Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Book Launch and Talk: Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana, by Bianca Murillo (CSU Dominguez Hills)
2018-05-03 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | buchanan 1940, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Dr. Murillo, who received her Ph.D in African history from UCSB in 2009, will be discussing her new book on twentieth century Ghana. Market Encounters, which was published as a part of Ohio University Press’s series New African Histories, explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.
This talk is co-sponsored by the African Studies Research Focus Group.

Kelly Shannon, Florida Atlantic University. Book talk: "U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights"
2018-05-09 16:30 - 18:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Kelly Shannon of Florida Atlantic University will speak about her new book, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights. She argues that since the late 1970s, the issue of women’s human rights in Islamic societies has become increasingly important to U.S. foreign policy. Her analysis sheds new light on U.S. identity and policy creation and alters the standard narratives of the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world.The talk is free and open to the public; delicious refreshments will be served.
The event is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Walter H. Capps Center, and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies.

Book Launch: Professor Xiaowei Zheng's "The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China"
2018-10-17 17:00 - 19:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the Department of History to celebrate the publication of Professor Xiaowei Zheng’s new book, The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China (Stanford University Press, 2018). Professor Matthew Sommer (History, Stanford) and Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low (History, UCSB) will speak about the significance of Professor Zheng’s book for the field of modern Chinese history. The event is cosponsored by the department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies and the Confucius Institute. A reception will follow.

UCSB History Associates: "Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life", talk with Jane De Hart and Laura Kalman
2019-01-26 14:30 - 16:00 | Buchanan 1910
Please join us for a talk by Jane Sherron De Hart, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on her new biography, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. It is the first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the deepest and most profoundly transformative legal minds of our time. This book, fifteen years in the making, was written with the cooperation of Justice Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates. De Hart’s book on the Equal Rights Amendment (Sex, Gender, and the Politics of Sex: A State and a Nation , co-written with Donald G. Matthews) won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics.
Professor Laura Kalman, Distinguished Professor of History at UCSB, noted legal historian, and author most recently of The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court (2017), will present a comment on de Hart’s book and its significance. Kalman’s biography of Lyndon Johnson’s friend, Abe Fortas, told the story of another famous justice of the US Supreme Court, Abe Fortas. This book won the LittletonGriswold Prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the most distinguished book on US law and society.
This event will take place in UCSB’s Buchanan Hall, Room 1910, on Jan. 26, 2019 at 2:30 pm. Discussion and a reception will follow.

Book Talk: Brendan W. Rensink, Brigham Young University "Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands"
2019-02-25 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant.”
Rensink’s findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West—namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities.
Brendan W. Rensink is the Assistant Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. His current research projects include consulting with the Native American Rights Fund, editing a collection of essays on 21st century West history, and writing a new cultural and environmental history monograph tracing experience in, perception of, and recreation in Western American wilderness landscapes.
This talk is part of the History Department’s two-year Migrations themed programming.

Book Talk by Kiran Klaus Patel, University of Maastricht: "The New Deal: A Global History"
2019-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Prof. Kiran Klaus Patel (Univ. of Maastricht) will speak about his new book The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2016), which won the World History Association’s Bentley Book Prize in 2017.
Professor Patel compares American responses to the international crisis of capitalism and democracy during the 1930s to responses by other countries around the globe — not just in Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Work creation, agricultural intervention, state planning, immigration policy, the role of mass media, forms of political leadership, and new ways of ruling America’s colonies — all had parallels elsewhere and unfolded against a backdrop of intense global debates.
Prof. Patel has also published ​Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945 (2005), and several books on the European Union, including most recently Project Europa: A Critical History (2018).
His talk is sponsored by the German Historical Institute (West) with the Gerda Henkel Foundation, supported by the UCSB Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, and the Center for Cold War Studies and International History.

