For 13 hours on Election Day, UM history professor Donald Spivey stood at the side of the road, waving to voters. At 11:55 p.m. he woke from an evening nap, just as the nation learned who its 44th president would be. Tears rolling, he and his wife opened a bottle of wine and watched the final returns. “Then I said, ‘This doesn’t look good. This is not a manly thing.’ And then I was getting these calls from friends, men from all over the country. They were all crying,” Spivey says, with a laugh.

Although he spent the better part of 2008 campaigning and blogging for the person he considered the best candidate for the job—fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama—Spivey ultimately thought he’d lose. “I’ve written about the race dilemma in America, the absurdity of it, the inability to see beyond it, etc., and I said, well, I can’t even imagine a scenario where the United States of America would elect an African-American president,” he says. “I was wrong. I’m happy to be wrong. Because it tells me that there is hope.”

As a historian, Spivey is accustomed to analyzing watershed moments from a distance, so when the campaign hit warp speed, he was careful to keep it out of his classroom. “Actually, I made it a point not to discuss this in class,” he says. This year it’s a different story. “Now, when I’m teaching African-American history, I will feel good about ending that course talking about the election of Barack Obama, because it is a part of the history.”

Forecasting the future, assistant professor in political science Gregory Koger presented his paper “Making Change: President Obama and the 111th Congress” on November 17 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. “Given the breadth of the Democrats’ 2008 victory,” he asserted, “it would be reasonable for Obama to expect that Congressional Democrats will support him throughout the 111th Congress, especially if they believe that working with Obama improves their prospects in the 2010 election.” In other words, Obama’s honeymoon may last longer than the typical 100 days. Still, with the economic crisis, two wars, and high expectations, no one denies his monumental task.

“Frankly, to be great you need great challenges,” Spivey says. “FDR in the Great Depression and World War II; Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War.”