Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Mia Dragnic and Pierina Ferretti: "An Expansive Rebellion: Feminism and Social Revolt in Chile"
2021-02-01 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Pierina Ferretti and Mia Dragnic García, sociologists and doctoral candidates in Latin American Studies at the University of Chile.
In October 2019, Chile experienced its largest social revolt since the return to democracy in 1990. The mobilization, which began as a spontaneous reaction to protest against a 0.30 USD rise in the Santiago transport fare, soon after became a widespread outburst against the precarious and unjust conditions that affect the majority of the population after almost fifty years of life under a neoliberal regime. Throughout Chile, high school and university students, young precarious professionals, residents of peripheral neighborhoods, sectors of a fragile and unstable “middle class”, soccer hooligans (a symbol of popular and stigmatized youth), qualified salaried workers and unqualified, retirees and older adults, office workers, and app workers, among others, joined together in mass demonstrations.
As an immediate antecedent to this revolt in Chile, there had been a recent emergence of a new wave of the feminist movement that has since caused a general awareness of sexist violence, sexual abuse, and the need for an abortion law, issues that today they occupy the center of social debate. One can see the underground work that Chilean feminism has carried out for many years and that has gained symbolic capital – this is key to understanding how it has moved from private malaise to collective revolt today. Feminism has acted in Chile as an expansive rebellion, starting with women and sexual dissidents and has advanced towards the politicization of broad social sectors, preparing the conditions for mass revolt.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=[REDACTED]
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

History Club Weekly Meetings
2021-01-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-01-21 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-01-14 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-01-07 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-12-31 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-12-24 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-12-17 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-12-10 19:00 - 21:00 and 7 more dates | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. LaKisha Simmons, "The Ancestors and the Womb are One: Black Motherhood and Histories of Black Infant Loss"
2021-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant and child loss emerge twin concepts of generation and Black relationality, which enable a theory of Black motherhood as connected to survival and remembrance. The concept of generation reveals how Black women in the 1930s defined themselves as mothering their children after Emancipation and yet as inheriting the ever-present enslaved past through their own mothers and grandmothers. Black women articulated a sense of self and well-being that was in conversation with the ancestors and unborn.
Join this Zoom event here: https://bit.ly/3hVdvP4.

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

Public History Colloquium Event–"Public Lands, Public History: Putting History to Work for the United States Forest Service"
2021-01-15 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, January 15 at noon for a Zoom talk by Leisl Carr Childers and Michael Childers (Colorado State University).
Childers and Carr Childers will discuss their current project, a new history of the USDA Forest Service from 1960-2020, and the historical methodologies that undergird their work. In particular, they will address what it means to work in applied history, how applied history works (or does not work) with regard to public lands management agencies, and how public history, applied history, and working as a public intellectual speaks to history taking a public turn.
Register in advance for this event here. You can download the event flyer at this link.
Recommended Readings:
Bundyville, Season ONE—podcast (applied history work by Leisl Carr Childers)
https://longreads.com/bundyville/season-one/
Imperiled Promise: The State of History in our National Parks
https://www.oah.org/site/assets/files/10189/imperiled_promise.pdf
Patricia Limerick, “Applied History, Knocked for a Loop but Neither Down Nor Out,” and “Where Bipartisanship Finds a Refuge: A Rendezvous with the Western Governors’ Association,” both in her “Not my first Rodeo” blog:
https://www.centerwest.org/archives/23851
https://www.centerwest.org/archives/23429
About the speakers:
• https://libarts.source.colostate.edu/csu-faculty-writing-history-of-the-modern-u-s-forest-service/
• https://leislcarrchilders.org
• https://michaelwchilders.com/author/michaelwchilders/

Job Talk: Taylor M. Moore's "Amulet Tales: Political and Spiritual Economies of Healing in Egypt"
2021-01-13 11:30 | Zoom, CA
The History Department invites all to a job talk by Dr. Taylor M. Moore on January 13, 2021.
Dr. Moore is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at UC Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersections of critical race studies, decolonial/postcolonial histories of science, and decolonial materiality studies with a geographical focus on Egypt and the late Ottoman world. Her manuscript-in-preparation, Superstitious Women: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt, uses modern Egyptian amulets as an archive to reconstruct the magical and vernacular medical life-worlds of peasant women healers, and their critical role developing medico-anthropological expertise in Egypt from 1875-1950.
Upper Egyptian and Black African women healers, and the amulets they wielded, shaped robust spiritual and political economies of healing in Egypt’s long nineteenth century. Known as “old wives,” these women stood at the center of a contest over power, expertise and scientific authority. Despite repeated and overlapping imperial, colonial, and nationalist efforts by government officials and doctors to discredit their knowledge, wise women controlled a widespread market in occult objects and services that were crucial to everyday life. By the 1920s, the production of occult knowledge became intimately entangled with the internationalization of the social sciences. Egyptologists and anthropologists designated women healers and their magico-medical practice as
“survivals” of ancient Egypt. As such, these women were both objects of scientific inquiry and critical producers of medical and anthropological knowledge.
Dr. Moore’s job talk will take place on Zoom at this link. To download the flyer for this event, click here.

