme. As the disease continues to spread from its outbreak in Wuhan, China, to more countries, the fear and panic leads to more and more comparisons to historical pandemics, specifically the Black Death.