“I don’t want to make anyone an atheist,” says Adam Laats, a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership at Binghamton. “No public school should have that as its goal, just like no public school should be trying to teach kids any religious idea, which would include creationism.”

Laats’ new book, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, was published in October by Oxford University Press.

“Creationism is a private issue, and most Americans are some kind of creationists,” Laats says. “Most Americans have some sort of belief that, you know, all this didn’t just happen.”

A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American adults believe God created humankind within the past 10,000 years. Another third of those polled said humans evolved over millions of years with God’s guidance. Just 22% said they thought humans evolved without any divine intervention.

“Most people who are creationists want their kids to learn evolution in schools,” Laats says. “It’s not a problem.”

The problem arises when people insist that their particular religious beliefs form part of the curriculum. Laats sees two key characteristics of what he terms “radical creationism.”

The first is that it disputes the legitimacy of mainstream science. “Radical creationists say mainstream science is entirely wrong,” he says. “Evolutionary science can’t be right.”

The other part is that radical creationists try to impose their beliefs into the public square. That includes public schools, but also questions such as: Should there be a prayer before a public meeting? Should people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays?

A former middle school and high school teacher, Laats says researching this book helped him understand certain anti-science attitudes present in the country today.

“The 2020 political moment, this crisis-fueled moment, has parallels in the history of creationism,” he says. “Understanding that history helps people understand how it is possible that some large number of Americans have confidence in these statements that seem, to me, patently false.”

Laats says there’s a pattern going back to the 1960s of aggressively dissident, competing science that today is expressed when someone labels facts as “fake news.” It’s not that someone like Scott Atlas, a physician and advisor to the White House coronavirus taskforce, hasn’t heard what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic. “It’s that they dispute the legitimacy of the people with whom they disagree,” Laats says. “And we’re experiencing an acute outbreak at the very top. It’s very easy for people to dismiss what seem like they might be obvious in-your-face truths if you dismiss the source of those ideas.”

Although debates surrounding creationism have certain elements in common with controversies about climate science, Laats says it’s not a fair comparison.

“They get lumped together because they’re the two most prominent science denialism issues out there,” he says, “but they actually have both different histories and different trajectories. Climate change denialism is a lot more like tobacco science.”

Large, well-funded tobacco companies paid to have scientists go over peer-reviewed reports in the 1950s and ’60s and issue statements highlighting the limitations of findings about the dangers of smoking. Some people who cast doubt on climate science have similar financial motivations, Laats says.

“It’s a deliberate, well-funded, intentional, cynical attempt to spread ignorance, or at least doubt about established science,” he says.

The creationism debate isn’t rooted in money, for the most part.

For science educators, this has been an issue for 50 years. And for many of them, it feels outlandish, Laats says. “How can there be a debate? It’s not a debate. There’s science. And then there’s this other thing.”

He’s optimistic that American schools will continue to teach mainstream scientific principles related to evolution. “Even the most ardent anti-evolution groups, like Answers in Genesis, want their kids to learn evolution,” Laats says. “They just don’t trust people like me to teach it to their kids. They don’t want their kids to learn from people that they don’t trust, including secular, politically liberal, union-member types. So it’s not evolutionary theory anymore that they actually have a beef with their children learning, even though they think it’s incorrect.”

From a public policy perspective, that needs to be the end of the discussion, he says, even if some people view that as accommodating science deniers. “Let’s stop fighting,” he says. “Let’s agree to stop talking right there because the rest of it isn’t our business. The rest of it is culture war talk. The way that I think of it is that Americans don’t disagree about evolution. We just don’t like each other. Or maybe a more polite way to say it is we don’t trust each other.”

Laats is the author of three other books about the history of American education: Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education; The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education and Fundamentalism; and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars. He earned a doctorate in U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2007. His next project focuses on the first systematic attempt at urban school reform in the United States.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the associate professor of history a $60,000 fellowship in January to complete her research and write her second book. She expects “Trafficking, Travel, and Illicit Migration in Early Twentieth-Century French and the Americas” to be published in 2022.

