J. B. Owens
Emeritus Faculty
B. “Jack” Owens received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1972). He studied with Robert Kingdon and Domenico Sella, who introduced him to the research questions and methodologies of the French Annales School (l’École des Annales). The movement takes its name from the first version of its signature journal, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, founded at the Université de Strasbourg in 1929 by two young professors, Marc Bloch (1886-murdered 1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956). During the first semester of graduate school (fall 1966), Owens read the emblematic Annales work, Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949; 1,160 pages of French!). Quickly recognized as a serious graduate student, Owens receive Ford and Fulbright grants to continue his dissertation research in Spain (Toledo and Granada). He selected East Asian history as his PhD minor, which afforded him the opportunity to discover the second continuing influence on his research and teaching, Joseph R. Levenson’s Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (1968).
Institutional and global financial crises wiped out Owens’s first two tenure-track positions at New York University (1971-73) and Lehigh University (1973-75). Therefore, he and his growing family arrived battered and disoriented in Pocatello in July 1975, and he spent the rest of his academic career at ISU, where he taught European, Latin American, and World history.
Owens received a large research grant from the U.S.-Spanish Joint Committee for Educational and Cultural Affairs (the successor to Spanish Fulbright research grants) and spent three semesters (1978-79) in Murcia, Spain. The Universidad de Murcia published his first book, Rebelión, monarquía y oligarquía murciana en la época de Carlos V (1980), and a companion monograph on the members of Murcia’s city council between 1500 CE and 1650 (1981). Owens is currently substantially revising the book and translating it into English.
While in Murcia, Owens headed the history department of the regional research institute, which eventually became the regional section of the Fundación Pablo Iglesias of Spain’s major socialist party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE). He organized group research on the workers’ movement in the transition from fascism to a parliamentary democracy, publishing two articles (in English) on the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). Because the institute’s director, a Senator, served on the Senate committee on the drafting of the 1978 constitution, Owens followed the process closely. This experience, and subsequent research in the 1990s, provided the basis for his world history course on establishing countries and other political units on the basis of a written constitution (late 18th century to 1996).
Back in Pocatello for the fall semester 1979, Owens established a plan for a special library collection named for his predecessor (and officemate), which in 1981 became the Glenn E. Tyler Collection in the History and Philosophy of Medicine and Science. Owens served as (uncompensated) founding director until 2008. Upon his death in August 1987, Tyler left his personal library to ISU; it consisted of about 22,000 volumes, including a rich collection of rare books, which became the basis of the Oboler Library’s collection of 16th-18th century works. Tyler’s bequest increased the library’s total monograph collection by about 14%. Because the library had no budget to process so large a gift, Owens spent well over 100 volunteer hours sorting the books in the library’s basement and wheeling them on carts to the acquisition department. For this contribution to the university, Owens received a special commendation from the Faculty Senate in 1989.
In 1991, Owens served on a department committee to create a graduate program in comparative and world history, which the administration would never send to the State Board. However, Owens increased his activities within world and world systems research and teaching organizations, and as a result, he created an upper-division world history course on the planetary Hispanic Monarchy, which included the global domains of the Crown of Portugal, of the First Global Age (1400-1800). He applied for and received a six-week grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to participate in a summer seminar in 1995 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Rethinking Europe/Rethinking World History, 1500-1800.” While there, he also wrote a draft of a future book (published in 2005) and created the design for a future multidisciplinary research project (funded in 2007).
Ronald Hatzenbuehler introduced Owens to information management using computers, and he presented his first paper in this area in 1986. In 1994 (pre-browser), Owens expanded this research to distance learning, work for which he received in 1996, the “Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Technology” from a national organization. From 1997 to 1999, he coordinated an ISU interdisciplinary project, funded by the State Board, involving faculty members from anthropology, health professions, and history to develop computer-mediated, distance education programs.
In the Annales vision, to achieve the comprehensive (“total”) history for which the movement called in the 1960s, a researcher had to integrate information about the economic, social, and cultural environments, and Owens felt frustrated because he did not know how to do that. In spring 1998, colleagues in historical geography, members of an online research discussion group, recommended that he explore geographic information systems (GIS) as a possible method. ISU had established a GIS center in January of that year, and Owens participated in his first GIS workshops in June. Over the summer, he wrote his first GIS paper, entitled “Where in the World’s History is Murcia?”, turning it into a successful funding proposal, which took him to Spain during the spring semester 1999.
In the Crown archive of Castile, in the castle of Simancas, Owens discovered some of the reports of a secret 1565 investigation into smuggling networks along the border between the Kingdom of Castile and that of Valencia (the latter was a separate country), much of it taking place within the Kingdom of Murcia (roughly the territory of the modern provinces of Albacete and Murcia). At the urging of ISU’s research office, Owens obtained a senior NEH summer research grant to pursue additional sources about these smuggling operations. He returned to Pocatello in August 2000 with approximately 3,000 pages of documents and the perfect research project for displaying the capabilities of GIS. Owens probably already held the university record for the greatest number of research grants obtained from ISU research committees, but based on this early success, the faculty research committee provided him with a series of timely grants, which allowed him to extend this work. At the centennial graduation ceremony in 2002, Owens received the Distinguished Researcher award.
Owens worked with department colleagues to design and begin the first GIS-based graduate program in History anywhere in the world (2002-2008). They addressed History’s vulnerabilities, which could (and did) lead to cuts in university funding and of entire history departments throughout the U.S. and the World. Timely funding from ISU’s office of research allowed Owens to collaborate with the multidisciplinary Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), which was initially founded to use GIS to organize information on Buddhism throughout Asia before becoming a global project.
