Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Learn the Mexican tradition of tamale making
2011-12-03 00:00 (America/Denver)
Tamale Making, Saturday, December 3 from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Learn the Mexican tradition of tamale making with George Hernández, a
Ventura County cook for over 40 years. Learn how tamales are made, enjoy
tamale tasting, and leave with a recipe just in time for the winter holidays.
Pico Adobe
123 East Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara
$20 Public, $17.50 Students and Seniors, $15 SBTHP Members
Reservation required. For more information go to www.sbthp.org
hm 10/6/11

Indians at Mission Santa Bárbara: Life at the Mission in 1800
2011-12-04 00:00
The Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library presents:
“Indians at Mission Santa Bárbara: Life at the Mission in 1800”
Featuring Dr. John Johnson
Sunday December 4 at 3:00 in the Bonaventure Room at Old Mission Santa Bárbara.
This lecture is part of the celebration of the 225th anniversary of Mission Santa Bárbara. Admission is free, but donations to the Archive-Library are gladly accepted.
What was Chumash life really like at the Old Mission? So much ink has been spilled about this topic, but often descriptions are not based on original documentary evidence. Dr. John Johnson has spent thirty-five years gathering information about the culture and history of Santa Barbara’s original inhabitants. He will present a lecture about Native Americans at Mission Santa Bárbara based upon primary archival sources preserved in the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library, as well as oral traditions passed down in Barbareño Chumash families that were recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
John R. Johnson, Ph.D., has worked as Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History since 1986. He is also Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he has taught an annual course on California Indians since 2003. Johnson became directly involved in research using the mission registers preserved at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library in a study of Chumash marriage and family patterns for his 1988 Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology at UCSB. He has served as a member of the Archive-Library’s Board of Trustees of since 1993. Johnson has written more than eighty studies, including journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, and several monographs pertaining to ethnohistorical, archaeological, and genetic research regarding California’s original inhabitants. He works closely with contemporary California Indians and recently produced a documentary film, 6 Generations, regarding the history of a Chumash family in Santa Barbara.
For more information contact Monica Orozco at director@sbmal.org
hm 10/31/11

The Incas and sacred space in colonial Cuzco
2011-12-05 00:00
Gabriela Ramos is lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Cambridge, and author the Death and Conversion in the Andes: Cuzco and Lima 1532-1670 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) winner of the Howard F. Cline Prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History in 2011.
Her talk will explore the ways in which the sacred space of the city of Cuzco was modified to facilitate religious conversion. She argues that the role of the Inca nobility was crucial in this process.
Reviews about Death and Conversion in the Andes:
Gabriela Ramos reveals the extent to which Christianizing death was essential for the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism. Ramos argues that understanding the relation between death and conversion in the Andes involves not only considering the obvious attempts to destroy the cult of the dead, but also investigating a range of policies and strategies whose application demanded continuous negotiation between Spaniards and Andeans (editorial review).
Ramos brilliantly demonstrates that, beginning with the execution of Atahualpa [the last Inca emperor], death and the dead were one of the great colonial sites of ongoing contestation about both the here and now and the hereafter. In an exquisitely researched study, Ramos traces the shift from pre-Columbian to colonial Andean funerary rituals and the differing ways that they became the center of how Andeans and Europeans communicated and exchanged their visions of power and the sacred,? in a true dance of death.
Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard University
Sponsored by the History Department. Free and Open to the Public.
hm 11/9/11

Start of Winter Quarter Classes
2012-01-09 00:00
See the calendar at:www.registrar.ucsb.edu/cal2012.htm
On our Courses page you will find some syllabi (click the Download link), and links to the instructors’ faculty pages, where there are often announcements about waiting list and “crashing” policies.
hm 11/6/11

PANEL: Welfare as a Public Good
2012-01-17 00:00
Please join us for the next event in the IHC’s Public Goods series:
McCune Conference Room,
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the notion of welfare as a public good has a venerated?if highly contested?history, and has found valence in many different cultures, political regimes, and religious traditions over the course of centuries. It has also been shaped as much by the politics of class, race, gender, and political economy as by more formally recognized norms of public and private provision. This panel explores the changing idea of welfare as a public good over time and in very different historical contexts from medieval Europe to the contemporary U.S., from narrowly-construed aid to the “deserving poor” to more expansive visions of social provision as a basic human right for all. It further considers how sharply divergent visions of the good society, and how to realize it, have fueled past and present debates over welfare.
hm 1/12/12

