Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

End of Summer Session B Classes
2014-09-13 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
See the calendar at:

Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles (FREE!)
2014-09-18 00:00
Thursday, September 18, 2014Mariachi 5:00 p.m.
Lecture 5:30 p.m.
Presidio Chapel, El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park
123 East Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara
For more information: 805-965-0093 or www.sbthp.org
Join the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation as Catherine Kurland and Evangeline Ordaz-Molina discuss Hotel Mariachi, their book which depicts the mariachi musicians of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and the eighty-year-old mariachi culture centered in the 1889 hotel on Mariachi Plaza. It is a story of valiant efforts by the community to preserve the cultural heritage of the mariachis and the historic hotel, built by great-grandparents of author Catherine Kurland, who traces her Latino family history back to the birth of Los Angeles. Documentary art photographer Miguel Gandert “joyously and heartbreakingly captures this dichotomy of a regal band at play and the harsh reality of the struggle for work.” Enrique Lamadrid offers an in-depth study of mariachi music, the lives of the musicians, and the role of southern California in the evolution of this musical form.
Enjoy a special guest appearance by Mariachi Garibaldi de Jaime Cuéllar
co-presented with ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara!
Added by: AJ 9/10/2014

2014-2015 New Majors Meeting
2014-09-30 00:00
Please join faculty members from the Department of History for a New Majors MeetingTuesday September 30th from 1-2pm in HSSB 4020
This a great opportunity for all new majors to meet members of the History faculty, the Department Chair, and Faculty Advisors

UCEAP Meeting Just for HISTORY Majors
2014-10-14 00:00
There is a UC EAP meeting ONLY for HIST, HISPP and MDVST majors on Tuesday October 14th from 4-5pm in HSSB 4020!

Geneologies of Chimurenga (Self-Liberation) Music: Re-writing Zimbabwean Nationalism Through Song
2014-10-14 00:00
This is the first lecture of the year sponsored by the Research Focus Group on identity. Our very own Mhoze Chikowero, who is spending the year in southern Africa on an ACLS fellowship, has agreed to speak to the RFG during a brief visit to Santa Barbara next week.
hm 10/10/14

A Garden History
2014-10-15 00:00
Presented by Goleta Valley Historical Society and co-hosted by Fairview Gardens
History Education Center
at Rancho La Patera & Stow House (click for map)
With interest in home hardens at the highest it’s been in decade, this lecture will take us back to another time when national interest was focused on household agriculture — the victory gardens of the first and second World Wars. Dr. Rose Hayden-Smith will talk about current national policy and models, as well as the way that the local food-systems movement is addressing a wide range of challenge facing Americans today. She will also discuss her new book Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War 1.
About the Speaker
Dr. Hayden-Smith has been an academic with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension (UC ANR) since 1992. She has worked in the area of youth development and food systems-agriculture and also with 4-H and Master Gardener programs. For more info, visit rosehayden-smith.com.
Reservations Recommended!
Admission is Complimentary.
dacia@goletahistory.org
(805) 681-7216, ext. 2
hm 9/30/14 – aj 10/1/14

Chair's Welcome Reception for History Faculty, Affiliates, Lecturers
2014-10-17 00:00
This event is by invitation only; wine and cheese will be served.
hm 10/4/14

Winter 2015 Scheduling Meeting for Majors
2014-10-21 00:00
All HISTORY Majors and Minors are encouraged to attend the Winter 2015 Scheduling Meeting Tuesday October 21st 3:30-4:30 in HSSB 4020
Come learn about new classes, course descriptions, and courses that fulfill GEs!
All first year and transfer students are strongly encouraged to attend.