This strong institutional support allowed Owens to obtain a full NEH fellowship (2004-2005) and the only fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation ever given to a faculty member at any of Idaho’s universities by that time (2005-2006). In addition to many articles, he published another book, ”By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age, in 2005.
Owens returned to Pocatello in late April 2006 and discovered that the European Science Foundation (ESF) had issued a call for multinational, multidisciplinary funding proposals for a research program named “The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading” (TECT). Because the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) supported the program, Owens could apply. In the end, he created the largest project, among the successful five, in number of collaborating researchers and academic disciplines represented, with its strength in History, Geographic Information Systems, and Mathematical Modeling (of complex, nonlinear systems): it is known as the DynCoopNet Project (“Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global Age [1400-1800]”). Suddenly, much of Owens’s research and teaching came together to permit him to craft the complicated ESF proposal in only five weeks; all of the other successful project directors worked on theirs for months. Most importantly, the submission of the proposal convinced ISU’s administration to grant the history department a new position, which was necessary for the start of the GIS-based graduate program, a component of DynCoopNet.
Owens’s innovative ideas attracted the attention of NSF’s director, who saw the DynCoopNet Project as a manifestation of what he called “transformative research” (tr). As a result, the agency encouraged Owens to submit a funding proposal in one of the tr categories. Working with geographer May Yuan, he submitted “Understanding social networks within complex, nonlinear systems: geographically-integrated history and dynamics GIS” (SOCNET). The NSF director’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) administered the grant as part of the agency’s tr Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program. One major SOCNET product is A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Training Manual for Historians and Historical Social Scientists (plus exercise data sets and free GIS software), which has continued to be downloaded by researchers and students in countries around the world.
Owens’s NSF award for the DynCoopNet Project was $394,000 for three years (2007-2010), the largest amount ever given to an individual historian. The total SOCNET grant was $1,761,897 (for four years, extended to five; 2009-2014), the largest NSF award ever given to a project headed by a historian. Most importantly, in the midst of an ISU budget crisis, these large grants brought “Indirect Costs” money to the history department to support the research-related travel and research of Owens’s departmental colleagues. During one academic year in which ISU budgeted for all history travel only $1,800, Owens’s NSF grants provided about $28,000 and probably saved at least one departmental teaching position.
Starting in 2015, Owens was developing another NSF funding proposal, but it was delayed by health problems and checked permanently by the pandemic because he could not travel sufficiently to recruit for the necessary multidisciplinary team. Thus, he published elements of the research design as “If I Forget Thee, O Murcia” and (with Vitit Kantabutra of ISU’s engineering program) “A Research Design for a World History of the World.” These and other articles related to his research career are available on Owens’s Academia.edu page (http://idahostate.academia.edu/JBJackOwens). A long (over 20,000 words) book chapter appeared in April 2021 in Oxford, England, with the title “Markets in the Shadows, Trade Diasporas, and Self-Organizing Trading / Smuggling Networks,” which represents his continuing work on 16th-century smuggling. Owens is currently writing an article for the Italian historical journal Storica about the emergence in the 1560s of cooperation among elite families who controlled a hugely disproportionate share of the economic and political resources of the Castilian City and Kingdom of Murcia.
Owens and his wife, Grace, are long-time human rights activists. Indeed, they met at Oberlin College, which opened in 1832 as the first higher-education institution to admit women and people of color on the same basis as white males. Starting with the abolition movement, the faculty and students have long been recognized for their role in struggles for civil and human rights. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the speaker at Grace’s graduation. They have received awards for their work, the most important of which was the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award given to Grace, a Highland High School Spanish teacher, at the national convention of the National Education Association (NEA) in Los Angeles in 1987. The event recognized her courageous leadership in dealing with fascist and white supremacist organizing in Idaho and the NW. Jack Owens is a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) --since secondary school-- and he has held leadership positions with the Pocatello Branch since shortly after arrival in 1975. He is thought to be the only person to have marched twice in the March on Washington in August 1963. At the Branch’s MLK banquet in 1995, he was presented with the Lifetime Civil Rights Service Award from the Branch, the Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, and the ISU Black Student Alliance. Together, Grace and Jack were given in 2000 the Cole Award of the Ecumenical Ministry of Idaho State University (for exemplary lives in defense of human and civil rights).
Since junior high, Owens has loved soccer (world football). Thus, he jumped into helping its founders build the Gate City Youth Soccer League (GCYSL), and he led the negotiations with School District #25 to establish soccer as a secondary school competitive program. He served as faculty director of ISU’s Soccer Club, and he assisted the two co-captains to start the first special, traveling team for boys 13-16 in 1983. When he returned from a research year in Spain (1983-84), he was appointed head of Idaho’s Olympic Development Program in soccer. Under the umbrella of the GCYSL, he created the Girls Soccer Association in 1985 to provide girls with intensive coaching and playing experiences in preparation for the new secondary school girls soccer teams. The national association named Owens “Girls Coach of the Year for 1987.” Until fall 1990, he dedicated many hours to coaching teams and officiating matches. However, when ISU finally started the women’s soccer program in 1998, he contentedly served as an enthusiastic fan. That support lasted until after the 2009 season, when ISU transferred Owens west to ISU-Meridian, where he had an office until May 2019. He arranged a home office and nearby satellite library just in time for the pandemic.