Media Coverage

Raffael Scheck, the Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, was interviewed for BBC Newsday on Aug. 15, which marked the 75th anniversary of Operation Dragoon, an event that "paved the way for the Allied invasion of southern France during World War Two." In the four-minute interview, Scheck told the BBC that the "units landing in August 1944 were mostly from North Africa and also from the west and central African colonies of France." Scheck, an expert on French Black African soldiers in World War II, said they black soldiers “took part in the liberation of the key ports of Toulon and Marseille.”  

The final beam for the new athletic center was hoisted into place Aug. 6, completing the skeleton of the building, reports the Morning Sentinel. "It’s the largest single project in the college’s history, according to Colby President David A. Greene," the Sentinel said. "In April 2017, Greene said the athletic complex was one of two things, the other being the arts, that would draw people to Waterville and sustain the revitalization of the city that the college and community had embarked upon."

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, was quoted in the article "From New York to Alabama, blacks worshipped in own spaces before slavery’s end" in Religion News Service Aug. 1. The article looks at the buildings and the religious practices used by blacks during and after slavery. “African Americans did not become Christian by default but they came out of slavery with a Christianity that was critical of the people who enslaved them,” Gilkes said in the article. “All you have to do is look at the spirituals to see where African Americans were connecting with the Bible in spite of the fact that you had white missionaries who had a truncated Bible that they were sharing with slaves because they didn’t want them to know about Moses,” she said.

WalletHub reached out to Patrice Franko, the Grossman Professor of Economics and Global Studies, for her expert opinion on international credit cards. In the short Q&A format, Franko answered the question What’s the biggest credit card mistake that international travelers make? with "Walking the beach with a wallet full of cards. Take one -- and for me the Amex because of traveller support."

"Notes from the Underground" is the name of the essay by Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of education, that appeared in DownEast magazine's Maine Homes May-June issue. The essay tells the story of Brown's father, who recorded daily events on the floor beams of his home in Alexander, Maine. "Each year, my father recorded the first frost, the first snowstorm...He registered his children’s marriages and the birth of each grandchild," Brown wrote. "He logged the December day he canoed down lake, the day my mother won $400 in the lottery, the day I was accepted to graduate school."

In a July 10 NPR story titled "The Famous Big 5 Personality Test Might Not Reveal The True You," Assistant Professor of Psychology Christopher Soto is quoted repeatedly on the origins of the test as well as a recent study testing its effectiveness in developing countries. Researchers are finding "that in many of these developing countries, people tended to agree more than disagree with the Big Five statements," NPR reported. Soto, who is a consultant on a Kenya project as part of the larger study, said, "The most surprising thing to me was if someone was interviewed twice by the same interviewer then their responses across the two tests were pretty consistent," he says. "But if they were interviewed by two different interviewers then their responses were often completely unrelated to each other." The story also ran on local NPR stations across the country from South Carolina to Iowa to Oregon to Hawaii.

Lindsay Mayka, assistant professor of government, co-wrote an article titled "Brazil’s Supreme Court pushed back against an attempt to cancel participatory councils" that appeared July 8 on Vox's Mischiefs of Faction political science blog. The article discusses Brazil's participatory councils and a recent Supreme Court injunction that blocked President Jair Bolsonaro's decree to dismantle them. "The participatory councils deepen democracy by including groups that typically have less influence through elections or lobbying, such as the poor," the authors wrote.

Sandy Maisel, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of American Government, was quoted in a June 26 article on Vox titled "Why Democrats think 2020 is the year they can defeat Susan Collins" in which he expressed skepticism about Collins's moderate image. "Despite the fact she would like to be, she is not John McCain, Maisel said, referring to the 'maverick' reputation the senator sometimes had before his death last year. She doesn’t have the moral rectitude. She’s not going to stand up on these issues and say this is who I am. She frets so much about how she’s going to vote and is the last person to commit,” he told Vox.  The Vox article has been cited elsewhere, including in a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee press release and in an AlterNet article titled "Behind the scenes of Democrats’ full-throttle effort to unseat Maine’s Susan Collins."

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs wrote a letter titled "Small Town Jewish Life Takes Center Stage" printed in the "Readers Forum" section of eJewish Philanthropy June 11, 2019. In it, she chronicles how she came to settle in Waterville and create Colby's Center for Small Town Jewish Life. "Our core values of economic accessibility, dynamic learning, and collaboration across institutional and generational lines have animated all of the center’s programs since its inception," she writes. Communities like Waterville are the future of Jewish life, she continues. "Small town Jewish communities have always demanded elbow grease, innovative solutions, and a determined entrepreneurial spirit. If you look at who is leading major Jewish organizations today, you would be surprised by how many of them come from towns like Waterville, bringing their determination and hard-won Jewish knowledge back to the centers of Jewish life."

In an article titled "Are Historians Doing Enough to Address Climate Change?," the author, Walter G. Moss, cited a 1998 book by Jim Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society. After citing the opinions of others on the dearth of historical writing on climate change, Moss writes, "Fleming’s words of 1998—'Since the mid-1980s, the dominant concern has been global warming from rising concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases'—[this] remains true today."