Interview with Andrew O'Shaughnessy

[beginning of interview]

SP: I’ll just start with--a little more obvious, uh, how are things going for you?

AO: Very well, thank you. Uh, I’m in Australia, of course. It’s somewhat bizarre being literally upside down, it’s… early morning here, evening there, and, uh, a lot of the time I’m sleeping you’re awake and vice versa. It’s lovely to be here, nice change of scene, and, uh, I’m trying to write a book so this is a good place really to just be able to focus on that.

SP: Okay, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s that book about, what are you doing in Australia right now?

AO: It’s about Thomas Jefferson’s founding of the University of Virginia, uh, his vision of what a university should be, it’s called The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University.

SP: Alright, with that,

like I mentioned before, I don’t figure on spending too much time today, but maybe if the audio quality is good we can set something up a little longer, some point in the future. But, if you don’t mind, for the sake of the interview, could you just tell me a little about yourself? Where you come from, how you ended up where you are now? That kind of thing.

AO: Yes, uh, I’m originally from Bedfordshire, in England, I went to university at Oxford, I did all my degrees there including my doctorate, uh, I knew when I started my doctorate there were unlikely to be any positions, uh, teaching positions in history at universities because it was particularly stagnant at the time. And so I did a couple of years of school teaching, secondary

level, and then I had the opportunity to go to SMU in Dallas on a one-year visiting position, and while I was there I applied for positions in the United States, and I was appointed at Oshkosh. I was at Oshkosh from 1990 to, um, 2003, and so thirteen years that I was there, uh, I was chairman of the department for five of those years, and I left Oshkosh to go to my present job, which was the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, as well as a professorship at the University of Virginia, and I’ve been there ever since, and that is now a longer period than I

was at Oshkosh, which is rather a shock, but it’s… time has passed so quickly.

SP: Right, I know I’ve only been here two years, but that feels like nothing compared--well, either compared to anyone I know who’s here, or… even in the grand scheme of things; time flies.

AO: Yes, you’re a student there, are you?

SP: I am, yes. Doing this project on behalf of the current chair of the department, Dr. Kercher. We’re working on a history of the history department, which also kind of blends over into just the history of the university generally.

AO: Yes, [indistinct] we coincided for a few years.

SP: So if you don’t mind me asking,

where exactly did you grow up, and what was it like there? You’d mentioned you grew up in England.

AO: Yes, so I grew up in Bedfordshire, it was not where I was born, I was born in Cheshire, but at six months age we moved to Bedfordshire, which is the most central part of England, but… very pleasant, it was not far from where many of the Puritan migrations occurred from East Anglia to Massachusetts, and it was a very pleasant little village I grew up in, but I always had this long-term connection with the United States because my father started to teach at Columbia University in New York from 1968, and so I would spend holidays in New York, and then

we would come back for the entire summer, and during that period I became interested in the local history of the village, about which I collected material over a long period, that became unwieldy, and I eventually focused on one family in the village who’d owned plantations in St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, and I wrote that up both in high school, I wrote up the story of one of them who’d been a radical MP in Parliament, and I also then wrote it up as an undergraduate thesis on the decline and--the rise and decline of one family’s sugar estates in St. Kitts and Nevis, the Paynes of Bedfordshire, P-A-Y-N-E, and that was really what engaged me with the idea of doing postgraduate history.

SP: Right, so you mentioned that your father was a professor while you were growing up, what was your family like when you were growing up? Siblings, anything like that?

AO: Yes, I’ve got an older brother who’s also an academic, he teaches at London University at Queen Mary College, uh, their areas were all very different, my father was in business studies, and had been in business, my brother is in communications, technically he teaches business, but his real interest is really a crossover with history, his particular interest is propaganda, um, what we now call fake news, though he’s been interested in that long before it became so topical.

SP: Alright. So I’m guessing, kind of around high school and then was when you ended up getting interested in history,

um, so did it end up being kind of a hobby, or how did it kind of progress to you studying it in college?

AO: It was a hobby, and it still is in some ways. I always feel rather narrow, because as my job I do my favorite hobby. But that’s how it… you know, that I started studying it, I’ve never really understood people who just see it as another type of career, I remember one professor who retired from Oshkosh, he got rid of all his books and just got golfing clubs and left for Florida, and it just seems very strange, because generally if you’re really keen on your field and an academic, you never stop, you continue to read and take an interest.

SP: Right. So, I’m guessing based on what you mentioned already, um, was it kind of assumed that you’d be going to college from the start? Or how did that come about?

