War Work: WWI in America

Kay Arnold specializes in women’s, Texas, and oral history, and works with the Austin History Center Association’s Austin History Makers project. She has taught the courses "Women in American History" and "Texas History" at St. Edward's University. Her most recent work includes, "Think of the Lives that Might Be Saved: Women’s World War I Work, University of Texas Services and James Ferguson” in Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James A. Ferguson (Texas A&M University Press, 2017). Her current and past service positions include a Board of Directors member of the Ruthe Winegarten Foundation for Women in Texas History, as Chair of the Membership Committee of the Texas State Historical Association, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Texas Folklore Society, and past President of the St. Edward’s University Alumni Association.

Brian Horrigan retired as exhibit curator for the Minnesota Historical Society in March 2018 after more than 27 years developing exhibitions and multimedia experiences for the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul and for several state historic sites. He was the lead developer and project director for several projects that received significant recognition and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including:  Families (1995); Minnesota’s Greatest Generation (2009); The 1968 Exhibit (2011; 2018); and WW1 America (2017).  Both The 1968 Exhibit and WW1 America received the coveted Chairman’s Special Award from the Endowment. Prior to coming to Minnesota, Brian was a project director for the Exhibits Service of the US Information Agency in Washington DC, developing official US cultural exchange exhibitions--such as Design USA and Information USA--that traveled to venues throughout the former Soviet Union. Brian was also the co-curator of the exhibition Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future and co-author of the book of the same name. The exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 and subsequently traveled to eight other museums in the United States.

Bernadette Pruitt is Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. She teaches classes on race and ethnicity, internal migrations, slavery, Recent United States history, and the African Diaspora. The first Black woman to earn a PhD in History from the University of Houston, she obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees from HBCU Texas Southern University. Her monograph, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (Texas A&M University Press, 2013), examines Black internal migration and community building in what ultimately becomes the fourth largest city in the United States. Pruitt’s book is one of the first scholarly attempts to address the Great Migrations within the South. The scholar has won several awards, including the 2014 Ottis Lock Superb Book Award with the East Texas Historical Association (ETHA). She is also the past recipient of other awards and fellowships including the University of Illinois at Chicago African American Studies Department postdoctoral fellowship, Huggins-Quarles Award with the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the University of Houston African American Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the Ima Hogg Scholarship with the Dolph-Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Fred White Jr. and Mary M. Hughes Research Fellowships in Texas History with the Texas State Historical Association. An engaged activist scholar, the historian currently serves as a member for the OAH Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession and is past chair of the 2015 Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize Committee, also with the OAH. She also serves on the Ottis Locke Prize Committee with the ETHA as well as a past ETHA board member. The co-advisor of the Sigma Phi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society, Pruitt has also served on the National Advisory Board and National Council of the honor society.