Matthew Lindaman

Biography

Professor Lindaman started teaching at Winona State in 2001 and currently serves as the chair of the department of history. He regularly teaches Western Civilization surveys in the university’s general education curriculum, while teaching upper division courses on World War I and Modern Memory, World War II, Hitler and Nazi Germany and European or World Environmental History. Professor Lindaman promotes 21st century thinking skills through use of text, images, and music in the classroom. Dr. Lindaman has been published in The Historian, The Journal of American Ethnic History, The Journal of Illinois History, and Minnesota History. An article exploring how Younkers department store promoted civic engagement during World War II will appear in a forthcoming issue of Annals of Iowa (only forty-seven states to go). Matthew is currently finishing up a pair of books: Heimat in the Heartland (University of Iowa Press) and John L. Griffith (University of Nebraska Press). The former builds upon his interest in transatlantic immigration history and the construction of ethnic identity, while the latter explores the growth and organization of intercollegiate athletic administration between the wars, especially as it relates to a correlation in growth of alumni involvement and the nation’s push for physical preparedness between the wars. Cognizant of the upcoming one-hundred-year anniversary of World War I, Dr. Lindaman is also working on Friends of France, a book-length project studying the writings and observations of American volunteers in France prior to America’s official entry into the war. Professor Lindaman comes from an extended family that is deeply involved in education at both the K-12 and university levels. A former high school teacher in German language and social studies, Matthew has worked with pre-service social science/history students at Winona State over the past decade. Promoting work in history education, he was the lead investigator in Blufflands and Prairies: Southern Minnesota’s Place in the Fabric of American History, a one-million-dollar Teaching American History grant sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. From 2006-2010, he served as the academic advisor for the grant, partnering Winona State’s department of history with the Southeast and Southwest Service Cooperatives and the Minnesota Historical Society to organize over fifty teacher workshops to explore Minnesota history through the theme of a sense of place.

Research Interest

Research Areas: Immigration history, World War I, World War II, Environmental history.