The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution's Winter 2021 Schedule
2021-01-12 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

Miroslava Chávez-García, "Migrant Longing"
2021-01-10 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB History Associates has partnered with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation to present a public lecture by UCSB Professor of History Miroslava Chávez-García.
Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Professor Chávez-García recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both “here” and “there” (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chávez-García demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned.
Please register for this Zoom event in advance at this link. To download the event flyer, click here.

Nyasha Mboti, "Closing the Loophole: Apartheid Studies"
2020-12-10 09:30 | Zoom, CA
Professor Mhoze Chikowero invites all to attend a special guest lecture by Dr. Nyashi Mboti as part of UCSB’s African Studies Series. Dr. Mboti will discuss the new field he founded: Apartheid Studies. He will introduce his forthcoming 4-volume treatise on the subject, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, which will change how we think about enslavement, colonialism, neocolonialism, impoverishment, and the exploitation and carnage of humans that has defined global history for at least half a millennium.

Dr. Mboti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His keen interest in academia is to ask questions that people do not normally intend or think to ask. He has, to date, successfully supervised ten doctoral students,
delivered seminal keynotes at international conferences, and published over two dozen peer reviewed research articles.

To read an early copy of Volume 1 of Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, contact Professor Chikowero at chikowero@history.ucsb.edu or Claudia Ankrah at c_ankrah@ucsb.edu. To download the flyer for the lecture, click here. To attend Dr. Mbughuni’s lecture on Zoom, use this link.

Public History Colloquium Event–"Pride of Place: LGBTQ Public History in the United Kingdom"
2020-12-04 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, December 4 at noon for a Zoom talk by UCSB alumnus Dr. Justin Bengry (Goldsmiths, University of London).
Dr. Bengry will present a major crowdsourced public history project he helped develop. Pride of Place maps sites of LGBTQ history in the United Kingdom. Dr. Bengry set the project in context of the state of LGBTQ public history in the UK. He is a historian of sexuality and capitalism who chairs the first MA in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London.
To view the Pride of Place online exhibition at the Historic England webpage, click here. To view the crowdsourced map, click here.
Please register in advance for this event at this link.

Sheila Lodge, "Santa Barbara: An UNcommonplace American Town"
2020-11-15 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB History Associates has partnered with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation to present a public lecture by former mayor Sheila Lodge on the topic of Santa Barbara history.
Lodge will discuss her book Santa Barbara: An UNcommonplace American Town about how Santa Barbara became the community that it is through planning. She will describe the many battles it sometimes took and the process that was developed to make the critical decisions. Because of her personal involvement in the struggles, her book is partially a memoir.
Lodge was born at home on her parents’ dairy in Arcadia, CA. She is a life-long Californian except for 2 1/2 years in Annapolis, MD, where she taught school and did social work. She returned to
California in 1950 and came to Santa Barbara in 1952. She served on the Santa Barbara City Planning Commission from 1973-1975, the City Council from 1975-1981, and as Mayor from 1981-
1993. An incurable public policy wonk, since 2009 she’s been back on the Planning Commission where she started her civic life 45 years ago.
Please register in advance for this free event here. To download the event flyer, click here.

Kendall Lovely, "Dismembering Classicism: Contesting Colonial and Classical Legacies in the Southwest"
2020-11-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom, CA
Classicization in U.S. heritage narratives often involves the imposition of classical elements, derived from Greek and Roman civilization, onto narratives of colonial conquest in Southwestern borderlands and frontier spaces. Ongoing controversies surrounding statues of the conquistador, Juan de Oñate, reflect the ways in which the classical legacy remains prominent in public spheres of historical narrative. In providing a visual narrative of conquest linked to classical imagery, the Spanish history of the settling of the Southwest becomes implicated in broader U.S. historical narratives that valorize conquest as a civilizing force in the settling of the American West. While much of this classical imagery first appeared in Spanish sources, this paper traces specifically how these classicized narratives of Spanish conquest became appropriated and implicated in Anglo-American/U.S. historical narratives, as well as counter-narratives of Indigenous resistance.
Kendall Lovely, a member of the Navajo Nation, is from Albuquerque, NM. She holds a double-major B.A. from the University of New Mexico in Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies and Anthropology, an M.A. in Comparative Humanities from Brandeis University, and a second M.A. in Museum Studies from UNM. Her recent thesis in Museum Studies explored Classical influence within early anthropology and museum discourses. Her examinations revealed how these models helped to construct colonial representations of gender, especially in Southwest ethnology. As a Ph.D. student in Public History at the University of California Santa Barbara, she continues these research inquiries toward decolonizing museum practices and the public interpretation of history in museum settings.
Please register in advance for this free presentation at this link.