Book Launch: Juan Cobo Betancourt and Natalie Cobo's "The legislation of the archdiocese of Santafé"
2019-05-06 17:00 - 19:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the Program in Latin American and Iberian Studies and the Department of History to celebrate the publication of Juan Cobo Betancourt and Natalie Cobo’s new book, La legislación de la arquidiócesis de Santafé en el periodo colonial [The legislation of the archdiocese of Santafé in the colonial period] (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2018).
The book will be presented, in Spanish, by Juan Carlos Estenssoro, professor and director of the Center for Research on Colonial Spanish America of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, who will be visiting our campus for this purpose, and Cecilia Méndez Gastelumendi, associate professor of History and director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at UCSB. The panel will be moderated by Juan Pablo Lupi, associate professor of in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCSB.
The event is cosponsored by the Department of Classics and the Office of the Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a dinner reception.
The event will be conducted in Spanish, in line with the LAIS Program policy of promoting the the use of languages other than English on campus events, in an effort linguistically to diversify our academic culture.
About the authors:
Juan Cobo Betancourt is assistant professor of history at UCSB. His research focuses on questions of race, language, law, and religion in the New Kingdom of Granada, and seek to situate the study of this region in a broader geographic and temporal context, while taking advantage of the region’s distinctive position to explore key themes in early modern social and cultural history.
Natalie Cobo is an historian and translator of early modern Latin texts. She completed her BA and MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge, and is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where she focuses on questions of religion, law, and ethnology in the 16th and 17th-century Philippines. She is also translating the second volume of Juan de Solórzano y Pereira’s De Indiarum Iure, entitled De gubernatione (1629) from Latin into Spanish and English at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.
They are both co-founders of Fundación Histórica Neogranadina, a Colombian non-profit foundation devoted to rescuing, preserving, and sharing Latin America’s historical manuscripts and early printed books through digitization, and promoting the development of digital humanities projects in the region (https://neogranadina.org).
About the guest discussant:
Juan Carlos Estenssoro is an historian and professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies at l’Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he also directs the Center for Research on Colonial Spanish America (CRAEC) . He is one of the world leading specialists in colonial Andean society, religion, music, and art, and the author of serval award winning books and articles. His pathbreaking book Del paganismo a la santidad: La incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo (1532-1750) (Lima, 2003), is considered a classic. Other books include Música y sociedad coloniales: Lima 1680-1830 (Lima, 1989), and, with other collaborators, La Música en el Perú (1985, 1989, 2007).
About the book:
The Catholic Church played a central role in shaping how early modern Spaniards arranged their own lives and attempted to transform those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Philippines to suit their vision of civilization. The early years of Iberian colonialism also coincided with a period of profound transformation within the Catholic Church — catalysed by the Reformation — which sought to centralize and homogenize its own practices. Because the reforms introduced by the Church in this period, spearheaded by the Council of Trent, were orientated towards the situation in Europe, ecclesiastics in the New World, who confronted a vastly different range of issues, had great freedoms to adapt and develop the spirit of these changes to local circumstances. A key way in which they did so was through the production of ecclesiastical legislation, whether issued individually by bishops or in assemblies of clerics such as synods and provincial councils.
This book contains the first critical edition of all of the ecclesiastical legislation promulgated during the colonial period in the archdiocese of Santafé in the New Kingdom of Granada, a vast region covering much of the territory of modern-day Colombia. It brings together the constitutions of the first and second synod of Santafé, of 1556 and 1606, the influential Catechism and instructions of fray Luis Zapata de Cárdenas, composed in 1576, and the never before published constitutions of the first and only provincial council held there during the colonial period, in 1625. This legislation was essential to the development of the Church in the region, and particularly the evangelization of indigenous people, and therefore provides key insights into how colonial society was constructed and consolidated in this period. Moreover, because the authors of these texts worked not in isolation but by drawing on a multitude of legal, theological, and pastoral sources that originated in different places and moments, in a complex process of translation and adaptation, the book explores what these texts reveal about how knowledge and ideas circulated in the early modern world, and the place that the New Kingdom of Granada occupied in the networks of exchange and communication that connected it.
This edition, with an extensive introduction, critical apparatus, and a translation into Spanish of Latin texts, aims to make these important sources available to a much broader community of scholars in order to open this field to new research.

Book Talk and Launch: Eileen Boris's Making the Woman Worker
2019-10-18 14:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
On October 18 at 2:00 in HSSB 4020, Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, presents a book talk titled “How Did an Americanist Come to Write Transnational History?” in connection with the launch of her new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019. This event is hosted by the History Department’s Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster, the Hull Chair, and Feminist Futures. Refreshments will be served, and books will be available to purchase courtesy of Chaucer’s Bookstore.
Click here to download the flier for this event.

