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Dr. Aleen Ratzlaff to Present 'Stories from Cowley County' at Learning in Retirement Nov. 16
November 12, 2009
Categories: General News
Tabor College Communications Professor Dr. Aleen Ratzlaff will share stories from her recent oral history project documenting black communities in Winfield and Arkansas City, Kan., during a program titled “Stories from Cowley County” at the Tabor Learning in Retirement Program, beginning at 9:45 a.m., Monday, Nov. 16, in the Wohlgemuth Music Education Center.
While on sabbatical last spring, Ratzlaff traveled to Cowley County and conducted interviews with men and women who were part of the area’s historically-significant black communities. Her research focused on life experiences of those were lived in southeast Kansas during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
“Rich stories of people’s experiences will be so easily lost if not captured, preserved and retold,” Ratzlaff said. “There’s so much to learn about an overlooked history from those who lived it.”
The goals of Ratzlaff’s ongoing research include preserving those stories by publishing a book, collecting photos for an exhibit at the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum, and writing an academic paper about the role of the Kansas City Call and the Black Dispatch newspapers, distributed in these communities during the 1930s to 1950s. Her co-researcher on the project is Heather Ferguson, executive director of the Cherokee Strip Museum in Arkansas City.
A 1974 graduate of Tabor College, Ratzlaff earned her master’s degree in communication at Wichita State University in 1994 and received her doctorate in mass communication from the University of Florida in 2001, where her dissertation focused on the black newspapers of Kansas published from 1878 to 1900.
Ratzlaff has been teaching communication courses at Tabor since 1997 and in recent years been active as a presenter on the Kansas Humanities Speakers Bureau. She serves on the advisory board of the Hillsboro Museums and is active in several professional organizations, including American Journalism Historians Association and Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Prior to teaching at Tabor, Ratzlaff worked more than 15 years as a community minister with World Impact, an urban mission organization, in Wichita.
The public is welcome to attend this session for $3. Registration and discount cards for lunch in the cafeteria will be available at the door during the half hour before the meeting. For more information, contact Connie Isaac, coordinator, 947-5964, or conniei@tabor.edu
