THE EARLY YEARS:�

History became a formal subject of study at ENC in 1921, with the arrival of Professor Hugh C. Benner to the Wollaston campus. He later served as the founding president of the�Nazarene Theological Seminary and a general superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene.�

During the 1930s and World War II era, the Department of History remained a small one-person department. Professor Linford A. Marquart was particularly effective in organizing ENC students. Under his sponsorship, the History Club developed into the most prestigious student organization on campus, and students formed a chapter of the League of Evangelical Students. That international organization elected him to a national office. When in 1940 Professor Marquart resigned to take a position on the faculty of Olivet Nazarene College, Professor Mervel P. Lunn replaced him on the ENC faculty and taught history throughout most of the decade.�
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THE POSTWAR YEARS:�

Shortly after WWII, ENC's History Department enjoyed a period of impressive growth and accomplishment. Two of the strongest instructors the College has known arrived on campus: Professor Charles W. Akers and Professor Timothy L. Smith. They not only professionalized the curriculum, but inspired a generation of students to attain academic excellence and professional prominence.�

Professor Akers returned to his alma mater ENC in 1948 while still engaged in graduate studies at Boston University. He was joined in 1949 by Professor Smith, who likewise was completing his graduate work at Harvard University under the renowned historian Arthur Slesinger, Sr.� Smith and Akers offered ENC students a rich program of instruction based upon their own rigorous doctoral studies. And both went on to establish national reputations as scholars, Akers in colonial American history and Smith in�American church history. Akers' three biographies [Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720-1766 (Harvard 1964), Abigail Adams: An American Woman(Scott Foresman, 1980), and The Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution in Boston (Northeastern, 1982)] received critical acclaim within the history profession.� The prestigious American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature included Akers’ work among the significant contributions to historical scholarship (Oxford, 1995). Smith's Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins, 1957) remains a classic work of American historiography. (Click here for contemporary reviews of Revivalism and Social Reform.)� He also wrote the definitive history of the Church of the Nazarene, Called Unto Holiness(Beacon Hill, 1962). Smith's many scholarly publications and formidable knowledge of American church history and ethnicity earned him the honor of being one of six distinguished historians to address the American Historical Association in the Bicentennial year of 1976 on the meaning of the�American experience.�

Professor Smith reorganized the College's general education curriculum by replacing a two-semester course in European history with a course in Western Civilization. Instead of multiple sections of the course, he employed a large lecture session with recitation sessions conducted by history majors. Smith also introduced illustrated lectures on Fine Arts as part of this course and thereby brought the visual arts into the general education curriculum.�

Dr. Smith was the first director of College Courses Incorporated, sponsored by the Quincy School Department. Dr. Akers transformed this into Quincy Junior College and served as its first full-time director. Smith passed away in 1997. Akers lives in retirement in South Carolina.�
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THE CAMERON-FAULKNER YEARS:�

Professors Akers and Smith inspired a generation of ENC students, including James R. Cameron who graduated from ENC in 1951 and received a Master's degree in history from Boston University in 1952. Professor Cameron taught full-time in the Eastern Nazarene Academy while pursuing doctoral studies at Boston University. When Professor Smith resigned in 1954 to take a position at East Texas State University, Cameron replaced him. (Later Smith went on to the University of Minnesota and ended his academic career at The Johns Hopkins University.)� When Dr. Akers resigned in 1959 to take a position at Geneva College, Professor Cameron, who received his doctorate that year, was appointed head of the History Department and Chair of the Division of Social Sciences. He would hold the former position for thirty-five years and the latter for thirty-six. In addition to earning numerous teaching awards, Dr. Cameron published several books [among them Frederic William Maitland and the History of English Law (Oklahoma, 1961) and Eastern Nazarene College: The First Fifty Years, 1900-1950 (ENC, 1968)] and has established an enviable reputation as a local historian. During Dr. Cameron's tenure as Department Chair, the basic history curriculum, still in effect today, took shape: two-semester survey courses in both European and American history, a seminar in historiography and methodology, and electives in English, Russian, American, Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern European history, along with a series of government courses.�

In 1959, Professor Barbara Faulkner began her teaching career at ENC as an adjunct instructor in English history. Meanwhile, she served as secretary to the academic dean and worked on her doctoral program at Boston University. She became a full-time instructor in the History Department in 1960, teaching primarily American and Russian history.