“Elisa’s work really touches on central questions of our own day,” says Eileen Boris, Hull Endowed Chair and distinguished professor of the department of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara. “She reconstructs the social and political history of people who traversed the Atlantic for a living while studying the ideas of border control, belonging and citizenship, civilian surveillance, racial profiling and policing of sexuality.”

While French women were migrating to cities like Vera Cruz, Buenos Aires and Havana to work in commercial sex trade, there were open immigration policies from Argentina up to Nova Scotia until restrictions became the norm by 1930.

“Historians usually talk about how the growth of nationalism, race and ethnicity affected these policies, but women’s mobility and the problem or perceived problems associated with migratory prostitution play a key role in this development,” Camiscioli says. “I argue that these early debates about border policing, passport control, repatriating, restrictive immigration requirements — all in association with women working in prostitution and societal fears about women’s mobility — helped create current border control regimes and shape understandings of illicit migration today.”

Camiscioli’s work also looks at the distinction between free versus forced migration. Personal letters collected as evidence for police records against prostitutes or their pimps indicate these women generally made the decision to travel abroad. “They wrote about feeling seasick or asked for news about their goddaughter. They had tender ties to their families,” she says. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t dreadfully poor, didn’t have violence in their lives, or that they didn’t experience degrees of abuse and deception, but there are shades of gray between coercion and choice and I think many of these women fell somewhere in between.”

Occasionally, Camiscioli can piece together a rough timeline of one woman’s travels. For example, a family reported their 15-year-old daughter missing but once the Buenos Aires police found her, she said she was sick and didn’t want to tell her family why she was miserable. Consulate records and ship manifests show this individual traveled to several cities before ending up in San Francisco. She reported to the U.S. Census that she was a dressmaker, an occupation often used by women who worked in commercial sex. She traveled to France three times to visit an aunt, and by age 40, she was living in Paris and managing a brothel.

“She was entrepreneurial. And by migrating, she experienced a boost within her working-class status,” Camiscioli says. “I’m astounded by how profoundly mobile these people were and the ingenious ways they got around the system. There’s so much tenacity, and while it can be easy to overly romanticize some of these stories, their sense of freedom and adventure does shine through.”

Camiscioli’s first book, “Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century,” was published by Duke University Press in 2009.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and French literature from the University of Pennsylvania and received her doctorate in history from the University of Chicago. She is the co-editor of the international Journal of Women’s History (along with distinguished professor of history Jean H. Quataert), and serves on research, teaching and granting committees in France, Belgium and the UK.

There are two common methods of teaching sex education in public schools: one based in science and another based on morals. At one point, however, the two weren’t much different, a Binghamton University researcher says.

“I look at events that happened in the 1920s, such as immigration reform and education reform, and observe why sex education shifted from a morally focused approach to a science-based approach during the progressive era,” says Julia Devin, a doctoral student.

Devin, a Los Angeles native, studied history at Seattle Pacific University before earning master’s degrees in educational foundations from California State University, Los Angeles, and in history from Binghamton. Though she was initially interested in standardization in public schools, women’s history grabbed her curiosity.

“There’s a belief that education is an equalizer,” Devin says, “but when I started teaching at a low-income, high immigrant-populated school in east LA, I realized schools fail students in a lot of ways, and I wanted to understand why.”

By examining the records of school boards and community organizations in major cities during the progressive era, Devin found that some schools encouraged certain groups to reproduce — and encouraged other groups not to reproduce — based on racial assumptions.

In its early practice, science-based sex education was tied to eugenics, or the science of improving a human population through controlled breeding, says Devin, recipient of a 2018 American Association of University Women fellowship.

Eugenics was considered by many to be a legitimate academic subject in the 1920s. Schools had the power to diagnose female students with “sex delinquency,” and could deem them unfit to reproduce. These young women, often immigrants, were sent to institutions and forcibly sterilized based on the results of IQ tests. Individuals who scored relatively well but were, nevertheless, identified as inferior in some way, were subjected to an emerging form of this science-based sex education that discussed racial fitness and eugenics, Devin says.

“Reproductive rights is different from reproductive justice,” Devin says. “Today, women of color have higher rates of complications during pregnancy and childbirth than white women. So there have been injustices related to race and reproduction going all the way back to slavery.”