Azaria Mbughuni, "Tanzania and the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa"
2020-11-12 11:30 - 12:30 | Zoom, CA
All are cordially invited to a special guest lecture by Dr. Azaria Mbughuni on the role of Tanzania in Southern Africa’s liberation struggles. Dr. Mbughuni’s guest lecture will build onto Professor Mhoze Chikowero‘s ongoing graduate seminar on African Self-Liberation.
Dr. Mbughuni is Assistant Professor of History at Lane College, where he is also the Chair of the Division of Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Mbughuni was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He earned his Ph.D. from Howard University. His research interests include the role of Tanzania and the Pan-African Diasporas in the struggles for African independence.
For more information and to obtain relevant readings, contact Professor Chikowero at chikowero@history.ucsb.edu. To download the flyer for this event, click here. To attend Dr. Mbughuni’s lecture on Zoom, use this link.

Public History Colloquium Event--"In the Spaciousness of Uncertainty is Room to Act": Public History’s Long Game
2020-11-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History this Friday, November 6 at noon for a Zoom talk by Professor Marla Miller (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) about her recent article in The Public Historian, “‘In the Spaciousness of Uncertainty is Room to Act’: Public History’s Long Game.”
Taking her title from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, an exploration of the long arc of historical change, Miller engages with students and the public around the ideas, questions and new directions posed in this address to the National Council for Public History, public history’s major professional organization. Miller is a historian of US women’s work prior to the industrial revolution, and is the NCPH’s immediate past president. She is the author of many books, including Betsy Ross and the Making of America and Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Her research, teaching, publications and consulting engage North American material culture, museum and historic site interpretation, historical interpretation in the National Park Service, and the teaching of public history.
Event attendees are invited to read Professor Miller’s article in advance; it may be accessed here.
Please register to attend using this link.

History of Public Policy (& Law) Senior Thesis Meeting
2020-11-05 16:00 - 17:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This meeting explains the thesis seminar application and enrollment process for History 195IA/IB, gives an overview of the Winter seminar and Spring quarter thesis process, helps get you started on preliminary tasks this quarter, and lets you meet and hear from your fellow policy history students on what they intend to research.

If you cannot attend on Thursday November 5th at 4pm, the meeting will be recorded and posted on the history department website. You can reach out to Professor Bergstrom directly with any questions!

Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83083342663?pwd=[REDACTED]

Lizabeth Cohen, Struggling to Save America's Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited
2020-10-22 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom, CA
Click here to download the flyer for this event.
REGISTER NOW
Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link
Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially mixed communities, to involve suburbs—not just cities—in solving metropolitan inequality, and most importantly, to hold the federal government responsible for funding more affordable housing and other urban investments, rather than turn to the private sector. Cohen will revisit this history by following the long career of Edward J. Logue, who worked to revitalize New Haven in the 1950s, became the architect of the “New Boston” in the 1960s, and later led innovative organizations in New York at the state level and in the South Bronx. She will analyze the evolution in Logue’s thinking and actions, when and how he met resistance and accommodation by communities, and what he and many others who cared about cities learned in facing the challenges of urban revitalization during the suburban boom of the second half of the 20th century. Amid substantial challenges today in the realms of racial injustice, public health, economic viability, and urban resilience, it is more important than ever that we reexamine the history of efforts—successful and failed—to keep American cities vital. Audience Q&A will follow.
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. Her most recent book is Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (October 2019), winner of the Bancroft Prize. It examines the benefits and costs of the shifting strategies for rebuilding American cities after World War II by following the career of urban redeveloper Edward J. Logue, who oversaw major renewal projects in New Haven, Boston, and New York State from the 1950s through the 1980s. Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is also a former president of the Urban History Association.
To learn more about or purchase a copy of Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, please visit Chaucer’s Books online.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series; the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment; the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; and the UCSB Department of History
Image courtesy of Boston City Archives
REGISTER NOW. ASL and Spanish interpretation will be provided. To view ASL interpretation, please attend the webinar on a desktop computer.

Sarah Case, "The Woman Suffrage Movement: 'A Century of Struggle'"
2020-10-17 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Join UCSB History Associates on Saturday, October 17 on Zoom for their first public lecture of the academic year. Dr. Sarah Case will survey the woman suffrage movement for the hundred years or so before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Her talk will consider why the idea of women voting was so controversial in the nineteenth
century, and examine how it became less so in the early twentieth century. Dr. Case will introduce some of the major activists and organizations in the women suffrage movement and highlight some of the turning points in the “century of struggle.”
Dr. Sarah Case earned her MA and PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a continuing lecturer in history, teaching courses in public history, women’s history, and history of the South. She is also the managing editor of The Public Historian, a journal focused on publicly engaged historical scholarship. She is the author of Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South (Illinois, 2017) and articles on women and education, reform, and commemoration.

The Zoom link for this event is https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82201755393. All are welcome!