Note-taking and -organizing for historians
2012-01-23 00:00
Dear History Graduate Students:
I plan to devote two-hours of my History 223A (Research Seminar in Modern Europe) to the art of note-taking and note-organizing. I decided to open this session to interested graduate students. The workshop will be held at 4-6, Monday, January 23, in HSSB 4041.
Roger Eardly-Pryor will demonstrate how to take notes in archives.
I will show the David Kertzer method I learned from my colleague at Bellagio.
Peter Alagona will demonstrate the Alagona method.
The idea of this workshop is prompted by my learning the Kertzer method. When I wrote my dissertation many, many years ago, there was no computer, and I had to rely on 3 x 5 note cards to take notes and organize my dissertation. Since then with the new computer technology and availability of various programs, I have experimented various methods, but all these methods have been unsuccessful, partly all these programs are too sophisticated and hence too difficult and cumbersome to learn. Thus, I managed to write a few books without any system, but I have always wanted to develop a system that is simple but efficient. At Bellagio I bumped into the Kertzer method, and I am now slowly converting all notes into this system.
Since then I have talked with several graduate students, and learned that very few research seminars here offer note-taking techniques. Graduate students here are pretty much on their own, and through trial and errors, they have to come up with their own system. They suggested that our grad students will greatly benefit from a workshop on note-taking and note-organizing, especially at the early stage of graduate career. Hence, I have decided to open up the two-hour session of my seminar as a workshop.
If you have already a great note-taking system that works for you, then you don’t need to come to this workshop. But if you are wondering how to take notes, how to organize and digitize your notes, how to take notes from secondary, primary, and archival sources in such a way to get access to these notes efficiently, and how to incorporate these notes into a seminar paper and a dissertation, this workshop might be of help.
Please let me know if you are interested to attend the workshop.
Toshi Hasegawa
hm 1/12/12

Domestic Production and Subsistence in an Ubaid Household in Upper Mesopotamia
2012-01-27 00:00
It was harvest season. Much of the grain was already processed and had been loaded into one of the storerooms and winnowing was underway in the backyard. The fire started in one of the storerooms. It quickly spread igniting the wooden beams that supported the flat clay roof, which roof collapsed crushing the wooden shelves where tools, personal items and beautifully painted vessels were stored. In the summer of 2007, some 6500 years later, members of the Upper Tigris Archaeological Research Project (UTARP) excavated this house at the site of Kenan Tepe in southeastern Anatolia. This paper attempts to reconstruct various aspects of the economy of this Ubaid household. This analysis leads to a number of hypotheses about the nature of domestic production, patterns of subsistence and modes of cultural reproduction during the Ubaid period in northern Mesopotamia.
Bradley J. Parker is Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History and Archaeology in the Department of History at the University of Utah. As director of UTARP, Bradley has conducted surveys and excavations at several sites in the Upper Tigris River region of southeastern Turkey. Between 2000 and 2011 this field work concentrated on the four hectare multi-period mound of Kenan Tepe. Bradley’s current research is taking him in new directions. Excavations at Kenan Tepe have produced remains from two prehistoric periods of Near Eastern History: the Middle Chalcolithic or Ubaid period (ca. 5000-4000 BCE), and the Late Chalcoltihic or Uruk period (ca. 4000-3000 BCE) while ethnoarchaeological research carried out by the project is also yielding interesting results.
A reception will follow the talk.
Sponsored by the Archaeology Research Focus Group and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Co-Sponsored by the Education Abroad Program, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
jwil 20.i.2012

Civil Rights and the Cold War At Home: Post-War Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left
2012-01-27 00:00
Arnesen offers a provocative talk on the relationship between the idea of a “long civil rights movement” and the historiographical reappraisal of the role played by the Communist Party in post World War II American politics and society. Arnesen is the author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001) and Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. He is writing a biography of A. Philip Randolph.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
More Information: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/eric-arnesen/
hm 1/26/12

Singers and Soldiers: Slaves and Slave Households of the early Islamic Near East
2012-01-30 00:00
Matthew Gordon is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Miami University of Ohio
A Reception Immediately Following the Talk, HSSB 4041
hm 1/30/12