AO: Yes. My father had been to college, my brother went to college, he was five years older, and he eventually became president of the Oxford Union, which was quite a big deal, uh, people like Benazir Bhutto and Boris Johnson are all sort of former presidents… as well as [William Ewart] Gladstone… so it was often assumed he might go into politics, but he only briefly took an interest in politics, and became an academic. So I think it was a lot easier for me than for many people who might be first-generation college, and who may find

sort of the faculty world a cultural shock.

SP: Right. [indistinct]

AO: It still didn’t make it that easy in that it didn’t help me particularly with any contacts, my father wasn’t an historian, and it was, as had been predicted, extremely difficult getting a first appointment. Everywhere you’re getting dozens and dozens of applicants, and some areas are more steadily subscribed than others. I do remember when we interviewed for Stephen Kercher’s position, well over a hundred people applied for that.

SP: You mentioned that you came to Oshkosh in 1990. What was the University like when you got there? What was the history

department like?

AO: Well the department was very small, I think it, uh, it had gone from being a department of over thirty in the early ‘70s, I think it is [indistinct] it was down to six, and when I got there, I think it was about eight people if you included the academic staff, and it had been terribly demoralized because the university system had had to lose about eighty people, or it had to--that had to be lost from Oshkosh, and nearly all of those people were in the English and History departments, they didn’t spread it round, and they were generally people who’d been quite sympathetic to student radicals during the Vietnam War, so it was regarded as a bit of a vendetta,

and a couple of those people had used the time to--had gone and worked elsewhere part-time, but had basically been… taken legal action, and kept up the pressure to be returned, so two of the people in the department were people who had been made redundant from the university for a considerable length of time, and then they--they returned, and obviously they bore some of those scars. And the senior people ironically were rather divided, there were only four of them: two men, and two women. It was divided down gender

lines, and they had once been allies against the former department chair, and by the time I got there they were very hostile to each other. But I have to say, they did not try to pull me in as a young person, it was possible to be friendly with both parties, they were just very antagonistic to each other, it made meetings rather difficult, and I think we lost at least one junior person as a result of the cantankerousness. But I still enjoyed it, I was thrilled to have a position, there was a sense that the University was back on the mend, and things were going well. We were still in the Clow building, which was pretty ugly,

I so like the rooms that the department now has, and the views across the fields and so on, it’s a lot nicer. But I would say that one of the rewards of teaching there was despite this difference between the senior people, it was actually a very happy department, and, uh, people were very supportive of each other and very nice to each other, and, you know, other than this one rift in which the rest of us were not--were not involved, in fact my host here, [indistinct] Bernard [?], came to speak at the… at Oshkosh while I was there, and he now is a senior professor at the University

of Melbourne, and he says he remembers it as the nicest department he visited. It still stands out in his mind, and he was very impressed that after his talk, every member of the department came out to dinner with him, and it was such friendliness and joviality and warmth, and sadly, I was a little worried, because it was a very junior department, and the senior people gradually started to retire, I was a bit worried when I was chair that we were going to implode, because we would get very good people for a short time, and then they would leave, and, you know, some of our former employees, one was recently head of the history department at Madison, another teaches at the University of California, Davis, but,

you know, these were really--another is at the University of Binghamton, one won a major prize from the American Historical Association, uh, these were really quite good hires, but we didn’t have them for very long, so I’m very pleased that the department has settled down now, and that there’s plenty of continuity.

SP: Right. I know there’s still some folks in the history department that I believe were around while you were there, I know Dr. [Thomas] Rowland is still around, he’s going to be retiring at the end of this year…

AO: Yes.

SP: …Might be a few others, maybe Dr. [Kimberly] Rivers.

AO: Yes, she was there. Actually, most of them came in just before I left, although Dr. Rivers had been there several years, but your Russian historian [Karl Loewenstein] was there,

and I coincided with him two or three years, and your Latin Americanist [Ana Maria Kapelusz-Poppi] was there right at the end of my time. So there’d not actually been a lot of people appointed since then.

SP: Right, so, some of the people who ended up in the department when you had arrived, they seem like they end up in the news a fair amount whenever you’re looking through the student newspaper over the years, you know. Werner Braatz, and, uh, Barbara Sniffen and Virginia Crane.

AO: Yes.

SP: Folks like them, they seem to have a penchant for showing up in the school paper for one reason or another, but…

AO: Yes.

SP: Do you think there was any one person in particular you might say was the most memorable, um, from the history department?

AO: I liked all four of those people, they’re real characters,

as I’d said, the men didn’t like the women, the women didn’t like the men. Virginia Crane is still alive, I don’t know if you’ve thought--she lives in Oshkosh, I don’t know if you’ve thought of interviewing her.

