2009-2010 Calendar of Events
| 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. |
| Tuesday, February 23, 2010
@
7:30pm HSSB McCune Conference Room 6020 Prof. Salim Yaqub of the UCSB History Department will be providing commentary and leading a Q & A session. |
Films of the Cold War: The
Ugly American (1963) Harrison Carter MacWhite (Marlon Brando) is the new U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan, an imaginary country in Southeast Asia. Sarkhan is wracked by nationalist ferment, which MacWhite initially attributes to communist subversion. Eventually, however, MacWhite comes see that the politics of Sarkhan are far more complex than he realized, and that even well-intentioned U.S. policies can alienate the very people they are designed to help. Released in 1963, the film uncannily foreshadows the U.S. debacle in Vietnam.  |
| Thursday, March 4, 2010 @
4pm HSSB 4020 |
Hussein Ibish, "What's
Wrong with the One-State Solution: Why Ending the Occupation and Peace
with Israel is Still the
Palestinian National Goal" In this new book, What' s Wrong with the One State Solution, Dr. Ibish examines the arguments generally put forward by Palestinian and other Arab American proponents of abandoning the goal of ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state and instead seeking to promote a single, democratic state in all of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The book also looks at differences between the deployment of the one-state idea by some Palestinian figures in the occupied territories as a diplomatic "threat" intended to spur greater Israeli seriousness about a negotiated agreement and the diasporic discourse that drives most one-state rhetoric. Finally, Dr. Ibish explains in some detail why ending the occupation and peace with Israel, while difficult to achieve and thus far elusive, are the only plausible and practicable Palestinian national strategy. |
| Tuesday, March 9, 2010 @ 5pm HSSB 4020 Prof. Zubok will sign copies of his book, available for purchase. Cosponsored by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and the Department of Political Science |
Vladislav Zubok, "Zhivago's Children: The
Last Russian Intelligentsia Drawn from Prof. Vladislav Zubok's new book of the same title, this talk examines one of the least-chronicled aspects of post-World War II European intellectual and cultural history: the the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic, socialist society, Russian intellectuals, writers, and artists contributed to the political disintegration of the communist regime. This highly educated and idealistic elite played a unique role in galvanizing their country to strive toward a greater freedom. Like their contemporaries in the United States, France, and Germany, members of the Russian intelligentsia had a profound effect during the 1960s, sounding a call for reform, equality, and human rights that echoed beyond their time and place. Vladislav Zubok is Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including the two prize-winning books Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev with C. Pleshakov (Harvard University Press, 1996) and A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). He is a Fellow of the National Security Archive and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has served as a consultant to CNN. |
| Wednesday,
April 14, 2010 @ 4pm HSSB 4041 |
 Gabriela Soto
Laveaga, "Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and
the Making of the Pill"Gabriela Soto Laveaga examines how the global search for medicinal plants transformed Mexico into the world’s supplier of synthetic steroid hormones. The search for barbasco, a Mexican wild yam, revolutionized pharmaceuticals, paving the way for some of the twentieth century’s most important medications, including cortisone, antihistamine, and oral contraceptives. Focusing on the southern state of Oaxaca, Soto Laveaga examines the more than 150,000 men, women, and children who from the 1940s to the1970s harvested these wild yams without realizing their medical and financial potential. In so doing she challenges us to consider what is “science” and who can produce it. |
| Tuesday,
May 25, 2010 @ 4 pm HSSB McCune Conference Room 6020 |
Andrew
Johns, "Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy during the Vietnam Era" In a talk based on his new book, Vietnam's Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War, Andrew L. Johns assesses the influence of the Republican Party--its congressional leadership, politicians, grassroots organizations, and the Nixon administration--on the escalation, prosecution, and resolution of the Vietnam War. Beginning his analysis in 1961 and continuing through the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, Johns argues that the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations failed to achieve victory on both fronts of the Vietnam War--military and political--because of their preoccupation with domestic politics. Johns details the machinations and political dexterity required of all three presidents and of members of Congress to maneuver between the countervailing forces of escalation and negotiation, offering a provocative account of the ramifications of their decisions. He offers a compelling reassessment of responsibility for the conflict, and challenges assumptions about the roles of Congress and the president in U.S. foreign relations. Dr. Andrew Johns received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 and joined the faculty at Brigham Young University in 2004. His research and teaching focus on the history of U.S. foreign relations, with an emphasis on the Cold War and the nexus of foreign policy and domestic politics. Dr. Johns is the author of Vietnam's Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (University of Kentucky, 2010) and the editor of The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). He is currently working on several projects, including a book examining Vice President Hubert Humphrey's struggles with the Vietnam conflict, a political biography of Senator John Sherman Cooper, and a reinterpretation of Richard Nixon’'s "madman theory." |