Dr. Steven Schoenherr recently retired after 30 years of service to USD's History Department. A pioneer in multimedia, audio-visual, and internet technologies, he taught many popular classes, including “U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction,” U.S. Foreign Relations,” “World War I,” “World War II,” and “History of Mass Media.”

Dr. Schoenherr was born in 1945 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was educated at Indiana University, Bloomington (BA 1967), the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Delaware (PhD 1976) where he won an “Excellence in Teaching” award. He wrote his dissertation on “Selling the New Deal: Stephen T. Early's Role as Press Secretary to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

He joined USD's History Department in 1977. His scholarly work focused on multimedia and history. Articles focused on the development of the floppy disk and the magnetic drum, among other technologies. He did extensive work in local history, including a multimedia project on Old Town and a history of shopping centers in San Diego. He also presented work on “William Randolph Hearst and the Mass Media” at the Hearst Symposium in 2005. A DVD containing historical photographs and films from the era of Yellow Journalism (1896-1905) will be published in 2007.

Dr. Schoenherr's history web pages have been particularly valuable sources of photographs and information about twentieth-century U.S. history. They include a Recording Technology History web page, a World War II Timeline page, a Versailles Treaty web page, a Cold War Policies web page, and many other web pages relating to diplomatic, political, and social history. His web pages received over 2.3 million "hits" between January 17 and April 1, 2007, transfering 6.05 gigabytes per day. His most popular web page is http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/maps/list-world.html which was "hit" 228,766 times. He continues to provides CDs of photographs for use by college textbook publishers.

His current research on World War I took him England, Belgium, and France. In London, he visited the Imperial War Museum and read reports of the War Propaganda Agency created in 1914. According to Dr. Schoenherr, “These reports…described how the British sought to plant publications in newspapers to offset the anti-British slant of the Hearst papers.” He used his digital camera to copy several hundred photographs and posters held by the Imperial War Museum, especially the Signal Corps photographs made by the U.S. when it finally entered the war in 1917. They documented the American Expeditionary Force from the time of its arrival in southern France in late 1917 under General John Pershing, through the Paris Peace conference of early 1919. He also visited World War I battlefields in Belgium and France.

Dr. Schoenherr will continue his research agenda after retirement. He also plans to spend more time with his wife, Carol, his children Valerie and Jonathan, and his grandchildren.

The History Department is grateful for his many contributions to the department and the College. He has been a good colleague and a hardworking instructor. He will be missed.