Barbara Walker, "Fathers and Sons and the Origins of Cold War ‘Area Studies’ in the United States"
2019-10-30 16:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Barbara Walker is Professor of Russian history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has published on a broad range of historical topics in the area of Russian and Soviet intellectual life and its economic foundations, social organization and culture.
More recently, she has branched out to explore the nature of expertise, specifically “information expertise,” in her current book project, A War of Experts: Soviet and American Knowledge Networks in Cold War Competition and Collaboration. Her book will present the intertwined stories of a variety of lively and committed “information experts” in the Cold War United States and Soviet Union, including early electronic computer designers, U.S.-Soviet research exchange scholars, journalists and Soviet dissidents. Information professionals in the area of intelligence make their appearance too. The book focuses on the efforts of these ambitious, often passionate “experts” to multiply their numbers and to expand the influence of their expertise in this period. To accomplish these goals, they built on networks and traditions reaching back into the 19th century, in which lay the origins of the professionalization of expertise in many areas.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

VIRTUAL TALK: Alan Liu, "Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age"
2020-05-04 11:00 - 12:00 | CA
Alan Liu (English, UCSB), Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

Date/Time: Monday, May 4 from 11am-12pm PST

Abstract: “Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive ‘network archaeologies’ can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other.

Attendance Request Form: If you’re interested in attending this virtual talk, please click on the following URL and fill out the following attendance request form. During the days leading up to the presentation, the event’s host, Brian J Griffith, will send you the schedule, along with a Zoom meeting URL and accompanying password.

URL: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdYDHH0i7fZ0MZInNacm1pl6iOPGR9qsuHHDyIE_-5EqPQRvA/viewform

Humanities Decanted--W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture"
2021-03-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Humanities Decanted series invites all to a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Audience Q&A will follow.
Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to create visually and sonically interesting multimedia works. This new artwork emerged from corporate laboratories, artists’ studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses and it involved some of the biggest stars of the art world. Less famous and often overlooked were the engineers and scientists who contributed time, technical expertise, and aesthetic input to these projects. These figures included the rocket engineer-turned-artist Frank J. Malina, MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes, and Billy Klüver, a Swedish-born engineer at Bell Labs who helped establish the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology. This book restores the role of technologists to the foreground, explores the era’s hybrid creative culture, and recounts the many ways that artists, engineers, and curators have collaborated over the past fifty years. Making Art Work shows that the borders of art and technology over the past half century are anything but fixed. Just as striking is that the original ideals and ambitions that animated the 1960s-era art-and-technology movement have not faded. Today, creativity, collaborations, and interdisciplinary research are promoted by academic and corporate leaders alike. What emerges is a long history of artists and technologists who have repeatedly built new creative communities in which they can exercise imagination, invention, and expertise.
W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara where his research, writing, and teaching focus on the histories of technology and science. Originally trained as a scientist, he is the author or editor of six books. McCray’s 2013 book, The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, won the Watson Davis Prize in 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”
Registration is required in advance. Register at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YAKxHjklSWqDzHO5Vs8Ngg.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Nicole Archambeau, "War, Plague & Confession: Stories of Survival from Fourteenth-Century Provence"
2021-05-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The History Department is proud to welcome back alumna Dr. Nicole Archambeau (History, Colorado State University) for a virtual talk based on her new book Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence. You can read a glowing review of Souls under Siege in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Dr. Archambeau’s book and talk draw on a rich evidentiary base of 68 narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the inquest had lived through outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of both body and soul.
Advance registration is required for this event. You can sign up here.
Click here to download the flyer for Dr. Archambeau’s talk.

A Conversation on Early Modern Print Culture: Hilary Bernstein and Patricia Fumerton Present Their New Books
2021-05-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Hilary Bernstein and Patricia Fumerton will each provide short introductions to their new books, followed by a conversation between the authors and then with the audience.
Hilary Bernstein, Associate Professor of History, specializes in early modern France, with a particular focus on the history, culture, and politics of provincial towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her new book is entitled Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France. Professor Bernstein will be introduced by Professor Erika Rappaport. Patricia Fumerton is Distinguished Professor of English, specializing in popular, multimedia print culture, with a focus on broadside ballads, 1550-1750; she is also Director of the NEH-funded English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Her new book is entitled The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics. Professor Fumerton will be introduced by Professor Andrew Griffin.
Registration Link
A Conversation on EM Print Final Flyer

History Faculty John W. I. Lee on IHC's Humanities Decanted: on his new book The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert
2022-02-10 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center is hosting a dialogue between John W. I. Lee (History) and Krzysztof Janowicz (Geography) about Lee’s new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Audience Q&A will follow.
The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural Georgia, John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923) gained national prominence in the early 1900s, but his accomplishments are little known today. Using evidence from archives across the U.S. and Europe, from contemporary publications, and from newly discovered documents, this book chronicles, for the first time, Gilbert’s remarkable journey. As we follow Gilbert from the segregated public schools of Augusta, Georgia, to the lecture halls of Brown University, to his hiring as the first black faculty member of Augusta’s Paine Institute, and through his travels in Greece, western Europe, and the Belgian Congo, we learn about the development of African American intellectual and religious culture, and about the enormous achievements of an entire generation of black students and educators.