SP: Yeah, we’ve been trying to get in touch with her, but--just kind of playing phone tag, so…

AO: Right, and she’s got a daughter, Amelia, who’s at the University. Barbara Sniffen was this… she was one of the people who was laid off, for several--for many years, during which she had cancer, and it was obviously a traumatic time for her. But she was really one of the first to introduce women’s studies to Oshkosh, she--because of her own experience, she became a very strong union rep,

and would represent, uh, any professor who was facing difficulties, and I think she was inclined that way anyway, she’d written her thesis on a Dutch radical. Joe Starr, as I said they were all real characters, Starr was one of the others who was laid off, and he actually taught at Ripon College during that period, and he’d done his doctorate at Trinity College in Dublin, which I knew, in fact I knew his supervisor, who, in actual fact, I think virtually outlived him, his thesis supervisor. And probably the one who stands

out the most for me is Werner Braatz, who was chairman of the department, his experience these layoffs, he’d survived, but it’d--you know, he had to hire lawyers at the time, and it made him very wary of dealing with people to the point that he always kept detailed notes of any conversation, because one of the ways he’d been called out by his own previous [indistinct] in the department was, this person would suddenly start quoting conversations and dates and times, and he realized you had to have that kind of evidence, so it always made him slightly paranoid, but I think he was an exceptionally good historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He actually ran the first, uh-- the first

panel on the Holocaust at the annual American Historical Association conference, and it was packed out, and this was in the early ‘60s, because it was… it was some time before that became a real subject of interest and study, and he’d been one of the pioneers of it. But I think if some of these people had more opportunity they could have published a great deal more… the trouble is, when they became faculty, it was still in the transition from a normal school to a university, and so, they were teaching huge loads, and, you know, six classes, and large numbers of students. They didn’t even have offices. Werner described how,

when he arrived he was in Dempsey, and he was in a hallway with a desk. So, you know, it was much less well-funded, a lot of the growth had been in the ‘60s, and I think Braatz joined the faculty at the end of the ‘50s, so he saw an enormous transition. It always impressed me as a university in that, in most states only the flagship campus--good, whereas in Wisconsin, it traditionally had a very strong second tier of universities, and Oshkosh, I thought, demonstrated the possibility of such. As I mentioned, the subsequent careers of some of the people who taught there,

I can think of at least four students I know who are now academics themselves, and good ones, and I always thought that the top students there were as good as you’d meet at most colleges, and I also felt we were doing a lot of good because the higher the normal proportion of first-generation university students, and so it seemed to me that it was fulfilling one of the real missions both of the university and of America, of giving people a real chance.

SP: So, one of the--yeah, one of the biggest names that’s been coming up whenever I’ve been looking through newspapers or records has usually been Werner Braatz. You mentioned him a little bit before,

I know that he ended up retiring at some point during the ‘90s toward--later on during then, so…

AO: Yes.

SP: I was wondering if you might be able to talk a little about what he was like, you know, besides--I can only gleam so many details from the reports and whatnot.

AO: Well, he had--he had been a sympathizer with student radicals in the ‘60s. They of course, to us now, seem quite moderate, but most people generally have concluded that the Vietnam War was continued with a lot of deceit, and, you know, questionable [indistinct], and obviously when they started forcing students to go to war and you had the

[indistinct] conscription and the draft, uh, it became very unpopular on campus. He was enormously critical of some of the people who’d led the department then. I think he rather despised them academically, not just politically. I didn’t think he was… by the time I met him, he was actually rather moderate, possibly even quite conservative with a small “c” in his views. He was a great antique collector, and had the most beautiful--one of the largest houses, private houses in Oshkosh, and that was his great hobby, was furnishing that. In fact, they left it all to one of the students, who could [?] give you a description of it, a student who’d

worked for them, and--who’d really been very helpful to him in his retirement.

SP: Okay. So, I know we’ve been talking for a little while now, and like I mentioned…

AO: …I would say he was personally very kind to me, he always said he stayed on to ensure that I got my tenure, and in short I was not [indistinct] hurt by these… the politics of the senior people. Gave [?] party [?] when my parents came into town, and other friends, and I always saw him as a friend, not just a colleague, but I did with the others as well. I was once on a panel with Barbara Sniffen and

Virginia Crane when we were in another state, and then we toured places like Williamsburg, Virginia afterwards, and they were fun to be with… And I realize that the compensation--I look at some of these [indistinct] departments like Harvard today, they’re not happy places… and colleagues don’t get on very well, and people do not feel well-supported by their colleagues, and that was not the case at Oshkosh. You know, they--people were fond of each other, and very supportive of each other.