In 1965, Drs. Cameron and Faulkner were joined by Dr. Larry Hybertson, another alumnus of the College. He received his doctorate in Renaissance Studies at the University of Oregon and came to ENC from the faculty of Florida State University. After six years, he resigned to pursue a second doctorate and a second career in psychological testing. Hybertson passed away in 1998.�

In the decade of the 1950s, Professor James Golden began a program of intercollegiate debate at ENC. Dr. Akers took over the debate program and forged it into one of national prominence. In 1958, Luther Starnes and Richard Schubert, both history majors, qualified for the National Debate Tournament at West Point. Dr. Cameron took over the program in 1959, and under his leadership the team went to the Nationals in 1961 and again in 1962. When Dr. Cameron was on an exchange professorship at Northwest Nazarene College in 1968-1969, his star debater and history major was Kent Hill. After his graduate training at the University of Washington, Dr. Hill became a history professor at Seattle Pacific University and President of a Washington-based think tank.� Hill became president of ENC following the sudden death of Dr. Cecil Paul in 1992 and served until 2001 when he became assistant administrator fro Europe and Eurasia for USAID.�

The pattern of history alumni returning to ENC continued when in 1977 Donald A. Yerxa became an instructor in the History Department. He taught history and general education courses (in particular the capstone course "Living Issues") while he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Maine. In 1980, Professor Yerxa became ENC's first full-time Director of Admissions and continued in this capacity until 1988, when he left ENC. During his time in Admissions, he continued to teach "Living Issues" and some courses in history. In 1991, Dr. Yerxa returned to ENC after writing Admirals and Empires: The U.S. Navy and Caribbean, 1898-1945 (University of South Carolina, 1991) and helped launch the new accelerated adult education program: LEAD. In 1992, he returned to full-time teaching on the Wollaston campus and was named chair of the History Department in 1994, a position he still holds.�

Yerxa supervised a major curriculum review in the mid-1990s that led to the expansion of offerings in American history. He launched a major lecture series, which continues to bring many prominent historians to the campus to speak and interact with students. And in 1997, he organized the Alpha Theta Rho chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. In 2001, Yerxa reduced his teaching at ENC to become the assistant director of The Historical Society with offices at Boston University. His principal duties are to edit the Society's bulletin, Historically Speaking. With ENC physics professor Karl Giberson, Yerxa wrote Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story (Rowan & Littlefield, 2002).�

In 1995, the History Department welcomed Nicholas Rowe to the faculty. He finished a doctorate in Anglo-French intellectual history at Boston College in 1997 and remained on the ENC faculty until 2001. Rowe provided ENC students with a fresh new perspective on the discipline of history and a variety of new educational experiences, including a January 1997 travel seminar to rural Tennessee where students conducted an exciting oral history project with two African American congregations.�
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THE PRESENT:�

The History Department is currently experiencing growth and new energy. Two new historians have joined the faculty since 2002. Carla Lovett, who is completing a doctorate in modern Austrian social and religious history at Boston University, brings a commitment to academic rigor and a keen desire to�provide students with expanded intellectual and social opportunities beyond the traditional undergraduate classroom. Under her guidance both the History Club and ENC's Phi Alpha Theta chapter have experienced renaissance. She has also introduced several new travel courses, including one on the Holocaust. Randall Stephens is the most recent addition to the ENC History faculty. He received his PhD in American religious history from the University of Florida in 2003. His areas of expertise include late 19th and early 20th-Century American history, the South, American religious history, American popular music, historical theology, and cultural history. He has published articles in the Journal of Southern Religion and Fides et Historia.