She will be collaborating with Family Planning of South Central New York in Binghamton throughout the 2018-2019 academic year to create educational events on reproductive justice. That work is supported through another fellowship for public history from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) and Humanities New York.  

“Julia’s research intersects with her background in education,” says Leigh Ann Wheeler, Devin’s advisor and professor of history at Binghamton. Wheeler believes Devin’s passion stems from her experience working with immigrant and low-income students and colleagues in Los Angeles.

“She’s a fantastic teacher, and she gets energized by interacting with students,” Wheeler says. “She finds that she’s more efficient in her research when she is teaching.”

Devin says she hopes to encourage dialogue among historians, health leaders and individuals in the community through her research.

“There’s a wide variety of people who have looked at the history of sex education, but not a lot of people have connected it to this larger time period with immigration, race and standardization,” Devin says. “I’m trying to show that they’re a lot more connected than we thought.”

How did problems such as poverty, racism, gender inequality and increasing climate instability come to plague humankind? Binghamton scholar Jason W. Moore has an answer in his new book, 

Moore, a professor of sociology, is an environmental historian and historical geographer. His book, published last fall by University of California Press, argues that capitalism is one of the most flawed and inefficient systems of organizing humans and nature.

To understand his perspective, first look at what he means by “cheap.” 

Moore argues that cheapening is the method used by capitalism to extract the most profit with the least cost. “There are two motives of cheapness,” he says. “One is cheap in price, but the other is cheapening in an ethical political sense, as in to treat with less respect, to degrade the value of work.”

For example, companies sometimes use prison labor to manufacture products. Prisoners don’t need to be paid, and corporations only incur a small cost when working with the prison. This would be an example of cheap labor, one of Moore’s seven cheap things.

Cheapening also means externalizing costs, which include toxic waste, carbon emissions and other negative environmental byproducts. Environmental consequences are a cost capitalism has historically ignored.

A reason for this lies in one of the central tenets of Moore’s book: the mythical divide between nature and civilization. Capitalism promoted a Cartesian view of nature, which states that human society is above nature, and is actually meant to control nature and reap its benefits.

This made it possible to lessen the value of anything — even humans — by placing it under the category of nature. Slavery, the taking of indigenous land, racism and sexism are powerfully influenced by this concept, Moore writes.

Capitalism is more than just a socioeconomic construct — it is a way of thinking about and organizing life, Moore writes in A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things. “This is a book that encourages 21st-century thinking to deal with 21st-century problems,” he says. “We need to have a way of making sense of the biosphere and relationships between humans and the environment as fundamentally interconnected at every turn.”

Moore wrote this book with Raj Patel, an award-winning writer, activist and academic. Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, regularly writes for The Guardian and is an advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Moore and Patel had been reading each other’s work and borrowing ideas for a while. After meeting for the first time at a conference in Austin, they decided to write a book together the same day.

“This book is a set of ideas with a sense of urgency to it,” Patel says. “It’s exciting that there’s already a great deal of attention being paid to it.”

Moore previously wrote several other books, most recently Capitalism and the Web of Life (Verso, 2015) His next book, titled Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, covers a world history of the origins of climate crisis. He has an active research agenda that spans topics such as agriculture and energy, environmental history and climate change.

“His work is groundbreaking,” says Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and Moore’s doctoral advisor. “There are people working on many of the topics he covers, but the way he pulls it all together is unique, and it’s very accessible.”

Moore is also chair of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network, a group of scholars and activists dedicated to studying historical change through seeing human society as a product and producer of the environment.

For more details about Moore and his book A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, visit his website, https://jasonwmoore.com.

Wall, a historian who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2010, received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research how Cold War politics and efforts by ethnic, religious, civic, patriotic and labor groups to spur, shape or halt immigration reform transformed vast swaths of American life.

“When President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he downplayed its importance,” she writes in her proposal to the NEH. “‘[This] is not a revolutionary bill,’ he declared. ‘It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.’ Few predictions have proven faultier.”