SP: Alright. So, like I mentioned, I didn’t want to take too terribly long with this first session.

AO: Yes.

I realize we’re cutting into your evening there.

SP: Like I mentioned, if you’re interested in maybe doing another session at some point in the future…

AO: Absolutely.

SP: …Then we can set something like that up maybe in the next couple of weeks, or else once you get back from your fellowship. Otherwise, I can send you the audio file for this…

AO: Yes.

SP: And, like I mentioned, this won’t be used for anything without it being signed off on the deed of gift.

AO: Right.

SP: I would like to thank you for your time right now, uh…

AO: Not at all.

SP: I’m guessing--well, I don’t know which one of us is more busy but I’m guessing you, since I just finished my semester, so, like I said, thank you very much. I’ll be in touch by email again, so…

AO: Yes. Excellent. Well, thank you.

And all the very best. Is this your last year, or?

SP: I’m actually a sophomore, so, second year.

AO: Oh, very good! Lovely, well done.

SP: Again, thank you. I will hopefully speak with you later.

AO: Very good, thank you. All the best. Bye.

[end of part one]

[beginning of part two]

SP: Today’s date is July 11, it is currently 2:14 PM Central Standard Time, and could you please state your full name and previous relation to UW Oshkosh for the interview?

AO: Yes. My name’s Andrew O’Shaughnessy, I was a member of the history department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh from 1990 to 2003. I was also chair of the department for

most of my years on the faculty.

SP: Alright. And I will be interviewing Dr. O’Shaughnessy for an ongoing project with the UW Oshkosh history department, we’re conducting this via conference call, and we’ll speak for half an hour to maybe 45 minutes, and then I’ll present Dr. O’Shaughnessy with a deed of gift for the interview. And with that out of the way we can jump right in. So I’ll just start with some questions immediately about UW Oshkosh, a little more specific than last time. I got a chance to speak with Virginia Crane a few days ago, and some of this is playing off of that a little bit.

SP: So the first thing I’m curious about is what the hiring process was like for you, because you’d mentioned interviewing for Stephen Kercher later when you were at UW Oshkosh, but I’m wondering what it was like when you were the interviewee sitting in the chair, as opposed to the interviewer.

AO: There were actually very

few positions in history at the time, so it was a very competitive environment, though that’s generally always been true, but there have been some periods which were even worse than others. And UW Oshkosh was one of the very few [schools] that was essentially taking walk-in interviews from the American Historical Association, so that is where the interview process began for screening. And some of those people would have… they applied, but they accepted some who were just at the conference. It was good that they had a good presence at the conference, not every university does that, because it is expensive, and it does mean that they can practically see their candidates, and do an initial interview before making

a short list. And I was then on the short list of three people, and I can tell you that one of those people now teaches at Oxford, so it was a strong field, and the other teaches at Duquesne University, I know my competitors were both good historians, and they brought me on campus for two days. I was quite impressed, because [indistinct] when they interview professors, they often bring all the candidates together, and they have them do nothing but a job talk. In my case, not only do you do a job talk, you also taught a class as well, and the class they had me teach was on the history of the American Constitution.

A survey course, I believe it was Virginia Crane’s class, and I also met with the Dean. I must admit, because I knew it was so cold and so on, I imagined that it would just be constant snow on the ground, and it was a cold part of the year that I was there, I think somewhere late February, early March, but a time when it often started melting elsewhere, but -- they took me to the library and showed me I suppose a promotional video of the University, where of course all the filming was in sunshine, and it gave me a different idea of what it was like. They also drove me around the town to give me an idea of…

where you might live, and the personal aspects of it. And there were dinners and lunches, too, so I was -- impressed by the entire process. It is the system used at most good universities, there were even some places… I got a response from a candidate at William and Mary College, where the initial interviews were just simply done… they didn’t send anybody to the American Historical Association.

SP: Okay. You also had previously mentioned a couple of the bigger names in the department, like Joseph Starr, Werner Braatz, Virginia Crane, and Barbara Sniffen. I’m also kind of curious about some of the other people who were in the department at the time, because Lane Earns I believe came in around the end of the

1980s, and then Franca Barricelli in the mid-1990s, I’m curious… them, and any of the other people who were there for maybe shorter periods of time, if any of them kind of stuck out in your mind, and what they had done while they were there?

