Emeritus Chancellor Professor of History Dr. Gerard M. Koot awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grant to direct Summer Seminar for school teachers in London, The Netherlands, and Belgium
UMass Dartmouth Emeritus Chancellor Professor of History Dr. Gerard M. Koot has received $164,550 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to direct a Summer Seminar for school teachers on "The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of Modern Society and a World Economy". The seminar will allow 16 teachers to spend five weeks in the summer of 2015 in London, The Netherlands, and Belgium to study historical literature at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London and other international museums and historical sites over the course of the seminar.
The seminar will investigate how a region of Northwestern Europe, centered on the North Sea, was the first region in the world to develop an economy that produced long-term economic growth able to provide an adequate and rising standard of living for much of its population. Participants will study how the economy of the Dutch Republic rose to preeminence in the new European led world economy of the seventeenth century, how Britain acquired this supremacy in the eighteenth century, and how it transformed itself to become the first industrial nation.
This is the 17th NEH Summer Seminar grant received by Professor Koot, which has allowed more than 250 school teachers, selected from a national pools of applicants, to spend five weeks studying the origin and development of Europe's first modern economies. After holding the first two seminars at UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Koot moved the seminar to the campus of the University of Nottingham in the English Midlands in order to allow participants to visit the historical sites and museum exhibits of early industrialization.
In 2005, Dr. Koot began offering a completely new seminar in London and The Netherlands to emphasize that the origin of modern and sustained economic growth should be understood in a broader European and world-wide context that laid the foundation of our global economy. Scholarly teaching and learning resources on the subject and information about his NEH seminars can be found at www1.umassd.edu/euro/ and www1.umassd.edu/ir/.
About Emeritus Chancellor Professor of History Dr. Gerard M. Koot:
After receiving his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Professor Koot came to UMD in 1972 as an Assistant Professor of modern European history. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1983 and Chancellor Professor in 1995. He was chosen as Chairperson of the Department in 1986 and served in this capacity until his retirement in 2010. He also served for many years as the Director of UMD's MAT program. He taught a wide variety of modern European history courses and published articles and reviews in scholarly journals on the history of economic thought. His book, "English Historical Economics, 1870-1926: The Rise of Economic History and Neomercantilism", published by Cambridge University Press, 1987, has been translated and published in China.