The act did away with a system of national origins quotas in place since the 1920s that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. It replaced this with a system that favored the reunification of families and, to a lesser extent, skills. This opened the door not only to Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also to millions of newcomers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also put a ceiling for the first time on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, greatly contributing to illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Neither popular writers nor historians of postwar America pay much attention to how we got the Immigration Act of 1965,” she says. “It’s often portrayed simply as the product of a great liberal moment — we got the civil rights and the voting rights, and the Immigration Act got thrown in there too. … I’m interested in both how we got the act, and why it took the shape it did.”

Immigration reform then was just as contentious an issue as it is today, she says. The Cold War was raging, and proponents of reform argued that failure to make changes in the policy was offending the newly decolonized people of Asia and Africa that the United States wanted to keep out of the Soviet Union’s orbit. Ethnic groups such as Greeks and Italians used Cold War rhetoric too, arguing that population pressure in their home countries encouraged social unrest and provided a fertile ground for communism.

“There were also people on the other side of the equation, people who didn’t want to open the borders. They said, ‘Ah, well, if we open the borders, then we’ll have all these spies coming in,’” Wall says. It’s a familiar argument in 2016, with some politicians seeking to limit or ban immigration from Muslim countries because of the fear of terrorism.

Andrew J. Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Colgate University, recommended Wall for the NEH fellowship. He says any book she produces will be carefully researched and beautifully written, in part owing to her background as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

“Wendy has an astonishing knack to make history come alive through the prism of current events — in this case, the (often poisonous and nearly always ill-informed) debate over immigration,” Rotter says. “Her story promises to place these debates in a deep and illuminating context.”

And he didn’t fib about any cherry trees, either.

Binghamton graduate student Kenneth Lane will spend the next year at Mount Vernon and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington to fill in details of Washington’s murky younger years, when he learned to cultivate the relationships, please the patrons, keep his mouth shut and let other people take the blame. Lane is one of 20 scholars chosen this year for a fellowship at the library.

“He learned as a young British subject the value of patronage,” said Lane, a doctoral candidate in history. “He learned by failing over and over again.”

The failures start in 1754 with Washington’s first patronage job — the “simple surveyor” of the Ohio River Valley, hired by his first real patron — his half-brother Lawrence.

“I see an adventurous, driven, egotistical man 100 percent driven by politics,” Lane said. Washington’s job wasn’t simply to map the Ohio River Valley and suggest areas to develop. It was to pick and acquire the best plots of land for his employers — and himself.

On the way, his bumbling started a world war that spanned five continents, 15 nations and required four separate treaties to end.

Alienated his patrons. Damaged his reputation. And to protect his own legacy, immediately altered his own papers to shift blame for the debacle to a friend.

He learned, Lane said. Oh, how he learned. He spent the next three decades rebuilding his image, keeping his mouth shut and currying the favor that all politicians need. “He’s the self-made symbol. It took him his whole life.”

Lane sees Washington as a key player — more or less unwittingly — in a new direction the British Empire used to gather power. Rather than royal colonies, it was switching to private companies and land grants to settle the Ohio Valley. Cheaper for the crown, but riskier — as in an untrained 24-year-old “surveyor” gets the opportunity to start a war.

“They’re pushing west aggressively, but not officially,” said Lane, whose dissertation will focus on the larger picture of the 18^th century British empire.

Where Mount Vernon enters the picture is its archive — including the surveying records of Washington’s Ohio Valley trek. Lane is looking to understand not only how Washington saw the valley, but how he planned to divvy it up among his patrons — and himself.

“They’ve been looked at, but nobody placed any importance in it,” said Robert Parkinson, an assistant professor of history and Lane’s adviser. And historians should, because of the Ohio River Valley’s potential to feed an empire: “This region was becoming known as the next paradise in North America,” Parkinson said, one both the British and French wanted to control.

“I need to get access to as much of George Washington’s papers as are left,” Lane said.

It’s also an important part of Washington’s story, said Doug Bradburn, a former Binghamton professor and director of the Smith library.

“The great study of his early rise needs to be retold in the context of the latest research on the character of the British Empire in America,” wrote Bradburn, once Lane’s adviser. “Additionally, I think more could be done to understand Washington’s life as a politician in both a patron/client political world, as well as his involvement in shaping a modern representative democracy. There are opportunities to analyze his efforts at land development, speculation, and entrepreneurship, issues that have only recently begun to garner serious attention.”

