Tom Isern, NDSU

Word has it, too, that Andy Gress is surviving and prospering in graduate school--in his case the library and information science program at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This is great to hear, as Andy left here on a roll--won a regional paper prize, did great work with Preservation North Dakota, and made sound decisions about his career. The latest is that Andy's found professional employment as a reference librarian while completing his master's. All this is wonderful to hear.

A dandy group once again in the Senior Seminar--fourteen scholars, working on two lines of work. Five are doing papers on immigration and ethnicity in Barnes County, following up on the fruitful collaboration begun last semester with Wes Anderson and the Barnes County Historical Museum. The rest are doing papers on historic buildings at Bonanzaville, establishing interpretive context for them. This is applied research, micro-history, and at the same time fresh, since it's all new stuff grounded in primary sources. What fun to lead this group into the archives (and the field) again!

Jessica Clark (PhD student in History) and I will both be making research trips to Saskatchewan this summer, courtesy of the Embassy of Canada, Faculty Research Program. A modest grant from the embassy will cover costs for Jess to extend the German-Russian oral history project into Saskachewan, conducting interviews in various localities, emphasizing the migration of German-Russians from North Dakota into Saskatchewan. Meanwhile I'll be doing archival work in Regina and Saskatoon that will provide some documentary underpinning for the fieldwork. All this made possible by the fruitful collaboration with Mike Miller and the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection here at NDSU.

They always turn up, and so sure enough, a few days ago, in my threshold loomed Andrew DeCock. Great to see you, Andrew, and to get caught up on what you're accomplishing. This for Andrew's friends here at NDSU: He's done well indeed in the graduate program at Kansas State, completed course work and thesis, and is awaiting defense of thesis later this term. Well done.