Outstanding Historian Honored

UMD American studies graduate student wins a grant to travel to a historian's conference for his dissertation on the Civil Rights Movement.By the Organization of American Historians

UMD American studies graduate student wins a grant to travel to a historian's conference for his dissertation on the Civil Rights Movement.

By the Organization of American Historians

Bloomington, IN–Aaron Bryant, University of Maryland, College Park, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to receive a 2012 OAH-Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) John Higham Travel Grant, which is given to graduate students to be used toward costs of attending the 2012 OAH/NCPH/IEHS Annual Meeting taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 19-22. According to the 2012 OAH-IEHS John Higham Travel Grants Committee, Mr. Bryant’s Ph.D. dissertation, “A Different Lens: Alternative Views of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” sheds light on this often-overlooked campaign, which proved to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final vision for social justice. This study examines the campaign from “above” and “below,” while employing interdisciplinary methodology and drawing upon art history, life history, political science, and architecture. Mr. Bryant works in the areas of museum studies and material culture and is a participant in the 2012 annual meeting panel “Exhibiting Democracy: Biographical Exhibitions and Sociopolitical Frontiers.”