"Colossus: The Forbin Project" At the height of the Cold War, the United States develops an enormous computer system in a top secret underground facility. The machine's single purpose is to keep America (and the planet) safe from nuclear war. The country's entire arsenal is placed at its disposal. As soon as the machine, known […]
East Germany, 1989: While a young man goes to the Oct. 3 40th anniversary ceremonies to protest, his mother suffers a heart attack and falls into coma as she watches the police arrest him. The mother awakens months later, when East Germany no longer exists. To avoid unduly exciting her, her son tries to set […]
Mark Hendrickson’s research focuses on labor, public policy, capitalism and political economy in early twentieth century U.S. History. He has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Aspen Institute, and the Institute for Labor and Employment Studies. He took his PhD in History at UCSB in 2004. This talk is sponsored by the Center […]
That amphetamine was used on all sides in the Second World War is widely acknowledged but little discussed by historians. Drawing on a range of primary sources Professor Rasmussen describes the ways British and American authorities evaluated amphetamine, and ultimately approved and issued the drug for use in combat despite a failure to obtain the […]
No archaeological discoveries have provided more striking examples that demonstrate the excellence of early Chinese pictorial art than those at Mawangdui, dated to the second century B.C.E. However, scholars have exclusively focused on the famous T-banner from Tomb No. 1, ignoring the pictorial context in which it was situated. To amend the imbalanced scholarship, Professor […]
In 1911 Monarch, “the last of the California grizzlies,” died in San Francisco after 22 years of captivity in Golden Gate Park. Within a year, conservationists launched the first campaign to protect California’s native wildlife. California has since become the site of some of the country’s most infamous battles over the protection of endangered species […]
The idea that America and other industrialized societies faced limits to their power and future economic growth helped define the 1970s. While scientists and free-market economists criticized this perspective, these Malthusian views stimulated fierce debate about the need to adopt a steady-state lifestyle. "Limits" - to resources, energy, wealth, even life itself - became a […]
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“Everyone’s looking for something.” Some of us have found it, or part of it, in Zen Art, though the types of things we look at, the way we talk about them, and the sorts of Zen we draw from them may be dramatically different. Indeed, the easily joined words “Zen” and “Art” exist in dynamic […]
As perhaps no other field of inquiry, the history of emotion, especially romantic love, seems dominated, almost premised upon, a search for attributes experiencing some sort of prolonged "rise" (and never "fall"). Romantic love has been the scale used to chart, variously, the rise of the civilizing process (as in the work of Norbert Elias); […]