Dr. David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus, University College, London, is the author of many works, including the well-known The Past is a Foreign Country. Dr. Lowenthal also be available to meet with graduate students and faculty, hosted by our public history program, from 4-5 in HSSB 3008. As recommended reading before the talk Prof. Lowenthal suggests […]

In this talk, Professor Topik considers the political economy and culture of coffee consumption in the Americas. He argues that it wasn't the Boston Tea Party that turned coffee into the Liberty Drink. Rather, economic and political factors in North and South America shaped this consumer culture. Steven Topik is Professor of History at UC […]

March 4 has been declared "Day of Action" to protest the ongoing de-funding of public education and the rest of the public sector. Local actions will acquaint the public with the seriousness of the situation. Two years ago the California state education budget was $102 billion dollars. This year it is $84 billion. Two years […]

Sam Walton founded Ozark-based Wal-Mart and made it a distinctively productive corporation in the decades immediately following World War II. The key to success was a rationalization of the firm's chaotic and expensive supply chain and the efficient employment of thousands of poorly-educated refugees from the agricultural revolution then sweeping the old Southwest. Bar codes, […]

In this talk, Hussein Ibish examines the arguments put forward by Palestinian and Arab-American proponents of abandoning the goal of ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state and instead seeking to promote a single, democratic state in all of Mandate Palestine. Dr. Ibish argues that ending the occupation and peace with Israel, while difficult […]

Sponsored by the Department of Classics. jwil 16.ii.2010

This lecture is part of the Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Economy series. Sven Beckert is the author of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (2001). He organizes the biannual History of Capitalism Conferences hosted by the Department of History at Harvard University. A copy of Beckert's […]

With interest in home gardens at the highest it has been in decades (even the White House has one), this event will take us back to another time when national interest was focused on household agriculture—the Victory Gardens of World War II. Our own Rose Hayden-Smith will talk about current national policy and models and […]

Philip Rousseau is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Early Christian Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at The Catholic University of America. Sponsored by the IHC Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group and the Mediterranean Studies program. jwil 16.ii.2010

For nearly 1,000 years, one of the most common forms of protection used by ancient Mediterranean warriors, including the armies of the Greeks and Alexander the Great, was the linothorax, a type of body armor apparently made out of linen. Due to the perishable nature of its material, however, no examples have survived; today it […]