Anchorage history professor who loves learning about the past receives award

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Ian Hartman knows history, but he didn’t always want to be a history professor.

Hartman was convinced early in life that he was going to be a jazz performing guitar player until something happened during his second year of college.

“Sure enough, I took a really transformative history course, coming up on the end of my sophomore year at the University of Pittsburgh, that kind of changed my trajectory,” he said in a recent interview.

Hartman moved to Alaska in 2011 and like many residents who move from the Lower 48, he was only supposed to be here for one year.

Hartman said one year turned into two years, and now he’s approaching 13 years living in state. Hartman is an associate professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He’s also the department chair.

“To this day, I really do believe that it’s the teacher that can really stir the passion and if you don’t have that, then history tends to be one of those overlooked disciplines,” he said.

Hartman doesn’t just make an impact in the classroom. He’s also contributed a great deal in making sure Alaska’s history is remembered. “Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest” is a book he co-wrote with David Reamer that highlights more than 100 years of African-American history in the Last Frontier.

“It’s one I was proud of because of the community involvement in it, which was really — I thought — an amazing opportunity for me to learn the history from the people who made the history themselves,” he explained.

He was also part of the Alaska Railroad’s centennial exhibit at the Anchorage Museum and works closely with the National Park Service.

Still, he said there’s so much about Alaska’s history that needs to be written.

“People, you know, have the history, the elders have passed it on over the generations, but there’s so many topics that just really haven’t received like a book-length treatment or an article-length treatment, so for an academic historian like myself, there’s just this incredible opportunity to write Alaska’s story,” Hartman said.

Hartman, along with Reamer, was awarded the James H. Ducker Historian of the Year Award by the Alaska Historical Society.

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