The Port Huron Statement at 50
2012-02-02 00:00
University of California-Santa BarbaraFebruary 2-3, 2012
We invite you to attend a conference which brings together historians, social theorists, contemporary student activists, and Port Huron veterans to discuss the origins, historical impact, and contemporary relevance of the New Left’s founding manifesto. (conference website)
Keynote speeches by: Michael Kazin and Tom Hayden
and:
Paul Booth
Charles McDew
Joshua Freeman
Lisa McGirr
Grace Hale
James Miller
Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Alice O’Connor
Richard Flacks
Charles Payne
Daniel Geary
Bob Ross
Nelson Lichtenstein
Vivian Rothstein
Ben Manski
Michael Vester
Jane Mansbridge
Howard Winant
Steve Max
Eric Olin Wright
3:00 p.m. CONFERENCE WELCOME
Richard Flacks, Professor of Sociology emeritus, UCSB , “What Happened at Port Huron”
Harrison Weber, President, UCSB Associated Students,”Why students should care about Port Huron”
3:30 p.m. KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Tom Hayden, principal drafter of the Port Huron Statement
4:45 p.m. PORT HURON AS AN EPISODE IN OUR LIVES: PARTICIPANTS REFLECT ON LEGACIES AND LESSONS
Chair: Richard Flacks
Chuck McDew, founding chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Bob Ross, professor of sociology , Clark University
Paul Booth, Vice President of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers
Michael Vester, Professor of Political Science, emeritus, University of Hanover, Germany
Maria Varela, pioneering Latino organizer (not confirmed)
7:00 p.m. DINNER AT THE FACULTY CLUB
SPEAKER: Michael Kazin . Professor of History, Georgetown University; Co-Editor of Dissent,
“Two Cheers for Utopia: Port Huron and the Fate of the Not-so-New Left”
Friday February 3 at Miller McCune Conference Room, Humanities and Social Science Building
9:30 a.m. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Chair, Joshua Freeman, Department of History, City University of New York.
Lisa McGirr, Professor of History, Harvard University, “The Worldwide New Left in the Early 1960s.”
Dan Geary, Senior Lecturer in History, Trinity College, Dublin, “How the New Left Transformed American Liberalism”
Grace Hale, Professor of History and American Studies, University of Virginia, “The Romance of Rebellion”
Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Chair in History, UCSB, “Why were the Students for a Democratic Society
Meeting at a United Auto Workers Summer Camp?”
12:00-1:00 p.m. LUNCH
1:30 p.m. THE FATE OF PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
Chair: Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology, UCSB
James Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research, “Is Democracy Still in the Streets?”
Erik Olin Wright, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Envisioning Real Utopias”
Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, “Beyond Adversary Democracy.”
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Associate Professor of International Studies, Brown University, “Participatory Democracy in Brazil’
3:30 p.m. GENERATIONS OF ORGANIZERS: VETERAN ORGANIZERS IN DIALOG WITH A NEW GENERATION
Chair: Alice O’Connor, Department of History, UCSB.
Steve Max, Midwest Academy
Ben Manski, Madison Wisconsin, Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution
Charles Payne, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago
Vivian Rothstein, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy
PANELISTS WILL LEAD BREAKOUT CIRCLES WITH CURRENT STUDENTS
6:00 p.m. CLOSING RECEPTION
Sponsored by Dissent, The Nation and the
UCSB Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy
hm 1/16/12

Animal Spirits Revisited: An Emotional History of Capitalism
2012-02-08 00:00
Despite its manifest absurdity, the rational actor model continues to domi-nate discussions of modern capitalism. This lecture proposes an alterna-
tive perspective, by deepening and broadening Keynes’s brief mention of
“animal spirits” in economic decisions. Building on the work of anthropolo-
gists and cultural historians, Lears explores the tangled relationships be-
tween capitalism and emotional life, on the shop floor as well as on the
trading floor, around the kitchen table as well as in the executive suite.
Abbreviated Bio
Board of Governors Professor of History, Rutgers University
Editor-in-Chief, Raritan: a Quarterly Review
He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los
Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.
In April 2009 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Publications
. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-
1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981; reissued by University of Chicago Press, 1994;
Japanese translation by Shohakusha Publishing, 2011)
. Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic
Books, 1994)
. Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003)
. Rebirth of a Nation, the Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper Collins, 2009)
Presented through the Global & International Studies
Master of Arts Program
hm 1/27/12