"Modernist Worlds at War: Wells, Welles, Spielberg, and Anglo-American Paranoia"
2014-10-22 00:00
Jed Esty is the author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism,Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford 2012) and A
Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England
(Princeton 2004), and is currently at work on a new project entitled
Ages of Innocence: Culture and Literature from Pax Britannica to
the American Century.
Jed Esty will be discussing his work-in-progress on
The War of the Worlds across media, from H.G. Wells to
Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg.
All welcome!
Reception to follow
hm 10/19/14

Single Puritan Girls in Tudor England
2014-10-23 00:00
It was reportedly H.L. Mencken who defined a Puritan as a person who was “haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.” But if the 17th century Puritan Simonds D’Ewes was any example, Shakespeare might have been closer to the truth in his comedy about The Merry Wives of Windsor. UCSB History Prof. J. Sears McGee will sort through the complicated—and sometimes hilarious—negotiations Sir Simonds undertook in his serial marriages to two teenaged Puritan heiresses. His talk will be based on some 70 volumes of Sir Simonds’ personal papers in the British Library that have never been published, including more than 1400 letters to and from a wide range of correspondents in England and abroad.
About Our Speaker
A senior member of the History faculty and one of its most popular lecturers, Prof. McGee specializes in the history of early modern Britain. His talk will be based on his forthcoming book, “An Industrious Mind”: the Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, being published by Stanford University Press.
The event will begin with light refreshments at 5:30 p.m. In gratitude for your loyalty and support, the History Associates Board is sponsoring this as a free event, but reservations are recommended because of limited seating.
You can make a reservation online by writing drake@history.ucsb.edu,
or phone (805) 893-4388
hm 10/4/14, 10/10

IHC Open House: Annual Theme "Anthropocene"
2014-10-23 00:00
IHC Public Events Series for 2014-15: The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities The Anthropocene, a newly-coined geologic term, designates the age during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. While subject to the forces of nature, the human species is itself a force that acts upon the natural world. We have altered the sea levels, the composition of the atmosphere and the surfaces and depths of the earth. But unlike nature’s agents of change, our species has now become fully cognizant of our impact. As Andrew Revkin has observed, ?Two billion years ago, cyanobacteria oxygenated the atmosphere and powerfully disrupted life on earth, but they didn’t know it. We?re the first species that’s become a planet-scale influence and is aware of that reality. That?s what distinguishes us.?
The UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center?s 2014-2015 public events series, The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities, will explore this time of significant biospheric human influence, with the aim of bringing into focus the challenges that now confront the planet and its inhabitants through the unique, critical perspectives afforded by the humanities and fine arts.
For more information and a list of upcoming speakers, please visit:
hm 10/10/14

The History and Causes of the Syrian Uprisings
2014-10-24 00:00
Dr. Bassam Haddad will be addressing the causes behind the Syrian uprisings and the various factors that led to the twists and turns that still engulf Syria, and, of late, beyond.
Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and teaches in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Bassam recently published “The Political Economy of Syria: Realities and Challenges,” in Middle East Policy and is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The “Other” Threat. Bassam is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for four organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East.
Lecture sponsored by the UCSB Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
hm 10/22/14

History of the Present: World War I and the Origins of Our Time
2014-10-24 00:00
This panel in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020) will be moderated by History Professor Alice O’Connor.It is open to all — families welcome!
Many aspects of our modern world have their origin in the violent global rearrangements following World War I (1914-1918). UCSB history faculty will discuss the far-reaching legacies of the war in this, the centennial anniversary of its outbreak. Whether you are curious about the war’s continuing effects on the Middle East, the historical treatment of post-traumatic psychological injuries, the peace movement and the League of Nations, or even if you only want to know if you can believe what you see on Downton Abbey, please come and enjoy this stimulating program, based on a model pioneered in a popular UCSB history class. Reception to follow.
hm 10/20/14

Fray Angelico Chavez and the Colonial Southwest: Historiography as Re-materialization
2014-10-25 00:00
This is the annual Tibesar Lecture of the Academy of American Franciscan History.
Prof. Ellen McCracken will discuss Franciscan Fray Angelico Chavez (1910-1996), one of New Mexico’s foremost 20th century intellectuals, whose historiography crucially involved strategies of re-materialization of New Mexico history. The many innovative material practices in which he engaged increased the understanding of the past and simultaneously helped to preserve it, giving it a visual material presence beyond the written historical narrative. Prof. McCracken will focus on key examples of these strategies in his seven-decade career, to illustrate how Fray Angelico Chavez’s innovative enhancements of traditional historiography point the way to enticing modes of amplifying the writing and presentation of history in the digital age.
Ellen McCracken is a professor of Spanish and comparative Latino/a literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among her books are: The Life and Writing of Fray Angelico Chavez: A New Mexico Renaissance Man (2009) and New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999). Her edited volumes include: Fray Angelico Chavez: Poet, Priest and Artist (2000) and Guitars and Adobes and the Uncollected Stories of Fray Angelico Chavez (2009).
Saturday. October 25, 2014 at 7:00 pm, Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library Conference Room
2201 Laguna Street
Free admission but space is limited
For more information call (805) 682-4713 ext 152 or email director@sbmal.org
hm 10/4/14, 10/10