AO: Well, I’m still very friendly with Lane Earns, and I see them -- and Franca Barricelli, they’re now married -- I see them most years, they moved to Massachusetts, he was recently Provost of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, so he obviously went up the administrative ladder. I thought incredibly highly of him, he was a remarkable historian. He went to Hawaii and started learning Japanese, and did his doctorate at the University of Hawaii. He was good enough to do

interviews in Japan on television, and he specialized in the urban history of Japan, especially Nagasaki. He was also similarly interested in the American connections and American influences. He did, I thought, a very good piece on the atom bomb, and the debate that went on with the Smithsonian when they did an exhibit on the atom bomb. Obviously some factions didn’t like -- they thought it was too sympathetic to Japan. And he pointed out that the veterans in Japan felt much the same way, it was the difficulty of trying to find the right balance, and the different ways that different countries

handle that. Franca Barricelli was closer to my period, she was an 18th century historian, she worked on theatre in Venice, I thought her an exceptionally bright and able person, she was recently the Assistant Dean at Oshkosh, and she’s now a Dean at Fitchburg University in Massachusetts, and we occasionally did team-taught classes together, and then we would… comparison of the American and French Revolutions, but they were excellent colleagues. I think Lane was especially nurturing of new people who came in. He’d been the first new person in many many years to join the department, and I don’t think it was that easy,

and so he really tried to facilitate the way of other new people. Some people didn’t stay that long, there was one called Cathy Potter, who was -- she went to teach in Michigan, and in some ways -- Kalamazoo College -- and in some ways she was deceived from a long-time position, and then she went to the University of Hong Kong, and of course she didn’t find that environment a very good one, although she stayed there many years, though later she was troubled even more. She was actually from the Wisconsin area, I think she had parents in Madison. I was surprised in some ways that she left,

she was a 17th century Russian historian, which was unusual, and she was, I would have to say, very good. Another person in the department was Mark Kleinman, and he, Mark Kleinman, stayed there for a number of years, he did 17th century intellectual and political history, and he actually left the profession [indistinct] student from the University of California, and he really wanted to go back to California and raise a family there, so he went off to do something different. Another young person in the department who replaced Cathy Potter was Tom Porter, who is now teaching at the University of North Carolina,

he essentially was working on late 19th and early 20th century Russian history. But we had a number of people who only stayed a short time but went on to quite important jobs, there was an American Brazilian historian who recently ran the university department of history at Madison, after a brief foul[?] in Florida. There was someone else at the University of California. [indistinct name] She was a medievalist, and though -- these people got around. [Someone] by the surname of Brown who was at Binghamton University in New York, he won a prize from the American Historical

Association for work on early American history, he was with us about three years, he was Canadian and trained at Oxford, and worked essentially on the period of the… he was a French historian, and the French Revolution.

SP: Alright, and you had mentioned that there was a pretty decent amount of turnover during that time period, too? People only staying a couple of years?

AO: Yes. That’s right, I was always very worried about that. In most cases, people were moving on for what was promotions, and I suppose it indicated a slightly better job market, but it did concern me as the department got younger and younger and the older people retired,

that we could just [implode?]. But that never happened, and in fact the current department is largely composed of people that we had recruited during that period. It’s not changed very much since my departure in 2003, so in some ways it’s very good.

SP: Right. So what kind of course load did you end up working with on any given semester while you were there? Because Virginia Crane kind of expressed that she had a pretty big emphasis on teaching classes, and that was basically the big thing that she did compared to research or anything else.

AO: So in the early days, the course loads had been as high as a community college, you know, progressed from being a normal school into a college. The course loads had been

very high, even when I was there, technically the course load was 4/4, with a reduced course load with the expectation of doing research work. So it was 3/3 during the time that I was there. I heard rumors that it was again moving to 4/4, but I don’t know if that’s true.

SP: Alright, and so how much time were you able to spend on research while you were there, and was it on your own, or did you end up being able to work with students, or how did that go?

AO: Quite a bit, and in fact, at this University, I think one of the most impressive and distinctive features was something called the faculty development program. In fact, I was talking to the head of HR here at Monticello, about how impressed I was -- this was just

a conversation last week -- about this program. Essentially, it was money towards research travel or research work, and also gave money for working in the [indistinct], and unlike national grants that people applied for, professors had a fairly good chance of getting the grant, I think for every two people who applied, one of them would get the grant. And I had quite a number during the period that I was there. And the book I wrote, I spent much too much time with it, it’s called An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean, but it has become something of a classic, and it came out in 2000,

and it continues to be used in [indistinct], and it’s referenced a great deal. The book that I wrote subsequently that I was working on while I was there, and that I had a sabbatical on, and some faculty development money, called The Men Who Lost America, many national prizes including the George Washington Prize. I didn’t get that kind of recognition for the first book, but I would probably say it was a better book, it was very heavily researched, which is why it took so long to write, and very broad in terms of what colonialists were doing at the time. And I’m currently working on a book about Thomas Jefferson’s founding of the University of Virginia, so I enjoyed being able to write and work. I think it did benefit my teaching, I noticed a lot of the people who won awards for teaching (which