When: February 10th, 2022 @ 4:00 – :5:30 PM
Where: McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

IHC Regeneration Talk by Scott Ellsworth: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past
2022-05-12 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it presents for racial justice today.
Click here for the flyer
Visit the event page for more information: bit.ly/Ellsworth-IHC

Focal Point Dialogues | Keynote Address "Impossible Histories" | Ada Ferrer
2022-05-27 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 1174, 1174 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the final events of this year’s Focal Point Dialogues in History Colloquium:

A Keynote Lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning author Ada Ferrer, “Impossible Histories: Understanding Failure and Absence in Atlantic Havana, 1812”. Friday May, 27th, 1-3 pm, in HSSB 1174 (free and open to the public, no registration required).
A Conversation with the author for graduate and undergraduate students following the keynote lecture reception, on Friday May 27th, in HSSB 4041 from 4-5 pm. To attend, please register using this form http://tinyurl.com/ucsbhistoryadaferrer

Focal Point Dialogues in History was an initiative born in 2020 as a Department commitment to educate ourselves in the history of anti-Blackness, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, and the national and international uprising it triggered. This education starts by understanding when did “blackness” become a thing, to begin with, and it requires leaving the “zone of comfort” of our specializations, and dare to explore…as we learn from each other, and from this year’s guest, Ada Ferrer. After an engaging dive into Herman Bennet’s African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018) in the first iteration of Focal Point Dialogues in 2020-21, this academic year we focus on Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (2014), The book can be downloaded here (You will need to have logged into your UCSB library account)
Ada Ferrer is a Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU, and the author of several major award-winning books, including Cuba, an American History (2021) winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (2014) received the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University, and several major American Historical Association awards, among them: the James Rawley Prize for the best book on Atlantic History, the Wesley Logan Prize for the best book in the History of the African Diaspora, the Friedrich Katz Prize for the best book on Latin American History, as well as the Haiti Illumination Prize from the Haitian Studies Association, among others. Her first book, Insurgent Cuba, Race, Nation, and Revolution (1999), was the recipient of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman historian in any field of history. Her research has been funded by major grants, including the SSRC, the NEH, the Guggenheim, the Spanish Ministry of Culture Fellowship, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
**Use of masks will be required to enter the classrooms. For questions write to Prof. Cecilia Méndez at mendez@history.ucsb.edu

Focal Point Dialogues | A Conversation with Ada Ferrer for Students
2022-05-27 16:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
A Conversation with the author for graduate and undergraduate students will follow the keynote lecture reception, on Friday May 27th, in HSSB 4041 from 4-5 pm.
The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the final events of this year’s Focal Point Dialogues in History Colloquium:

A Keynote Lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning author Ada Ferrer, “Impossible Histories: Understanding Failure and Absence in Atlantic Havana, 1812”. Friday May, 27th, 1-3 pm, in HSSB 1174 (free and open to the public, no registration required).
A Conversation with the author for graduate and undergraduate students following the keynote lecture reception, on Friday May 27th, in HSSB 4041 from 4-5 pm. To attend, please register using this form

Focal Point Dialogues in History was an initiative born in 2020 as a Department commitment to educate ourselves in the history of anti-Blackness, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, and the national and international uprising it triggered. This education starts by understanding when did “blackness” become a thing, to begin with, and it requires leaving the “zone of comfort” of our specializations, and dare to explore…as we learn from each other, and from this year’s guest, Ada Ferrer. After an engaging dive into Herman Bennet’s African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018) in the first iteration of Focal Point Dialogues in 2020-21, this academic year we focus on Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (2014), The book can be downloaded here (You will need to have logged into your UCSB library account)
Ada Ferrer is a Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean History at NYU, and the author of several major award-winning books, among them, Cuba, an American History (2021), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (2014) received the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University, and several major American Historical Association awards, among them: the James Rawley Prize for the best book on Atlantic History, the Wesley Logan Prize for the best book in the History of the African Diaspora, the Friedrich Katz Prize for the best book on Latin American History, as well as the Haiti Illumination Prize from the Haitian Studies Association, among others. Her first book, Insurgent Cuba, Race, Nation, and Revolution (1999), was the recipient of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman historian in any field of history. Her research has been funded by major grants, including the SSRC, the NEH, the Guggenheim, the Spanish Ministry of Culture Fellowship, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
**Use of masks will be required to enter the classrooms. For questions write to Prof. Cecilia Méndez at mendez@history.ucsb.edu
To attend, please register using this form http://tinyurl.com/ucsbhistoryadaferrer