The Past, Present, and Future of Feminist Studies
2012-02-09 00:00
Conference ScheduleThe Past, Present, and Future of Feminist Studies
February 9th – 11th 2012
Thursday, February 9th
7 – 9 pm
Opening Remarks – Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Feminist Studies and Patricia Cline Cohen, Professor of History
Genders and Sexualities
Chair: Leila Rupp (UCSB)
Panelists:
” Matt Richardson (University of Texas, Austin)
” Lynn Sacco (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
” Siobhan Somerville (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
The Past, Present and Future of Feminist Studies
Welcome – Melvin Oliver, Dean of Social Sciences, College of Letters & Science
Chair: Jacqueline Bobo (UCSB)
Panelists:
” Nan Alamilla Boyd (San Francisco State University)
” Ednie Garrison (University of South Florida)
” Valerie Ann Johnson (Bennett College)
” Alison Kafer (Southwestern University)
3:30 pm- 5:30 pm
Productive and Reproductive Labors
Chair: Laury Oaks (UCSB)
Panelists:
” Melissa Forbis (Stony Brook University)
” Francisca James Hernandez (Pima Community College, Research Associate at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW) at The University of Arizona)
” Lilia Soto (University of Wyoming)
” Ruby Tapia (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
” Chikako Takeshita (University of California, Riverside)
Dinner 6 pm
At the Faculty Club for invited guests, members of the department, and affiliates who worked with our former ABD scholars. RSVP required–Leigh Dodson, ldodson@umail.ucsb.edu and Eileen Boris, boris@femst.ucsb.edu
Saturday, February 11th
9 am- 11:30 am
Race and Nation
Chair: Mireille Miller-Young (UCSB)
Panelists:
” Maylei Blackwell (University of California, Los Angeles)
” Emily Hobson (University of Southern California)
” Paula Ioanide (Ithica College) and Felice Black (UCSB)
” Priya Kurian (University of Waikato)
” Judy Rohrer (University of Connecticut)
12 pm – 1 pm
Rethinking the Field
Concluding and Discussion
hm 2/5/12

Using the Ancient Greeks to Think about Public Goods: A Dialogue
2012-02-16 00:00
Using the Ancient Greeks to Think about Public Goods: A Dialogue with Josiah Ober (Classics and Political Science, Stanford)Greg Anderson (History, Ohio State University) and moderator Glenn Patten (Classics, UCSB)
Classical structures (such as the polis) and ideas (such as koinonia) are frequently invoked in discussions of the common good — either as the grounds from which modern ideas and structures developed, or as marks of a fundamental break between ancient and bourgeois societies. Two leading scholars offer complementary views, exploring both civic decision-making and social practices, Aristotelian theory and cultural context, continuity of past with present and the distance between them. Together they offer new perspectives on the problem of re-imagining the commons today.
Greg Anderson is the Ohio State University Department of History’s specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in Classics from Yale University. Anderson’s primary research areas are archaic Greece, classical Athens, and social theory. His work explores articulations between culture, politics, and the production of material life. His first book, The Athenian Experiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), addressed the cultural implications of the shift from a narrow oligarchic regime to a more socially inclusive political formation in pre-classical Athens. Among his more recent publications, one article reconsiders the cultural construction of “tyranny” in archaic Greece, while another makes a case for seeing the classical Greek “state” as a cultural “effect,” the product of a complex entanglement between the material and the ideational. His current book project (Illiberal Athens) is a postmodern Marxist “social ecology” of classical Athens, an account of the inequalities, the exploitations, and the other costs of producing a “free society” in Greek antiquity.
Josiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of Classics and a courtesy appointment in Philosophy. His most recent book, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. His ongoing work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers seek to explain economic growth in the ancient Greek world, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.
He is sole author of about 60 articles and chapters and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), and Athenian Legacies (2005). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, and UC-Irvine. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006).
Sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Department of History, the Department of Political Science and the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment as part of its Public Goods series.
jwil 20.i.2012

UCSB Associated Students History Initiatives
2012-02-16 00:00
[Note: This event was originally scheduled for Feb. 2.]
The Living History Project is an exciting new effort that uses a variety of media, including archival materials, interviews, and video to bring together stories and remembrances about the role UCSB students have played in shaping the campus throughout the years.
Associated Students Living History Project Coordinator Mahader Tesfai will present his work developing the Associate Students’ Living History Project.
A.S. Publications Coordinator Andy Doerr will give a brief overview of A.S. history and the A.S. Annual Report which he has produced since 2004.
Please rsvp to jpd@umail.ucsb.edu
hm 1/23/12; 1/30/12