I did), they were people who were also very active in their research. And so clearly, to some extent, this was reflected in their […]. I certainly did work with students, doing research projects. There are three former students now who are academics, who do work closely related to what I was doing while I was at Oshkosh, one of whom I […] most closely was someone called [indistinct name ()], who is now a professor at [Wisconsin] Lutheran College, just outside of Milwaukee. And he was one of my students and did projects under me. I also had seminars, and I used to do research

projects in the seminars. In fact, I had […] seminars, they actually helped me by going through newspapers looking for material related to the Carribean before and during the American Revolution. There was so much to go through, and […] I would have spent a lot of time on myself. What they did was really very helpful.

SP: Okay, and Virginia Crane had also mentioned one of the things that she did was a seminar class focused on computer research and stuff like that. So I’m wondering how technology ended up affecting your ability to do research at the time, if that ended up helping you in any of the projects you were working on, and if so, how that worked out, since that was still

I suppose kind of progressing and getting better at the time compared to where it stands now.

AO: Yes. Technology really played a role later for me, there still wasn’t a lot online. We had started using email in about 1994 or 95, and Oshkosh was very early to […], and we were given computers on our arrivals, so we were one of the first generations of faculty in 1990 to come in with computers as part of the package. But at the time of course the computers didn’t actually go online, they were largely just for word processing. And, you know, that came much later. Certainly we were using PowerPoint by the time

that I left, and there was a very good media service at several levels, and I was very impressed. They always brought the equipment to the classroom, they didn’t do that here at Virginia. You often had to -- at the University of Virginia, which is their flagship main campus -- had to go and get equipment themselves, so there was a very good background of support. And then I was impressed by the media department at the time, which was trying to promote the University. Chancellor John Kerrigan, I think was very shrewd in realising Universities have to promote themselves and show the public see [?] of what they were doing, so he used to do his own program interviewing people […] the week,

and in a really quite good […] studio, and they did a very nice magazine at the time with interviews with professors and […] whether it was their research or their classes. I took -- for two years I took students abroad to Cambridge, for half a semester at Cambridge University. It was quite unique, because we had an arrangement with the college where they were able to be residents. And at the time the University was not doing a lot with overseas

education and travel, and that was probably my best experience in terms of my teaching, because it had such an impact on students. Of all the students that I have had any […] contact with, that group […] both years, they had a Facebook page, and I still hear from those people. Some of them have visited with their families, so it was really a great experience. I taught it with […] in the English Department, who is still a very good friend. In fact, I’m teaching at the University of Virginia a course that’s just a week long at Oxford in September with her. So actually many good friendships I made -- and I was there 13 years, it was a considerable time -- continued subsequently. […]

I gave the James Madison lecture at the University of Wisconsin Madison and at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

SP: Alright, and you ended up serving as the [department] chair at UW Oshkosh a couple of years, but outside of that while you were still there, who else ended up serving as the chair?

AO: So Lane Earns -- it was Werner Braatz for much of my time beyond tenure, and he was a German scholar, I think we talked about him a bit last time.

SP: Yes.

AO: And then Lane Earns took over, but Lane moved into senior administration, and so as soon as I got my tenure I essentially

became chair of the department, and when I was in Cambridge, Franca Barricelli acted as chair for me, and she subsequently became chair upon my departure.

SP: Okay, and then that also covered my next question, which was how you ended up becoming the chair, so…

AO: There was essentially no-one else who could do it.

SP: Okay, yeah.

AO: And I really didn’t want it when I’d just completed tenure, and trying to start a new book, but my position here was largely as a result of the fact that I had some administrative experience, so…

SP: Right.

AO: Things you thought you didn’t want can help in a positive way.

SP: Alright, and you’d mentioned a couple of concerns you had when you were in Oshkosh

as the chair, like turnover for faculty and staff. I’m curious if there were any other kinds of issues that you had to contend with when you were the department chair, or anything else you had to keep in mind?

