Editor’s Note: The purpose of this column, which is published in Perspectives on History as space permits, is to recognize and honor the accomplishments of AHA members. Submissions are welcome; entries will be published in alphabetical order. To submit an entry, write to David Darlington, Associate Editor, AHA, 400 A St., SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

Allison Blakely (Boston Univ.) has been appointed to the National Council on the Humanities. Blakely was nominated by President Barack Obama on August 5, 2010, and confirmed by the Senate December 21, 2010. Blakely is a professor of European and Comparative History at Boston University and previously taught at Howard University for 30 years. He is the author of Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society; Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought and numerous scholarly articles on Russian populism and the various European aspects of the Black Diaspora. The National Council is the 26-member advisory body of the NEH.

Life member John A. English (Queen’s Univ., Canada) has published Patton’s Peers: The Forgotten Allied Army Commanders of the Western Front, 1944–45 (Stackpole Books, 2009) and his Surrender Invites Death: Fighting the Waffen SS in Normandy will also be published by Stackpole in 2011.

Life member Cheryl R. Ganz, Chief Curator of Philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, is a recipient of the 2010 Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. The Smithsonian Congress of Scholars nominated Ganz for her book The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2009). Ganz offers the stories of fair planners and participants who showcased education, industry, and entertainment to sell optimism during the depths of the Great Depression. The research prize recognizes and promotes good scholarship across the Smithsonian Institution and is designed to be pan-Institutional, reflecting the diversity of research at the Smithsonian across disciplinary areas.

Life member Karen Offen (Stanford Univ.) has been elected to the multi-national Bureau (Executive Board) of the International Committee on the Historical Sciences/Comité International des Sciences Historiques (ICHS/CISH), as part of a slate that will serve for five years. The bureau will direct planning for the 2015 International Congress on the Historical Sciences in China.

Glenn W. Olsen (Univ. of Utah) has published The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the 21st Century (Catholic Univ. Press, 2010).

Amy Lippert (Colby Coll.) and Jason T. Sharples (Catholic Univ.) have been named visiting scholars at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Amy Lippert is spending the 2010–11 academic year working on Consuming Identities: Visual Culture and Celebrity in 19th-Century San Francisco. Lippert’s project traces the growth of the commodified image industry in San Francisco during the 19th century, incorporating mass-reproduced visual representations of people into a broader history and explaining the cultural roots of modern celebrity. Lippert holds an MA and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jason Sharples is spending the 2010–11 academic year working on Mastering Fear: Imagination, Rebellion, and Race in Early America and the Atlantic World, 1640–1800. Mastering Fear is an examination of fears of insurrection and purported slave conspiracies, exploring the interplay between exaggerated concerns about subversives within slavery, perceived threats external to the institution, and the development of racial thinking. Sharples is an assistant professor of history at Catholic University and holds a PhD from Princeton University. They are two of seven fellowships awarded in 2010 as part of the academy’s Visiting Scholars program, which supports scholars and practitioners in the early stages of their careers—both postdoctoral fellows and untenured junior faculty—who show potential of becoming leaders in the humanities, policy studies, and social sciences.

Robert Martello (Olin Coll.) has published Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise with Johns Hopkins University Press. Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn combines a biographical examination of Revere with a probing study of the new nation’s business and technological climate.

Stephen H. Norwood’s (Univ. of Oklahoma) The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009) was a finalist for the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Studies.

Susan E. Whyman (Independent Scholar) received an independent scholar award from the Modern Language Association for her book, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800, published by Oxford University Press. Susan E. Whyman received her MA and PhD degrees in British history from Princeton University. The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 combines impressive archival research, focusing on previously untapped writing by ordinary people—including laborers and servants—as they expressed themselves in personal letters, with an institutional and cultural history of expanding literacy and the rise of the Royal Mail. Tracing the widening opportunities for the recording and circulation of the everyday lives of ordinary people, Whyman not only questions assumptions about the relatively slow diffusion of literacy before the onset of universal formal education in England but also emphasizes the diverse motivations and opportunities for the cultivation of what she calls an epistolary literacy, which was to have important consequences for the development of the novel.