Chicano! A Conference on the Emerging Historiography of the Chicano Movement
2012-02-17 00:00
This is the first major confernce on the emerging historiography of the Chicano Movement as witnessed by the several scholars who will be presenting on their recently published books or on their book projects on the Movement. More than 40 years after many of the key events of the Chicano Movement, historians and other scholars with the distance of time are now rexamining and assessing the various aspects of the most significant civil rights and empowerment struggle by Chicanos in the United States. This conference will call attention to the emergence of what we can now call Movement Studies as part of Chicano Studies.
We are very excited about the pathbreaking nature of this conference and I along with my colleagues and students in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the Chicano Studies Institute here at UCSB would like to invite you to join us for the conference.
Thank you,
Mario T. Garcia
Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies
UC Santa Barbara
(805)893-4074
garcia@history.ucsb.edu
hm 2/8/12

Questions and Answers about Nazi Art
2012-02-21 00:00
75 years ago, the first Great German Art Exhibition (Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung) opened at the new „House of German Art“. The show was accompanied by the infamous exhibition „Degenerate Art“ („Entartete Kunst“), which was initiated by Joseph Goebbels and on view in the Munich Hofgarten close by. For the national socialist regime no other exhibition project had a comparably programmatic and propagandistic significance as the GDK. Explicitly intended to demonstrate the achievements of the regime’s cultural politics, the sales and exhibitions mirrored both the way the „Third Reich“ conceived of art and of itself as a nation of culture and civilization. Numerous works were purchased by the national socialist elite, but also by private customers.On October 20, 2011, the database GDK Research was launched. The paper will give a short introduction to the database, explain its various sources, and deliver a succinct historiography of the art of the national socialist regime. In particular, however, this talk will highlight some pertinent questions:
What was the impact of the eight shows (1937-1944)?
How do politics and ideology relate to landscapes, genre scenes, portraits and still lives?
And where do we stand today?
Why is this research on Nazi art important and necessary?
What does the media response to tell us?
hm 2/14/12

White Wash
2012-02-22 00:00
“White Wash” explores the complexity of race in America through the eyes of the ocean via the history of African Americans and water culture from slavery, civil rights wade-ins to surfing in contemporary times. In examining the history of world water culture, and the history of black identity as it triumphs and evolves in the minds of black surfers, we learn about the power of transcending race as a constructive phenomenon. Discussion following the screening. Panelists include, Ted Woods, director; Rick Blocker, UCSB Alum and founder of BlackSurfing.com; Alison Rose Jefferson, Cultural Historian and UCSB Doctoral Graduate Student in HIstory; and Peter Neushul, UCSB Lecturer on the History of Science and Surfing. 78 min., English, USA.
CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR BLACK STUDIES RESEARCH, THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT,
AND THE SURFRIDER FOUNDATION, ISLA VISTA CHAPTER
hm 2/2/12

Nuclear Weapons and Humanity's Future
2012-02-23 00:00
11th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future
Daniel Ellsberg is America’s best known whistleblower for his role
in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a move that harkened an end
to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and exposed government deceit
and illegality at the highest levels.
In the 1960s, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation
and consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House,
specializing in the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear
war plans, and crisis decisionmaking.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg has
been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era
and unlawful interventions.
This FREE event is sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
hm 1/20/12

The Cold War, Human Rights, and Self-Determination
2012-02-23 00:00
During the Cold War countless peoples and movements in both the decolonizing world and the advanced industrial states mobilized under the banner of self-determination and sought to institutionalize its status as a human right in international law. In this talk, focusing on the end of European empire in the 1970s, Professor Simpson explains why self-determination came to have such expansive and potentially disruptive meaning in the post-WWII era, serving as a short-hand for a wide range of claims to sovereignty.
Bradley Simpson received his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University in 2003. He is assistant professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and the author of ECONOMISTS WITH GUNS: AUTHORITARIAN DEVELOPMENT AND U.S.-INDONESIAN RELATIONS, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2008. Professor Simpson is currently working on two book projects, an international history of the idea self-determination, and a study of U.S.-Indonesian-international relations during the Suharto era (1966-1998).
The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies.
The event is free and open to the public. A brief reception, with refreshments, will follow Prof. Simpson’s presentation. Please join us for this exciting event!
hm 2/17/12