AO: Yes, I think the biggest worry was state support, and the governor at the time was Tommy Thompson, and he certainly… the subsequent state has been really quite hostile, but what he did do was simply to opt to continue the same level of investment in the University, so with inflation the University was actually receiving less money, and that was a concern, unless you take into account student fees, but universities are free to […]. In any case,

nor could people necessarily pay a great deal more, and so that was a real concern of mine, […], they often had to bring in new people who […] people who’d been around… ten years, and they were below national average, and so this sense that the state wasn’t really supporting us. I remember giving a talk in a local prison and being very depressed as they described the huge increase in investments in the prisons, you could almost put the two on a graph, […] lines going in opposite directions. I think it was a tremendous […] one of the highest proportions of incarcerated people

anywhere, a great cost to the state, and I’m not sure whether it was good in any way, and it seemed to me a sign of a lack of imagination in government at the time.

SP: Right. So between teaching classes, doing research, and also kind of administrative work for the department, how did your time end up being split while you were at Oshkosh, and did any of those things kind of end up outweighing the other, or what?

AO: I think it was possible to balance them all, I can’t say -- I didn’t do a great deal of additional faculty service, for which people volunteer. Other people like Virginia Crane did a great deal, and

I think we all play to our different strengths, so I didn’t sit on a large number of faculty committees. I was also impressed by those who did, and gave a lot of service especially to the faculty development board. The members of that had to read a great number of different proposals and write commentaries on them.

SP: Alright, and one other thing that I just kind of thought of off the top of my head, actually is kind of relating to how many classes people taught on an average semesterly basis. I’m curious if you kind of had any ball-park estimate for maybe just the number of history classes that ended up being taught overall on any given semester or year or whatever it ends up being.

AO: Well, because it was a 3/3 load, that basically

meant three different classes and meeting for nine times in a week, and they -- essentially we had to do a lot of survey course teaching, so the load was usually two surveys and one upper-level course each semester, and the survey courses could be large, although for most of my time, I taught reasonably-sized survey courses, and it has to be said that the really big classes went to adjuncts, and technically you could be called upon to teach during the breaks, as well, and Oshkosh has an unusual semester, but I never was actually

forced to do that. Again, that was done by adjuncts, staff, the semesters were really quite attractive, it was two thirteen-week semesters, so that did leave a significant period for breaks, and because I grew up and lived in England, for most of the summer I used to like to go back there, which in some ways was a shame, because it was one of the few times of the year I could actually be in Oshkosh.

SP: Alright, and you’d mentioned maybe because of the kind of administrative work you ended up doing as the chair, you ended up in your current position, I suppose. So how did you end up leaving Oshkosh, and how did you end up getting the position you have now?

AO: So I was actually job-hunted,

and I suddenly had two or three messages as to whether I was interested in taking a position, and what I do now, I’m at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and they have a small research park with several departments, including archaeology, […] a library, […], conferences including conferences overseas, and they wanted someone who would be in charge that -- and several people nominated me for the position, and I really didn’t expect much to come of it, because while I was interested in Jefferson, I had never written about Jefferson, nor was Jefferson specific to my research,

and I was invited here, again there were three final candidates, I’d been nominated […] application to the larger […], and to my surprise I was offered it, and of course my interest in colonial history makes it very pleasant to work in one of the original thirteen colonies and be close to sources and… connected with that era. But I felt very grateful to my time at Oshkosh, to the encouragement and support that I received. It was a very good place in terms of developing one’s teaching and research, and

I often look at -- I get to see a lot of academics, because we […] fellows visit here every year, and I’m involved to a degree at the University of Virginia, I’m listed there as a professor, and I realise that there are a lot of larger, more famous departments that are actually less […] than the one at Oshkosh. Actually I really enjoyed everybody during my time. My host in Australia, when you were in contact with me there, he still remembers visiting to give a talk at Oshkosh, and he said that he thought it was the most harmonious department -- and this would have been in the late 90s -- the most harmonious department he had visited, and he was very impressed

that everyone went out to dinner with him, which is quite a big deal, because unlike, you know, some veteran […] institutions, generally the professors pay for themselves on those occasions, […] expenses.

SP: Right, and that kind of goes into one of my last questions, which is, looking back now, what might you say about the time you spent Oshkosh, you know, the good and the bad, and anything like that? Since Virginia Crane kind of touched on that for her as well.

