Whenever we speak of the Silk Road, the mind’s eye conjures up a single merchant traveling on a camel laden with goods, most likely on his way to Rome. The discovery of multiple artifacts and excavated documents in northwest China allows us to revise this image. In fact, few people moving along the Silk Road […]
The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets […]
A specialist on the later Roman Empire and its transformation into a Christian state,Professor Elm’s research bridges intellectual and social history and focuses on interactions between Christians and “pagans” in late antiquity. In this talk, she asks how ideas of bondage and practices of unfree labor influenced the formation of theological maxims in the writings […]
At 4PM on April 5, Prof. Zorina Kahn (Bowdoin College) will discuss a paper entitled "Of Time and Space: Technological Spillovers among Patents and Unpatented Innovation in early U.S. Industrialization." Kahn is chair of Bowdoin's economics department and the author of the award-winning The Democratization of Innovation . Her talk assesses the role of institutional […]
Holocaust Remembrance Week Inaugural Event, admission free Orchestra of Exiles recounts the dramatic story of Bronislaw Huberman, the celebrated Polish violinist who rescued some of the world's greatest musicians from Nazi Germany and then created one of the world's greatest orchestras, the Palestine Philharmonic (which would become the Israeli Philharmonic). This feature-length documentary mixes period […]
Technologies played a dramatic role in birthing the modern industrial world, so it is hardly surprising that classic and widely familiar histories of technology trace narratives of triumphant Western progress, contrasted to backwardness or stagnation in other societies around the world. But in recent years historians of Western technology have become less interested in technology […]
In this talk, Fredrik Logevall discusses his highly acclaimed new book, EMBERS OF WAR: THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA'S VIETNAM. Drawing on newly available documents from several nations, and making full use of the vast published literature, Prof. Logevall surveys the broad sweep of the Vietnam War. He begins with […]
Join us for a talk by Robert C.T. Parker (Wykeham Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of New College, Oxford University) on Friday, April 12th at 2:00 pm in HSSB 4080. Dr. Parker is Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for Spring 2013. Sponsored by the departments of Classics, History, Religious Studies, and the Interdisciplinary […]
Before there were coasts there were shores. In this talk, John Gillis explores the emergence of modern coasts, which, beginning in the eighteenth century, displaced older notions of shore. The creation of coasts has been a global phenomenon, but in this talk Prof. Gillis focuses on the American experience. He examines the effects of coasts […]
Michael Zakim offers a paper entitled “Paperwork,” a social and cultural exploration of antebellum clerkship and the relationship of that species of “nonproductive labor” to the emergence of modern American capitalism. His paper can be found here. About our speaker: Michael Zakim is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of […]