High Achievers H i g h
A c h i e v e r s
Four with College ties win state’s highest civilian honor
She digs teaching archaeology of ancient world
Jodi Magness, a leading expert on the
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our leaders with ties to the College won the prestigious North Carolina Award, the highest civilian honor that the state can bestow. They are alumni Jerry Cashion and Jan Davidson, eminent presidential historian William Leuchtenburg and distinguished biologist Darrel Stafford. • Cashion, the N.C. Historical Commission chair, has long been the person to turn to with questions about North Carolina history. In 1958, Cashion enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he received bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in history. His dissertation addressed the Cherokee during the period preceding the American Revolution. As a graduate student, he taught popular courses on North Carolina and United States history. Among his students was future Governor Michael F. Easley, whose friendship he values to this day. • Davidson has been called “North Carolina to the bone.” His contributions to understanding Tar Heel arts and culture are extraordinary. Since 1992 he has served as director of the John C. Campbell Folk School, founded in 1925 at Brasstown in Clay County in the southwestern corner of the state. As a teenager, he was a disc jockey at WCVP in Murphy, N.C. He followed his muse to UNC-Chapel Hill, where at night he played in a rock band called the Southern States Fidelity Choir. In his daytime hours he completed undergraduate studies in English and a master’s degree in folklore. • Leuchtenburg, a UNC history professor emeritus, is the nation’s leading authority on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Leuchtenburg was lured to North Carolina by the National Humanities Center and served for 10 years as a Kenan Professor at UNC before retiring in 1992. The author of more than a dozen books on 20th-century American history, Leuchtenburg is best known for The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (1958), widely used in courses, and the prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963). • Stafford, a biology professor at UNC, has been at the forefront of research into blood coagulation for 15 years. He has made world-class advances in understanding the essential details of how coagulation works and how it can be regulated. “If the genetics revolution had a front line, it would stretch through Stafford’s cramped lab at UNC-Chapel Hill,” noted The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer in 2004. As a consequence of Stafford’s work, doctors can better regulate patients’ treatments, since every patient on blood clotting medications responds differently. •
archaeology of ancient Palestine, including the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, won the Archaeological Institute of America’s Excellence
Jim Haberman
in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Magness, the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism, has led UNC students every summer since 2003 in excavations of a Roman fort dating
Jodi Magness
to ca. 300 A.D. at Yotvata, Israel. Based in the religious studies department, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early Jewish history, literature, religion and archaeology. Magness’ book, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2003 by Choice magazine and won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society’s Award for Best Popular Book in Archaeology. •
Jerry Cashion
Jan Davidson
40 • Spring 2008 • Carolina Arts & Sciences
William Leuchtenburg
Darrel Stafford