Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, "The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs"
2025-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.