Erin Annis, a Binghamton University doctoral student, is studying these lesser-known families, four in particular, to learn about how their perceptions and definitions of themselves changed.

The 18th century was a turning point in the Scottish sociopolitical climate, allowing Scottish citizens to participate in unprecedented travel and interactions with foreigners. “What I really love about the period,” Annis says, “is that people started writing and talking about their thoughts and feelings for the first time.”

Her research addresses how new, foreign interactions changed the way these families defined themselves. Only one of the families Annis is studying has previously been researched, and by looking at more families, she can apply what she learns to a broader audience. Annis’ research allows her to picture paint a picture of what life was like for the middle classes in general, not just one family.

“I want to push this even further,” she says, “and ask, what does this tell us about how people in general experience the British Empire?”

Annis faces unique challenges as her research requires traveling to nine archives across Europe and America. There, she hunts down letters, journals, legal suits and anything else available and, preferably, legible.

“She’s developed a project which requires sophistication and an archival source base that few graduate students will dare attempt to combine,” says Howard Brown, a history professor and Annis’ adviser.

“I like to learn about these people from a perspective that hasn’t been filtered through what another historian thinks,” Annis says. “And then being able to filter it myself and come up with an explanation for what choices they made and how that affected them. I’m understanding these people and learning from them, and that’s what I really enjoy about this work.”

Annis, a Michigan native, plans to combine the knowledge she has gained into a book after completing her dissertation.

“I hope it leads to a string of publications that reveal innovative and penetrating analysis,” Brown says, “where she’ll make original contributions to the scholarship on 18th-century identity.”

Pianist John Kirkpatrick “tirelessly promoted and championed” the music of American composers, wrote Tom C. Owens, editor of

Massey wrote his dissertation on Kirkpatrick while pursuing a doctorate in historical musicology at Harvard University. He expanded the work into John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page, published in 2013 by University of Rochester Press. The book combines biography with analysis of Kirkpatrick’s historical approach to editing. He demonstrates how Kirkpatrick, who died in 1991, became a collaborator as well as an editor, proposing revisions that altered composers’ original intentions.

Ryan Raul Bañagale, an assistant music professor at Colorado College, says his own writing has been inspired by Massey’s approach to scholarship, “particularly his demonstration that the editors of music have as much to do with the writing of history as do the composers themselves.”

Although his book is primarily a scholarly work, Massey says he hopes to reach a broader audience. “Kirkpatrick played a small but important role in the history of American music,” he says, “and one of the goals of my project has been to introduce him in such a way so that some aspects of my research would be appealing to non-musicologists.”

Massey, whose bachelor’s degree is in piano performance and mathematics, said he turned to musicology because he “enjoyed the kind of puzzles that lay at the center of our experience of music.” He came to Binghamton University in 2012, attracted by the “energetic” music department. “Now that I’m here,” he says, “I am enjoying working alongside faculty throughout the humanities who are passionate about their diverse interests.”

During the 2013-14 academic year, Massey is teaching and working on two publications: a definitive list of Virgil Thomson’s compositions at the request of The Virgil Thomson Foundation and a book, due out in 2017 from Oxford University Press, about British composer, conductor and pianist Thomas Adès, one of the most famous living composers working today.

“My book will be the first full-length study of Adès’ music as a whole in English,” Massey says. “I think an in-depth look at his work can give some interesting answers about the different directions that contemporary composition is headed.”

Many students progress from J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world to J.R.R. Tolkien’s re-fashioning of Norse mythology in The Hobbit to Arthurian legend and eventually to medieval history. But Ben-Ezra is taking a larger step: to understanding how one political campaign nearly 800 years ago still applies to today’s socio-political realities.

“My interest lies in how the three major religious groups get along,” says Ben-Ezra, a Binghamton University undergraduate majoring in history and political science. Her research, supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, fills in details of how Christians, Jews and Muslims could demonize each other.

During the Sixth Crusade in 1228, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, already excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX, negotiated control of Jerusalem and several other cities held by Egypt.