Civitates Permixtae: Cicero, Arendt, Augustine
2012-02-24 00:00
This talk is sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program, and the UC Multi-Campus Research Group on Late Antiquity.
jwil 18.i.2012

From Material Exchange in Eurasia to Liberating Appropriations in World Art
2012-02-24 00:00
This talk will be divided into two parts. The first part will give two case studies of material exchange in Eurasia during the first millennium B.C. In the second part the implications of these examples of material exchange for the study of Chinese art will be given, using illustrations mainly from later Chinese art, after the introduction of Buddhism into China at the end of the Han dynasty to the early Qing dynasty.
Wang Haicheng is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Washington (Seattle). He earned his MA at Peking University (2000) and PhD at Princeton University (2007). His research focuses on the art and archaeology of early China, especially on comparative studies between Bronze Age China and other early civilizations. He is also interested in the art and archaeology of the Silk Routes. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork– both excavations and surveys– on both Neolithic and historic-period sites on the Silk Routes.
This talk is sponsored by East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Art History & Architectures, the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program, the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
jwil 18.i.2012

"John Quincy Adams Pimped for the Tsar!" Political Rhetoric in 19th-Century America
2012-02-26 00:00
Think America’s political discourse is nastier than it’s ever been? Think again. According to History Prof. John Majewski, the political scene now is downright genteel compared to what it was like in the days when America was young. Come hear what politicos said about each other in that era when Prof. Majewski speaks on “Political Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America.”
We will meet at noon in the banquet room of Marmalade Restaurant in the La Cumbre Shopping Center (directly across the parking lot from Vons). A buffet lunch of sandwiches and salads will be served prior to Prof. Majewski’s talk.
Our speaker, UCSB History department Chair John Majewski, is a 19th-Century U.S. historian who specializes in Civil War and economic history. He is the author, most recently, of Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Imagination of the Confederate Nation (UNC Press, 2009).
Sponsored by the UCSB History Associates. Please RSVP.
The cost is $22 for members, $25 for non-members.
hm 2/3/12

Films of the Cold War: Countdown to Looking Glass
2012-03-01 00:00
For over forty years, “Looking Glass” was the nickname of the Airborne Command Post–an essential element in the command and control of the Strategic Air Command’s forces. This made-for-TV docudrama is a fictionalized account of how quickly a nuclear war could break out between the US and the Soviet Union over Middle East oil. This fast-paced film feels as though you are watching breaking news, and features cameos by famous diplomats such as Paul Warnke, and a young Georgia Congressman, and current presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. The film will be followed by a Q and A, and feature commentary from History Professor Salim Yaqub.
hm 2/22/12

New Discoveries in the Jewish and Early Christian Catacombs of Rome
2012-03-02 00:00
The catacombs of ancient Rome form the single most important source of information concerning the rise of Christianity from an archaeological point of view. This lecture focuses on exciting new results produced by a science-based approach to these materials, as performed within the framework of a recently concluded international project based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It discusses the results and historical ramifications of a series of radiocarbon datings in the Jewish and early Christian catacombs of Rome by seeking to answer such questions as: What does the fact that the Jewish catacombs antedate the Christian ones tell us about Jewish-Christian relationships in the very center of the Roman Empire? By then elaborating on the evidence produced by stable isotope analysis and several other research techniques, this lecture also delves into the harsh demographic realities that Jews and Christians alike were facing during the first centuries of the Common Era. In an attempt to bring back to life the common folk that lie buried in the endless and pitch-dark subterranean galleries of the catacombs, I will argue that there is very little in the archaeology of these monumental sites that lends support to more optimistic notions about the rise of Christianity such as those proposed, most prominently, by Rodney Stark.
This lecture is sponsored by the UC Multi-Campus Research Group in Late Antiquity in cooperation with the UCSB Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program.
jwil 02.xi.2011

From Imperial Capital to Polis: Sardis from the Lydians to the Hellenistic Period
2012-03-08 00:00
Nicholas Cahill is Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Sardis Expedition.
During the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the Lydians, a native Anatolian culture located in what is now western Turkey, established the first empire in this region since the Bronze Age. As they conquered Greek cities along the Aegean coast and native peoples inland, the Lydians established a border between the great civilizations of the Near East and the emerging western identity in Greece. In consequence, they became both the most generous patrons of Greek sanctuaries and sages, and paradigms to the Greeks of wealthy but disordered and ignorant barbarians.
This event is sponsored by the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program, and Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 02.ii.2012

