Dr. Gordon Harvey, originally from Birmingham, is the Head of the History & Foreign Languages Department and a Professor of History. He has attended Auburn University and UAB and has been at JSU since 2008. He has recently been working on a research project focusing on bike messengers.

One of his favorite things about Jacksonville State is the amount of first-generation college students. “I feel a kinship with them,” he admits. “We first gens often have a greater degree of anxiety and self-doubt about college success because it was never modeled for us.  I hope that I can serve for them as an example of what is possible for us first gens.”

As a college student, Harvey didn’t plan to teach history. “My first degree is in Marketing.  I really wanted to be a creative in an ad agency, but I didn’t apply myself during that first four years, and found that my interests drifted to history.  Later, I wanted to be a football coach and high school history teacher, but I realized that, frankly, you can’t do both with equal excellence.  Something has to sacrifice.  While earning a degree in Secondary Ed, I fell in love with a deeper approach to history that I experienced in my upper-level courses and decided to go to grad school. So, now I have degrees in Marketing and Secondary Ed, and hold an MA and PhD in History.  I think I made the right choice even if it took me a while to get there,” he says.

One of the most influential books in Harvey’s life is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. It “revealed to [him] the nature of history and how we are all connected in one way or another, whether we realize it or not. How our actions, however innocent they seem, have a residual effect on the world around us.” Harvey includes his favorite quote from the book: “The world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things.”

In addition to acting as the department head, Harvey teaches courses in American History. While he enjoys teaching upper-level courses, Harvey thrives in History survey courses. “The challenge of making history relevant and interesting to students who are only taking it to satisfy a gen ed requirement is a lot of fun,” he says. He adds that he also loves to “show students that there is no limit to our intellectual ability, nor a limit to our potential as students and humans.”

Although he primarily teaches class in American History, Harvey’s specialization is in the history of the 1970s south. “I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my state and region, and I wanted to understand how we could be so full of potential but keep working against our better angels and self-interest,” he says.  “My directing professor at Auburn was a preeminent southern historian who always tried to find the hopeful side of the South while not apologizing for the negative side. I sought to do that for the 1970s South and southern governors elected after 1970. I wrote 2 books and a handful of articles on these progressive southern governors and was one of the first historians to study the 1970s South in this way.”

One of his most recent research projects focuses on bike messengers from the 1970s to present day. “I’ve become fascinated with messengers’ role in pop culture and fashion (lycra and messenger bags!); their role in the urban economy; their growth and decline; their relationship with the urban space (and cars); the messenger community, which you can witness take place through Instagram; and the technology of the messenger industry,” he explains. He has already started his research and hopes to have a completed manuscript by this December.

When he’s not in his office or in the classroom, Harvey enjoys running trail ultramarathons of over thirty-one miles long. He is currently training to run his second one hundred mile race this November. Harvey says the races are therapeutic and force him to deal with “self-doubt, fear, and the nature of success.” One of his favorite foods to eat is spaghetti, which is what he would choose if he could eat only one thing for the rest of his life—without gaining a thousand pounds, of course. “I can’t eat it, ever,” he says. “I don’t know how to stop.”

To JSU students majoring or minoring in History or Foreign Language, Dr. Harvey gives this advice: “Do not ever feel that your degree limits you to a handful of jobs.  Your degree is equipping you with the skills that are in high demand in today’s workforce. You are learning how to think and communicate.  Those skills are employable anywhere.  While here at JSU, get out of your comfort zone.  Take risks. Do things that scare you a little.  Stretch yourself.  This is the place to learn who you are inside and who you want to be.”