From Table to Text: Borders and Boundaries in Food History
2023-03-03 - 2023-03-04 | CA
From Table to Text: Borders and Boundaries in Food History
March 3rd and 4th, 2023
A Virtual Conference Hosted by the History Department,
University of California at Santa Barbara
Organizers: Erika Rappaport and Elizabeth Schmidt
All paper panels will take place via Zoom. If you need assistance setting up a Zoom account, please let us know.
For questions please contact: Erika Rappaport, rappaport@ucsb.edu or Elizabeth Schmidt e_schmidt@ucsb.edu
Please see here for the draft program

History Associates Talk | Lisa Jacobson "The Potent Politics of Weak Brews: How 3.2% Beer Helped End Prohibition" | Apr 6, 5:30 PM | Draughtsmen Aleworks
2023-04-06 17:30 - 19:00 | Draughstmen Aleworks, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
To commemorate the 90th anniversary of beer’s re-legalization in the United States, Lisa Jacobson will explain how a coalition of brewers, scientists, and labor leaders persuaded Congress that a beer capable of producing a mild euphoria could be legalized without violating the 18th Amendment’s ban on intoxicating beverages. Insisting that alcohol potency alone did not determine intoxication, this anti-prohibitionist coalition promoted new understandings of pleasure and risk that have long since influenced how alcohol is regulated and sold in the United States.
Lisa Jacobson is an Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. She hopes that her book Fashioning New Cultures of Drink: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition will be available for pre-order by the 91st anniversary of beer’s re-legalization.

Download the flyer here: Potent Politics of Weak Brews_2.24

Book Launch: ENTREPÔT OF REVOLUTIONS by Manuel Covo
2023-04-14 17:00 - 19:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
We are delighted to announce the launch of Manuel Covo’s recently published, prize-winning monograph, Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French-American Alliance, which will take place on Friday, April 14th, from 5-7 pm in HSSB 4080.

Book talk by Salim Yaqub: Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord, Wed, May 3, 4–5:15 pm, HSSB 6020
2023-05-03 16:00 - 17:15 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
On Wednesday, May 3, from 4 pm to 5:15 pm in the McCune Room (HSSB 6020), the Center for Cold War Studies and International History will host a talk by Salim Yaqub. I’ll be talking about my new book, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945.

Professor Salim Yaqub discusses his new book, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945, which traverses the broad sweep of postwar U.S. history. It explores how Americans of all walks of life—political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others—struggled to define the nation’s political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. The book chronicles the nation’s ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath of World War II; to the frightening emergence of the Cold War and repeated U.S. military adventures abroad; to the struggles of African Americans and other minorities to claim a share of the American Dream; to the striking transformations in social attitudes catalyzed by the women’s movement and struggles for gay and lesbian liberation; to the dynamic force of political, economic, and social conservatism. Carrying the story to the spring of 2022, Winds of Hope also shows how dizzying technological changes at times threatened to upend the nation’s civic and political life.
Salim Yaqub received his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Yale University in 1999. He is now Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of three books: Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Professor Yaqub has also written several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

The talk is free and open to the public, and delicious refreshments will be served.

