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History Professor with Southern Charm

What can you tell about a man by the trappings in his office? In this case, there’s a wobbly desk chair. A bag of M&M’s next to a bag of almonds. A lone red apple. A worn picture of Jimmy Carter taped to a file cabinet underneath a syllabus for History 50. A tattered briefcase. A poster of James Madison, and one by 19th-century artist George Caleb Bingham. And lots of maps.

Well, the man’s not going to go hungry, for one thing. He’s attached to the past with sentiment. He has a sense of place, and he teaches. He’s a Democrat, and he likes art.

All those things are true of Robert Tinkler, first-year assistant professor in the Department of History, and, as you might expect, he’s much more. He’s got a quiet charm that emanates sincerity (ask him to do his impression of Jimmy Stewart) and patient intelligence. He’s humble but alert to irony. He speaks with a mild southern accent, and he’s ready to smile.

Tinkler first came through Chico in 1984. He visited Lassen Park, thought it was the most wonderful place he’d ever seen, and pocketed one of those small guides to Bumpass Hell—the lakes and pots of steam. Seventeen years later, in 2001, when he got a call to come for an interview for a position in history at Chico State, he’d just discovered the now brown-around-the edges guide in the recesses of a bureau drawer. “I took that as a sign,” he said.

Tinkler was born in Greenwood, South Carolina, the youngest of six. He became the family genealogist at age seven and always loved school. In the 11th grade, his “extraordinarily talented” U.S. history teacher, Beth Pinson, assigned a research project that required work at the local college library.

“I wrote a paper for her class,” said Tinkler, “that would serve as the basis for my senior thesis at Princeton. I looked at the Nullification Crisis, an attempt by South Carolina in the 1830s to declare a federal tariff null and void. The state was threatening to secede from the union. My interest was in the Unionists, those who opposed secession and gathered troops to fight against the state if necessary. Pinson had asked about the significance of the Unionists. I argued that they were terribly important because they made the nullification forces compromise.”

Tinkler comes from a progressive background. His father, an early supporter of the ACLU, was one of a handful of liberals in their hometown. After graduation with an A.B. in American history from Princeton, Tinkler went to Washington, D.C., to work with the nonprofit Women Executives in State Government, a peer-to-peer educational organization. The goal was to put statewide appointed cabinet members and elected women officials from the executive branch—governors, lieutenant governors, and treasurers such as Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey), Madeleine Kunin (Vermont), and Evelyn Murphy (Massachusetts)—in touch with businesses and institutions traditionally most accessible to men. The forum allowed members to share strategies, successes, failures—and to learn from one another. “It was a fabulous organization,” Tinkler said. “We were involved with changing the political landscape.”

In 1990, Tinkler began the doctoral program in American history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which houses the highly regarded Southern Historical Collection. “Chapel Hill has wonderful professors—almost as good as Beth Pinson,” Tinkler said, grinning.

Completed in 1999, Tinkler’s dissertation, “‘Ashes of Greatness’: Politics and Reputation in the Antebellum World of James Hamilton,” explores Southern codes of honor as they related to the trajectory of the leader of the nullification movement. Tinkler explained that the large debts Hamilton incurred in the postnullification years and his very public attempts to erase them embarrassed his fellow Carolina slaveholders. These planter-aristocrats wished to forget Hamilton because his example reminded them that their own wealth and power rested precariously on an unpredictable commodities market.

Of particular interest to Tinkler are those who worked “against the grain” of public opinion in the South. In addition to turning his dissertation into a book, he is working on an article tentatively titled “The Theatre of White Supremacy” about the near-lynching of Lunsford Lane, a free African American man in North Carolina in 1841, by a white mob. Although some of the mob members were sympathetic to Lane, Tinkler explained, they wished to re-enforce a sense of superiority over this financially successful black man, exemplifying white southern modes of controlling blacks outside of slavery.

Tinkler’s interest in the Civil War is focused on the social dimensions of the conflict, particularly the southern whites who opposed the Confederacy. He points out to students that about 100,000 southern white men from Confederate states fought for the Union, illustrating the complexity of the war. Reenactments of the war, he said, satisfy the continuing interest of many Americans in understanding their past.

Visual presentation is one of the things that defines Tinkler’s teaching style. “Many of us are visual learners,” Tinkler said, “so I provide video, slides, and overheads in the classroom, that is, I use ‘visual evidence.’ I lecture, but I always try to get the students themselves to be historians, to figure out the facts and come up with interpretations. I want them to encounter the past.”

Thomasin Saxe, College of Humanities and Fine Arts