Prof. Leon Soulé taught in the History Department for many years, starting in the 1960s and retiring in the late eighties. He was known as an outstanding teacher and scholar. Indeed, as a teacher he was inspiring, and a number of his students were motivated by his teaching to get their Ph.D. and become professors themselves. These scholarships commemorate Prof. Soulé and his contributions to the History Department and the profession.
This year’s recipient of the Soulé Award is Becca Ross.
Becca Ross is a double major in History and Communication Studies. Her interests include traveling and politics. After graduation she plans on attending graduate school to get her master’s degree in Higher Education. Her accomplishments as an undergraduate include being initiated into Order of Omega, an honors fraternity recognizing the top 3% of Greek life, and she was also recently elected SGA Vice President for the upcoming school year. A special memory she will have from her undergraduate years will be living downtown and experiencing everything Cleveland has to offer!
Professor Rose remembers Becca as a student who is excellent at connecting content from her courses to lessons she can bring to the classroom in her future career as a social studies teacher. In HIS 299, Becca wrote an engaging lesson plan about the four female Catholic missionaries from Cleveland who were murdered in El Salvador in 1980. In her lesson plan, Becca used this historical event to discuss issues related to the El Salvadoran civil war, its connection with the Cold War, the involvement of activist Catholics as well as the U.S. government in the conflict, and how all of this reflected on the role of women in both the United States and in Latin America during the early 1980s.
I remember Dr. Soule from 1967. He taught a course on Southern history. He challenged us. As a resident in Georgia for almost 40 years, I have found the insights he gave us about the South to be invaluable to life in a place very different than my growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.