Book Launch: Stephan Miescher, A Dam for Africa
2023-05-19 15:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 1174, 1174 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In A Dam for Africa historian Stephan Miescher explores four intersecting narratives that weave together around Akosombo: Ghanaian aspirations about building a hydroelectric dam in the context of decolonization and Cold War; international efforts of the US aluminum industry in benefiting from Akosombo through subsidizing the VALCO aluminum smelter; local stories of upheaval and devastation in resettlement towns; and a nation-wide quest toward electrification and energy justice during times of economic crises, droughts, and climate change. This book and its accompanying documentary film Ghana’s Electric Dreams (R. Lane Clark and Stephan F. Miescher, co-produced with France Winddance Twine) tell the stories of Akosombo from multiple perspectives by foregrounding a range of historical actors.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, "The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs"
2025-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
UCSB Professor of History (emeritus) Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Michigan State Professor of History (emeritus) Lewis Siegelbaum will engage in a colloquy on Professor Hasegawa’s new book, The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs. When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Although Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs; it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy.
Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era, it untangles the struggles between the increasingly isolated Nicholas and Alexandra and the factions of scheming nobles, ruthless legislators, and pragmatic generals who sought to stabilize the restive Russian empire either with the Tsar or without him. By rejecting compromise, Nicholas undermined his supporters at crucial moments. His blunders cleared the way for allout civil war and the eventual rise of the Soviet Union.
Definitive and engrossing, The Last Tsar uncovers how Nicholas II stumbled into revolution, taking his family, the Romanov dynasty, and the whole Russian Empire down with him.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books, including The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (2017), Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and the Police in Petrograd (2017); Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan (2006); The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo‑Japanese Relations (1998), and The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (1981). He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Juan Cobo Betancourt, "The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada
2025-02-07 17:00 - 18:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Book Presentation: “The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada”
Juan Cobo Betancourt UC Santa Barbara | Associate Professor of History
Commentator: Yanna Yannakakis Emory University | Professor of History
The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and historical writing, Juan F. Cobo Betancourt examines the introduction and development of Christianity among the Muisca, who from the 1530s found themselves at the center of the invaders’ efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown. The book explores how successive generations of missionaries and administrators approached the task of drawing the Muisca peoples to Catholicism at a time when it was undergoing profound changes, and how successive generations of the Muisca interacted with the practices and ideas that the invaders attempted to impose, variously rejecting or adopting them, transforming and translating them, and ultimately making them their own.

History Associates Book Club: "Lies my Teacher Told Me"
2026-01-29 17:00 - 18:00 | Mosher Alumni House, Alumni Association / UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106
The History Associates and the History Department are launching a new special program “A Book in Common.” The first session is taking place on Thursday 1/29 at the Mosher Alumni House. This is a Book Club for history faculty, staff, students, History Associates, and history-minded community members. We’ll discuss Lies My Teacher Told Me (graphic novel, PDF will be available closer to the time). Food will be served.
Free book: Lies My Teacher Told me (download here)
Free dinner: please register ahead of time.
A roomy venue with space for everyone
Important food for thought: why history matters, with everything going on right now.

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History Associates Talk by Professor Anthony Barbieri on "Beyond the Mountains and Seas: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE-1936 CE)"
2026-02-22 14:00 - 16:00 | Night Lizard Brewing Company, 607 State Street, Santa Barbara
The History associates brings to you a talk by Professor Anthony Barbieri off the department of history on his latest book. The talk narrates the integrated history of Eurasia over the last two millennia through the travel of two dozen remarkable men and women who voyaged across this vast continent and reported on their encounters with a foreign culture. It argues that, despite increasing empirical knowledge gathered about the “other,” mental projections of the “monsters at the edge of the world,” still colored peoples’ perception of the foreign “other” well into the modern era.

Talk by Mateo Jarquin, "Managaua 1979," Monday, April 20, 4 pm, HSSB 4041
2026-04-20 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Mateo Jarquin of Chapman University will be giving a talk titled “Managua 1979: International and Transnational Origins of the Cold War’s Last Great Revolution.”

After the Cuban Revolution, armed movements across Latin America embraced violent struggle as a path to social transformation. Yet only one managed to seize power: Nicaragua’s Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). Their unlikely victory in July 1979 gripped the world’s attention and ignited a major hotspot in the late Cold War.
How did it happen? Drawing from his book The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, Mateo Jarquín recounts the fall of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The story unfolds not only inside Nicaragua and in Washington but across Latin America, where the rebel FSLN was embedded in a regional web of state and non‑state actors conspiring to isolate Somoza, challenge U.S. influence, and ultimately bring about the last major left‑wing revolution of the 20th century.
Mateo Jarquín is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Master’s Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University. His research explores the intersection of democracy, revolutions, and international relations in modern Latin America. He is the author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), which received the 2025 Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Articles from this research agenda have appeared in journals such as Cold War History and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History. Alongside his historical work, he writes regularly about contemporary Central American politics. Originally from Nicaragua, Jarquín holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Grinnell College.

The event is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History and the UCSB Department of History. It is free and open to the public.
