| Betty Miller Unterberger | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 27, 1922 Scotland |
| Residence | Brenham Washington County Texas, USA |
| Alma mater |
Syracuse University |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Years active | 1947-2004 |
| Known for | First female Professor at Texas A&M University SHAFR President (1986) |
| Political party | Democratic[1] |
| Spouse | Robert R. Unterberger |
| Children |
Three children, including |
Betty Miller Unterberger (born December 27, 1922) is a retired historian, who as professor of American international relations spent the bulk of her extensive academic career at Texas A&M University. In 1968, she became the first woman on the faculty of the formerly all-male institution, where she continued until her retirement in 2004 at the age of eighty-one.[2]
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A native of Scotland, Unterberger was reared in the United States. In 1943, aided with a scholarship in speech, she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from Syracuse University, but her interests lay with history and political science. In 1946, she received the Master of Arts in history from the women's Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard University.[2]
Unterberger was particularly influenced at Radcliffe/Harvard by the diplomatic historian Thomas A. Bailey, a visiting scholar from Stanford University. It was from Bailey that she learned about American troops sent to Siberia in Russia at the end of World War I during the Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, sometimes known as the "Red" and "White" Russians. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University became the basis for her first book on the subject, the award-winning America's Siberian Expedition, 1918-1920: A Study of National Policy.[2]
At Duke, Unterberger enrolled in a seminar with Professor Charles Sydnor. She wrote a paper on Thomas Braidwood of Scotland and the origin of schools for the hearing impaired.[2] This article, "The First Attempt to Establish an Oral School for the Deaf and Dumb in the United States," was carried in 1947 in the Journal of Southern History and became the first of her many publications.[3] It is very different in topic to her later writings, the majority of which focus on foreign policy.
From 1948-1950, while she was still working on her Ph.D., Unterberger taught at East Carolina University. From 1954-1961, she was an associate professor of history and the director of the Liberal Arts Center for Adults at Whittier College, and from 1961–1965, an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton, where she was also from 1965 to 1968 professor and chairman of the graduate studies division.[4]
Unterberger came to Texas A&M University (TAMU) as a full professor in 1968. Her appointment coincidentally developed when her husband, Robert R. Unterberger (born ca. 1921), accepted a full professorship in geophysics there.[2] "I felt very much alone [as a woman] at Texas A&M, but it wasn't strange to me," Unterberger said much later (There had been only three women professors in southern California at the time the Unterbergers came to Texas). "I had been told that I [was] taking the bread out of the mouths of deserving male grad students," Unterberger often recalls.[5] She told how she became close to the first African American student who attended her class in 1969: "He came to see me in tears one day saying that on his dormitory room was a big sign that said 'N--- Go Home!' I took him under my wing. I tried to have students understand one another. The only thing that makes us different is our backgrounds, experience, and differences in cultures."[5] By 1976, TAMU had elected its first black student body president, Fred McClure.[5] She also invited her students on occasion for social gatherings at her home.
From January to August 1979, Unterberger was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton University. From the late 80s on, she was a frequent visiting professor, teaching at the University of California, Irvine in 1987, at Peking University's Institute of International Relations in 1988, and at Prague's Charles University in 1992. In 1991, she was appointed Patricia and Bookman Peters Professor of History at TAMU, and in 2000 was elevated to Regents professor of the Texas A&M University System.[4]
A high point of Unterberger's career was her election in 1986 as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, an organization 99 percent male founded in 1967, defeating Robert Dallek.[2] In 2004, the society established the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize in her honor.[6] Toward the end of her career, She developed an interest in India and Pakistan, particularly the work of Pandurang Shastri Athavale, or the "Dada", the founder the Swadhyay Movement. According to her, Swadhyay has "liberated millions from poverty and moral dissipation." In 1997, she successfully nominated Athavale for the $1.3 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.[2]
Robert Unterberger also holds a Ph.D. from Duke University. Howard Mumford Jones, Unterberger's Harvard graduate school advisor, had urged her to marry Robert. At first reluctant, she consented after being stricken by influenza. Robert Unterberger is a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. He was severely injured when his jeep blew up in the Philippines two days after the official end of World War II. The Unterbergers have three children, Glenn A. Unterberger (born 1951), Gail L. Unterberger (born 1952), Gregg R. Unterberger (born 1958). Howard Jones had much impact on Unterberger, having introduced her to the technical advantages of having a dictaphone in her historical writing.[2]
Unterberger is a cancer survivor, having endured four surgeries between 1950 and 1964.[2] The couple lives in College Station, Texas.