The Excavations at Sardis
2012-03-09 00:00
Nicholas Cahill is Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Sardis Expedition.
Please RSVP by March 6th by contacting Ryan Abrecht: ryanabrecht(at)umail.ucsb.edu
Participants may wish to read the following article in preparation for the roundtable:
N. Cahill “Mapping Sardis,” in Love for Lydia: A Sardis Anniversary Volume Presented to Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: 2008), 111-124. A copy of this volume is on reserve at the Arts Library.
This event is sponsored by the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program, and Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 02.iii.2012

Theories and New Developments in Learning in History
2012-03-14 00:00
Susannah McGowan, a Ph.D. candidate in Education, will be leading a discussion on teaching on Wednesday, March 14, at noon in HSSB 4020. Susannah will describe the some key theoretical ideas in the education literature that can be applied to history, and then discuss how how digital technology can be used to enhance learning in history classrooms.
Susannah was worked extensively with historians on teaching issues–she has co-authored an article in the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY on “Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom.” (Vol 92, 2006).
Click the link below to see a copy from within the UCSB domain. (Note: large file, slow download)
hm 2/26/12

Start of Spring Instruction
2012-04-02 00:00
First day of classes.For the official academic calendar, click the link:

In Search of King Midas: New Discoveries and Reinterpretations at Gordion (Turkey)
2012-04-03 00:00
For over half of a century, the University of Pennsylvania Museum has conducted excavations at the ancient site of Gordion in central Turkey. The site is best known as the capital of the Iron Age kingdom of Phrygia and the home of the semi-legendary King Midas, who ruled around 725 BC and whose enormous wealth and power helped to spawn enduring legends of his “golden touch”. Who was this semi-legendary figure, and what is the current state of our evidence concerning his actual life and accomplishments? The on-going excavations at Gordion have helped to answer some of these questions, unveiling a society of enormous complexity and shedding much needed light on the history of this elusive ruler and the enigmatic Phrygian people. Recent research at the site has substantially improved our understanding of Phrygian culture, as well as clarifying other important aspects of the site’s three millennia of occupation. The application of new archaeological techniques and a fresh study of previous finds have combined to produce dramatic and significant new interpretations about the site’s history, its multicultural heritage and the unheralded preeminence of Phrygian culture in ancient Anatolia.
Andrew Goldman is Associate Professor of History with Gonzaga University. He received his degrees from Wesleyan University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology), and his research interests include Roman Anatolia, the Roman military, and Roman pottery. Professor Goldman has worked at many sites throughout Turkey, including Çatal Höyük, and since 1992 he has been working at the ancient site of Gordion.
This talk is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, with cooperation from the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program.
jwil 05.iii.2012

The Archaeology of Shipwrecks: Treasuring the Past?
2012-04-03 00:00
To the media and in the minds of the general public ‘maritime archaeology’ often suggests the study of shipwrecks, perhaps because of the prominent role they played in the development of the subject over the last half century. In reality maritime archaeology encompasses all past human activity relating to seas, interconnected waterways and adjacent locales. But ships and ancient seafaring nevertheless remain a significant focus for research. Unfortunately it is not only archaeologists for whom shipwrecks hold a fascination but those whose motivation is rather more commercial. This lecture reviews current research, reviews some dramatic discoveries and asks in what ways should we treasure the past?
Jonathan Adams is a specialist in maritime archaeology, with interests in ships as manifestations of innovation and social change, and in the practice of archaeology in the coastal zone and under water, particularly the ethics of the developing field of deep-water archaeology. He was a Deputy Director of the Mary Rose Project and has directed several other research excavations including the Amsterdam (UK), and the Sea Venture (Bermuda). He is currently working on medieval and early modern shipwreck sites in Sweden including the Kravel Project, and in Guernsey, as well as prehistoric maritime landscapes in Sweden and the UK. He is Director of the Centre for Maritime Archaeology and a member of the Archaeology Management Group.
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology. the IHC’s Archeology RFG, and the IHC’s Public Goods series.
jwil 30.iii.2012
