YSU’s Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Conference returns this spring

Youngstown State University’s Valerie Waksmunski-Starr Memorial Conference on the Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, three days of student-led research, powerful public exhibits and engaging lectures from national and local scholars will be held April 16-18.

To be held at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor, LAHSS-Con is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary conference where YSU students present original research, strengthen communication skills and engage in scholarly dialogue — all while connecting academic work to real-world issues in our community.

This year’s featured lecturers include Joseph M. Beilein, a nationally renowned Civil War historian, and Whitney E. Barringer of the American Historical Association, who led the most comprehensive survey of K–12 history education in the U.S.

Beilein’s lecture, “From Ohio Schoolmaster to Missouri Bushwhacker: The Strange Civil War of William Clarke Quantrill,” will be held Thursday, April 17 at 6 p.m. and will discuss the impact and legacy of guerrilla violence in Civil War history.

Barringer’s lecture “The Persistence of History” will be held Friday, April 18 at noon and will explain and discuss Barringer and her colleagues’s research into the standards and legislation on history education in the U.S.

In addition to featured lectures, the conference also has two debuting exhibits, “Resistance is Not Futile: Grassroots Resistance to the KKK,” a student-researched exhibit on the 1924 anti-Klan riot in Niles, and “Sharing Our Story: Fifty Years of Oral History at YSU, a faculty-curated exhibit highlighting YSU’s pioneering oral history program.

The conference is free and open to the public. For more information, visit.