AO: Yes, so I -- my experience was basically very positive, and I realise […] I’m involved a bit in the graduate teaching here at the University of Virginia, a very high portion of people are not getting jobs even though they’ve got their doctorate. They are qualified,

it’s just -- it got very difficult again, it’s not helped now by the fact that the number of history majors has halved since 2008, which I think is very alarming. I think the negative side for me was in a sense being somewhat isolated from friends and people that I’d known, I didn’t get many visitors […] and so that, on the social side -- and of course, the winters are very cold. I mean, they could be lovely, and I liked the fact that, unlike in Britain, you get this very bright sunlight on a sunny day, and I know that I should […] especially

April, if there was still snow around and it was freezing, I regretted that. It did mean I sort of kept in doors quite a bit, as well. But it is a beautiful state. I used to like to go up to Door County, I spent quite a bit of time in Madison, including a whole year on what was a special fellowship for the [UW] System at the Wisconsin Center for the Humanities at the University at Madison, and so I became quite familiar with Madison. […] time in Milwaukee. It’s a very distinctive state, I still take a great deal of interest in what happens there politically, and whenever it’s in the news, it’s rather pleasant

that people who were born there and have grown up there have great loyalty to it, and most of them seem to stay there, if they can. That was attributed partly to the fact that it did have very good infrastructure, which I worry now about, they’re letting -- you know, they’re not continuing to the same level, and when you think of the wonderful vision of the Wisconsin System, going back… literally generations ago, when in fact people were less wealthy… It’s not unique to Wisconsin, it’s more national, wider support now for the colleges and the schools. It’s partly why I’m writing about Jefferson’s vision on education,

and his vision of a university, because we associate him with anti-government, and small government, and we hear often from Jefferson about dangers of too much central control, and yet in this respect, he argued for real expansion, [indistinct] the state government in supporting education, and before the remarkable [indistinct] during the American Revolution, [indistinct] state school system in Virginia. Which, […] hundred years later.

SP: Right.

AO: It was well ahead of its time.

SP: Alright, and one of the other last things that we’ve been kind of wondering about, myself and the archivist, and a couple of other people is, for a little while the history department

at Oshkosh had, to our knowledge, a graduate program, and maybe this was already gone by the time that you arrived, but I’m curious if you knew anything about it yourself?

AO: It pretty well had gone by the time I arrived. I remember that, in the ‘70s, it had been a department of 30 people, and they had been very ambitious to be a department like Milwaukee, and competing directly with them, and in fact they really regarded themselves as the third best department in the System. And in some ways they cut their throats by trying to get rid of the history requirement, the broad liberal arts degree, which meant, of course, less students being fed into history courses,

and wanting to teach small classes. And it was not untypical in that period for a lot of colleges to want to have graduate programs, because it seemed that that was more prestigious, whereas in fact many of them were better off focusing on the […] undergraduate teaching, and there was still some of it when I arrived. School teachers especially would like it, they wanted us to have a master’s degree to give them additional accreditation.

SP: Alright, but by the time you were there it had, for better or for worse, already gone away, or?

AO: Yes, that’s right. Yes. […] The department fell to about six people at one point, and the big -- and

this preceded me, but the real dividing line was the period of so-called cuts, when about 70 positions were lost. Many of them came from the departments of history and English, and it created a lot of ill feeling. It would be good for people to study now as to the dangers of what happens and how much harm it can do. […] cutback, but it leaves a permanent shadow.

SP: Alright, yeah. It seems like for the most part you’ve got a really large rise around the 1970s before it kind of drops back off…

AO: Yes.

SP: And now kind of going smooth from there, if not getting very much bigger. At the very least, running smoothly now.

AO: Well, that’s very good, and as you probably know,

Steven’s Point said it was going to remove its history department altogether, which was tragic, because that is a very department, and I would see it as a competitor to Oshkosh, so the fact that the department hasn’t shrunk and that it’s stable at a time when there’s a reduction in the number of history majors and […] nationwide, I think is very encouraging and I hope it will continue to grow.

SP: Alright. Well, that just about wraps up the questions that I had today, kind of some more detailed stuff compared to what we had covered last time, more specific things. If you had any kind of final thoughts regarding your time there, or anything else before we wrap things up…

AO: I’m just glad you’re doing this,

the archives essentially got real guys and quite serious before my departure, I think it’s very important for an institution to keep its archives and to maintain that. I’m very pleased that you did it. I had -- there is someone called […] in Milwaukee, who is the person who did a lot of the filming, and when he left there was very little interest in keeping his stuff, but as a result he does have a big personal archive of his own, so I hope people will be aware of that and seek him out, because it is fun to see these films now and see another generation of students.

SP: Alright. Well, with that,

like I mentioned before, I can email you a deed of gift for this interview, as well as a recording and/or transcription of it, and that will just follow the same process that we did last time. If you had any other questions or concerns before we finish things up?

AO: That’s fine, good. And thank you for doing this, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you quicker, […] finishing off in Australia, it was very hectic.

SP: Alright, my recorder says that we’ve been recording for about 44 minutes and 15 seconds, and I will stop it here.

[end of interview]