Wallace A. Hettle
Professor of History
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Wallace A. Hettle
Professor of History
For more than a decade, Wallace Hettle coordinated the annual Carl L. Becker Memorial Lecture, which is sponsored by the History Department and UNI’s chapter of the history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta. The series brings distinguished and innovative historians to campus, highlighting new perspectives on studying the past. The Phi Alpha Theta lecture series, including the Becker Memorial Lecture, continues on now under the leadership of Professor Dise.
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1994
Dr. Wallace Hettle regularly teaches U.S. history to Emancipation and U.S. history from Emancipation. He created an upper-division course titled the American Radical Tradition. He also teaches on the Civil War and Reconstruction. He has taught seminars on topics such as Mark Twain, American slavery, and the Civil War in American culture.
Hettle’s research mostly concerns the social and cultural life of the South during the Civil War era. He is especially interested in mythology about history. His most recent book is The Confederate Homefront: A History in Documents (2016). While he enjoys studying the South, Dr. Hettle is a lifelong resident of the Midwest.
He also writes about history and current events. His columns have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the History News Network, Rawstory, Newsweek.com, Al-Jazeera, and Yahoo News. In August 2022, he published the article Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory?