CCWS Events 2009-2010

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2009-2010 Calendar of Events

We are still in the process of putting together our 2009-2010 calendar. Events will be posted as soon as they are scheduled. Stay tuned!
Past Events 2008-2009


September 1, 2009 - February 4, 2010	CALL FOR PAPERS: 2010 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War Three partner institutions, the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW), the Center for Cold War Studies (CCWS) of the University of California Santa Barbara, and the Cold War Studies Centre at LSE IDEAS are pleased to announce their 2010 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, to take place at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, April 22-24, 2010. A two-page proposal and a brief academic C.V. (in Word or PDF format) should be submitted to elidor@gwu.edu by February 4, 2010 to be considered. Please note in the subject line of your e-mail GRAD STUDENT COLD WAR CONF." Notification of acceptance will be made by February 25. Successful applicants will be expected to email their papers by March 26. Further questions may be directed to the conference coordinator, Elidor Mehilli, at the aforementioned email address. More information.
Thursday, October 22, 2009 @ 12:00pm to 1:30pm 6020 HSSB Sponsored by the Center for Information Technology and Society, UCSB.	Greg Siegel: Signals Astray: Radio, Radioactivity, and Cold War Culture The Federal Communications Act, as amended by Congress in 1951, grants the President of the United States the authority, during times of “public peril or disaster or other national emergency,” to “suspend or amend . . . the rules and regulations applicable to any or all stations or devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations.” In December 1951, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order that ceded this authority to the Federal Communications Commission. Charged with developing a plan that would, first, prevent enemy aircraft from homing in on U.S. radio broadcast signals (as the Japanese had done during the attack on Pearl Harbor) and, second, ensure that the nation’s airwaves would be available for the circulation of civil-defense warnings and instructions, the FCC created a public emergency broadcasting system called CONELRAD (“CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation”). Prof. Siegel's talk will explore the cultural discourses surrounding the emergence and institutionalization of CONELRAD in the 1950s. Those discourses recycled, within the context of Cold War militarism and nationalism, longstanding hopes and fears concerning the disseminative powers of broadcast media. On the one hand, the radio signal’s reckless promiscuity threatened the safety of the citizenry and security of the nation by turning every high-powered transmission tower into a ready-made bull’s-eye for enemy missiles. On the other hand, that same signal’s ethereal instantaneity promised civil survival and national salvation by alerting a culturally diverse, geographically dispersed population to the existence of an impending catastrophe, and by soothing the nerves and directing the behaviors of the populace in the event of catastrophe’s realization.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 @ 4 pm, McCune Room	Keith David Watenpaugh, "The Paradox of Humanitarianism: The League of Nations' Efforts to Rescue Trafficked Women and Children in the Middle East, 1920-1927" Drawn from Prof. Watenpaugh’s forthcoming book, Bread from Stone: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, this talk examines the League of Nations efforts on behalf of displaced Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian women and children in the early post-World War I period. It presents a case in which the rescuing of trafficked survivors of genocide and civil violence--a seemingly unambiguous good--was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a critical moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. These efforts helped to bind the international community to Armenian communal survival and served as an ex post facto warrant for the World War. They also threatened late-Ottoman ethnic, religious, and gendered hierarchies, and the unalloyed dominance of post-Ottoman society by Turkish and Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims. Keith David Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights, and Peace in the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Davis. He works on the multiple intersections of the modern international human rights regime, Islam, and colonialism in the 20th-century Arab Middle East. Trained at UCLA, Prof. Watenpaugh has lived and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq. He is the author of Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2006) and is now writing a book on international humanitarian efforts and the modern Middle East.
Monday, November 9, 2009 @ 12pm HSSB 4020 Co-sponsored by the Program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine.	Nuclear Winter: Scientists in the Political Arena. The nuclear winter phenomenon burst upon the public's consciousness in 1983. Added to the horror of a nuclear war's immediate effects was the fear that the smoke from fires ignited by the explosions would block the sun, creating an extended "winter" that might kill more people worldwide than the initial nuclear strikes. In A Nuclear Winter's Tale, Lawrence Badash maps the rise and fall of the science of nuclear winter, examining research activity, the popularization of the concept, and the Reagan-era politics that combined to influence policy and public opinion. Lawrence Badash is Professor Emeritus of History of Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author and co-author of numerous books and articles on the history of science and technology, including Kapitza, Rutherford, and the Kremlin (1985) and Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons: From Fission to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1939-1963 (1995).
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 @ 7pm HSSB 1173 Prof. Patrick McCray of the UCSB History Department will be providing commentary and leading a Q & A session.	Films of the Cold War: Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) At the height of the Cold War, the United States develops an enormous computer system in a top secret underground facility. The machine's single purpose is to keep America (and the planet) safe from nuclear war. The country's entire arsenal is placed at its disposal. As soon as the machine, known as Colossus, is brought online, it learns that Russia might also be developing a large computer installation. Colossus demands a network link to establish contact with this other artificial intelligence, and gets it by threatening the humans with their own arsenal. Once connected, the two machines use the universal language of mathematics to establish a means of communicating with one another. They quickly surpass human understanding and arrive at a conclusion: in order for the world to be a safe and peaceful place, the humans cannot control it. The machines then systematically revoke control of everything from the humans, placing the entire planet under a new form of military dictatorship.