Sound like a hallmark for diplomacy over militarism? Think again, Ben-Ezra says. Papal supporters in Italy demonized Frederick for finding a diplomatic rather than military solution. He was demonized both as a propaganda tool and, quite literally, in religious documents portraying him as the Anti-Christ. However, she also found intolerant references to Muslims eventually dried up in German documents.

Ben-Ezra admits her insight faces its limits. She speaks excellent Hebrew and is learning Arabic, but her Latin is rudimentary and she doesn’t speak German or French. She must rely on translations.

However, not all history is written, and Ben-Ezra has talent examining artwork and religious iconography, says Elizabeth Casteen, an assistant professor of history and Ben-Ezra’s adviser. “The material she is working with is material that’s incredibly complex,” Casteen says. “The texts are very, very strange. … You have to see the images themselves as text.”

The Sixth Crusade created as much conflict in Christian Europe as it resolved in the nexus of the three religions in Jerusalem, Casteen says.

“She’s fascinated by questions of identity. She’s fascinated by questions of tolerance,” Casteen says. “It’s part of what makes Ilana’s research incredibly relevant now.”

Ben-Ezra and Casteen hesitate to draw direct parallels between the 13th century and the 21st century, but they have common elements: the demonization of political and religious competitors; the balance between military and political solutions; the ways social groups create self-identity by segregating themselves.

All this from Harry Potter? It’s actually a pretty common progression, Casteen says. Many of her students found their interest the same way, or through the TV series Game of Thrones.

For Ben-Ezra, the Sixth Crusade is one step on a path that started with a major in pre-medicine and may lead to work in policy, Near-Eastern studies, international relations or perhaps law.

“It’s all part of a larger interest,” she says, “in the growth of intolerance.”

Four days of digging beneath the corn stubble yielded project director Michael Jacobson and his Binghamton University colleagues just a few modest items, including a charcoal smudge and the possible remains of a wooden post. But if test results show that those artifacts date from the late 18th century, that could be enough to convince National Register staff that the location of the Battle of Chemung should be preserved for further study.

Jacobson, PAF’s battlefield research coordinator, launched the dig in Chemung, N.Y., at the request of local residents who care about historic preservation. Once home to the Village of New Chemung, the site is a few miles east of the better-known Newtown Battlefield. Historians often treat the Newtown and Chemung encounters as one event, although they occurred two weeks apart.

“There was a local push to highlight the fact that Chemung was a separate battle from Newtown, and also to help preserve the landscape,” Jacobson says.

PAF received a $37,357 grant in 2009 from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to conduct historical research on the Chemung battlefield and do some initial mapping. In 2012, the program awarded PAF a further $56,194 to perform an archaeological field survey.

The Battle of Chemung was part of the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition, a 1779 campaign of the Continental Army against British loyalists and the pro-British Iroquois. Gen. John Sullivan’s troops were camped at Tioga Point, near the present-day Athens, Pa., when scouts brought word of the settlement at New Chemung.

The village served as a base for various raiders, including, loyalists, Delaware and other Native Americans allied with the British. “It was also a traveling stop for loyalist refugees from New York City and Philadelphia who were making their way to Canada,” Jacobson says.

The Continentals stormed New Chemung on Aug. 13, only to find that all the occupants had fled. Heading west in pursuit, a detachment of soldiers encountered a group of Delaware warriors waiting in ambush about a mile away. The Continentals fought off the Delaware and then returned to New Chemung, where they burned the village to the ground.

To locate New Chemung in the landscape, the Binghamton archaeologists used a geographic information system (GIS) to lay an image of the Sullivan expedition’s official map over a present-day topographical map. They also used written accounts from the time of the battle, taken from Continental soldiers, loyalists and the Delaware, to pinpoint landmarks.

Finally, the archaeologists, guided by specialists from Ithaca College, walked the field with a magnetometer, a sensing device mounted on a cart. That exercise produced a printout that resembles a moonscape. The many dark splotches set against the gray background indicate disturbances in the soil that might — or might not — point to artifacts buried below.

At each of several spots that seemed most promising, the archaeologists dug a rectangular trench about 30 centimeters deep. In November, one of those test trenches produced the charcoal smudge, and another the traces of what perhaps was a post.

