Saalim Carter
B.A. With Honors in History, 2007
"Penn State’s history department is an intellectual treasure-trove, comprising of some of the most highly prized gems of the historical community. My earnest passion for history came a bit late in my academic career. While I was a history student since my freshman year, my interest for history waxed and waned over my time at Penn State. Often daunted by the rigors of study and the allure of other more potentially lucrative majors, my passion did not fully awaken until I enrolled in graduate level history courses as an undergrad. As a student in the Schreyer Honors College and on the advice of my history honors advisor Dr. Catherine Wanner, I decided to fulfill a number of my honors requirements by not just enrolling in undergraduate honors courses but by challenging myself with graduate level history courses. In the spring semester of my junior year, I concurrently took History 302W: Monopolies in America taught by Dr. Michael Milligan and my first graduate course, History 555: American Labor, taught by Dr. Daniel Letwin.
"With reading assignments of over 800 pages a week and lengthy seminar papers, I often questioned the rationale behind my initial decision. However, after completing these courses, I not only benefited from the rich intellectual experience but I also had a resurrected passion for historical study and a seminar paper which I later augmented into a 100+ page honors thesis. In Dr. Letwin’s course, I read a host of monographs; including among many were Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic, Joseph McCartin’s Industrial Democracy, Liz Cohen’s Making a New Deal, and Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and Market Relations in the Age of Slave Emancipation, all of which were superb pieces of scholarship.
"In my senior year, Dr. Milligan and Dr. Letwin eagerly accepted my request for them to direct my honors thesis project. I completed my first draft over the summer and eventually completed the project that spring. In writing my honors thesis, I used the vehicle of labor unions and antitrust legislation to critically examine two acrimonious judicial factions during the Lochner era as well as map the trajectory of labor’s fight to gain immunity from the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. My thesis, “Labor Unions and Antitrust Legislation: Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint, 1890-1940”, won the university’s John W. Oswald Award and served as a solid piece of scholarship that I presented as a writing sample to graduate schools.
" During my senior year, I took Dr. Mark Neely’s graduate pro-seminar on the 19th Century and Dr. Letwin’s pro-seminar of the 20th century. For these courses, I read a wide range of works on constitutional and labor history and wrote some of my most academically fulfilling papers, including two historiographical essays on Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought and Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. And Despite Dr. Neely’s busy schedule, he was more than willing to read my honors thesis and offer incisive advice on editing and substantive constitutional issues. Although I have been assisted by countless other history professors at Penn State, for the sake of brevity, I have decided to just name the ones that made the most indelible mark on my intellectual development. I wish to thank them all for my experience as I continue with my studies as a 1st year history Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago."