When Jeff Forret '95, PhD, stood for the first time in front of a college classroom to lecture on the topic of United States history, it all sounded strangely familiar.
Much like what he heard in his first college history course as taught by Rev. George McDaniel '66, PhD.
"My first notes from Fr. McDaniel's classroom were the foundation," said Forret, a professor of history at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. "I have been building on them ever since."
Now in his 11th year at Lamar, Forret credited academic connections he made at St. Ambrose and elsewhere with helping him develop a strong reputation as a scholar on the topic of slavery in the pre-Civil War South. He has written three books on the subject, including a volume for the Issues and Controversies in American History textbook series. He co-edited an anthology on the same topic.
Forret's most recent book, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South, earned honorable mention in the U.S. history category of the 2016 PROSE Award competition. Also this year, Forret was awarded a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities stipend to fund archival work for his next book.
That project will tell the story of infamous slave trader William H. Williams. Forret intends to sell the book as a trade market paperback.
It is a story that will be told with a deeper level of empathy than his previous scholarly works, Forret said. That's because, in the course of doing research, Forret encountered the name of a 4-year-old boy who was shipped south with his enslaved mother. That struck a chord with the father of a 5-year-old son.
"That made it all so intensely personal for me because I have this little boy who I love and I know the aspirations I have for him," Forret said. "What has developed within the past few years as I research this topic is a growing sense of the tragedy of it all."
The younger brother of SAU Professor of Business Administration and Managerial Studies Monica Forret '88, PhD, Jeff Forret said his own history always will have St. Ambrose roots.
"It's the most perfect school I could have gone to," he said. "It's all about the people you meet there. I had classes with wonderful professors who helped my understanding of history and who made my writing what it is."
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