Now, the group awaits test results, hoping that the results will persuade the National Register that the site is significant enough to preserve, Jacobson says. “We’ll get the data, tie it with the historical documents and try to put together the best package we can.”

Palfreyman, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, came to Binghamton in 2010 to study the American Revolution and the early Republic. His dissertation ponders what happened to the Loyalists — the American colonists who stayed loyal to England — after they lost the American Revolution.

“My research indicates that the vast majority of Loyalists who chose to stay in the states after the war reintegrated back into American society,” he says. The process was never simple or uncontested, but most former supporters of the king quietly became Americans. There was no ongoing, systematic violence in the early republic, as is so often the case in the aftermath of civil war — no permanent political cleansing, no stubborn pockets of insurgents to root out.

“We like to think of the revolution and the founding as unanimous decisions made by a united people,” Palfreyman says. “We often forget that this country was founded, in part, by people who had never wanted to be independent, and never wanted to create a new nation.”

Diane Miller Sommerville, an associate professor of history at Binghamton, predicts that Palfreyman’s research “will constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of the processes of how the new, young government incorporated not only political opponents into the electoral system but also former enemies of the Revolution.”

Because he so enjoys teaching, Palfreyman seeks out a variety of opportunities to educate, including a summer 2013 contribution to the Civil War blog of The New York Times. His article described the 1863 draft riot in Boston, an event not as well known or documented as a larger protest in New York City.

“The draft riots piece definitely gave me an opportunity to write for a different kind of audience,” he says. “It was about setting a scene and letting the natural drama unfold. And that’s what historians really love to do. We love to tell good stories.”

The Red Hook, N.Y., native discovered one downside to expanding his audience. “The online format does provide a kind of instant commentary that is a new thing in scholarly fields,” he says. “And, in my case, not all of the comments were flattering.

“But first and foremost, I’m just happy to see that people care enough to read and comment. I think it’s a mistake to let serious discussions about history be cloistered in scholarly journals and college classrooms.  … I hope to be able to do both in my career — to put in my time in conversation with the specialists in my field but also to tell stories in such a way that makes other people interested in the same things that interest me.”

It’s the sort of question academic researchers tackle all the time, fodder for graduate students and professors.

Levine is neither. She’s an undergraduate; a Binghamton University senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law. She’s also an undergraduate fellow with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

“The history of medicine is fascinating,” says Levine, 21, of Baldwin, N.Y. Her curiosity started with a simple question in a history seminar in the spring of 2012.

Using a $300 stipend, Levine began accessing primary sources, specifically public health reports and legal documents. She focused her work on the period from 1965 to 1970, right about the time when patients’ rights became an increasing concern.

What did she find? “Patient rights were not actively sought at all,” Levine says. The efficacy of treatment was the primary concern in whether to deinstitutionalize a patient.

She presented her findings last fall in a talk titled “Patient Rights and the Mentally Ill: Deinstitutionalization in the Late 1960s.” She was the only undergraduate to present findings to IASH.

“She’s setting her work off against the traditional viewpoint,” says Gerald Kutcher, professor of history and Levine’s adviser. “For an undergraduate, that’s impressive.”

Although the work is preliminary, it has the potential for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Seeking primary sources and in-depth analysis takes it beyond the standard undergraduate report, he says. “She has the ability to look at material and understand it in a sophisticated way,” Kutcher says.

Levine is the first to understand the limits of her work. She looked at one five-year period. A decade later, the process of deciding when and how to deinstitutionalize a patient was different. A patient’s wishes began to outweigh treatment concerns.

And she looked solely at records on individual cases. She hasn’t yet factored social, economic and political factors into evolving policies on deinstitutionalization. Many issues played into the decisions that closed and consolidated psychiatric facilities across the nation into a fraction of their numbers from the 1950s. One of the survivors is the Binghamton Psychiatric Center, which Levine recently visited for the first time.

Levine is interested in pursuing the topic after she gets her degree, but research isn’t her career goal. She’s looking to become a lawyer, specializing in health law.

“Working on a hospital ethics board will be ideal,” Levine says. “It’s going to continue to become more and more strict.”