"Fiber Theft in the Medieval Silk Industry"
2014-10-27 00:00
The Pre-Modern Cluster in the Department of History announces its first event, a brown bag lunch presentation.
All interested faculty and grad students are welcome to attend.
hm 10/22/14

UCDC and UCCS Meeting for HIST Majors
2014-10-29 00:00
Wednesday October 29th 3:30-4:30pm in HSSB 4020
Come learn about courses and internships at the UC Centers in Washington D.C. and Sacramento.
Come learn about the new changes and great opportunities
and hear stories from students who just returned from UCDC!

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
2014-10-29 00:00
Kati Marton, award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent andbestselling author, discusses her critically-acclaimed book, The Great
Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. As the New York Times
writes, The Great Escape “describes the crossroads where art and politics
meet, the perils of dictatorship and the horrors of war, all of it punctuated by the
frantic struggle to create the atomic bomb.”
And the New Yorker: “Marton illuminates Budapest’s vertiginous Golden Age and the
darkness that followed…. By looking at these nine lives — salvaged, and
crucial — Marton provides a moving measure of how much was lost.”
================
In The Great Escape, Kati Marton follows nine survivors over the decades as
they flee fascism and antisemitism, seek sanctuary in England and America,
and set out to make their mark. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller,
and Eugene Wigner enlist Albert Einstein to get Franklin Roosevelt to
initiate the development of the atomic bomb. Along with John von Neuman,
who pioneers the computer, they succeed in achieving that goal before Nazi
Germany, ending the Second World War, and opening a new age. Arthur
Koestler writes the most important anti-Communist novel of the century,
Darkness at Noon. Robert Capa is the first photographer ashore on D-Day. He
virtually invents photojournalism and gives us some of the century’s most
enduring records of modern warfare. Andre Kertesz pioneers modern
photojournalism, and Alexander Korda, who makes wartime propaganda films
for Churchill, leaves a stark portrait of post war Europe with The Third
Man, as his fellow filmmaker, Michael Curtiz, leaves us the immortal
Casablanca, a call to arms and the most famous romantic film of all time.
Marton brings passion and breadth to these dramatic lives as they help
invent the twentieth century.
The event is free and the public is welcome to attend.
hm 10/22/14

Suffragettes At Home:’ Representations of Domestic Labour in the Feminist Press, Britain 1908-1914
2014-11-03 00:00
In 1910, the Vote (the newspaper of the Women’s Freedom League) launched a photography competition inviting their suffragette readers to send in photographs of themselves engaged in domestic labour. The result was a bizarre series of images depicting the leaders of the militant suffrage movement performing mundane household tasks, such as cleaning the stove and cooking a vegetarian dinner. Whether this competition, entitled ‘Suffragettes At Home’, was intended seriously or as a joke remains unclear, and historians have interpreted it in markedly contradictory ways. In this paper I examine the ‘Suffragettes At Home’ series as a way into exploring the contradictions and complexities of first wave feminists’ attitude to the ‘problem’ of housework. While representations of domestic labour were ubiquitous across the feminist press during this period, reflecting an important reality in the lives of its female readership, the new figure of the modern emancipated woman was most commonly depicted as detesting housework. This in turn touched on the wider and more fundamental problem of who should perform the necessary reproductive labour once feminists had succeeded in their struggle to liberate women from the confines of the home.
Laura Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She researches the history of British feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and is the author of Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s’ as Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2013) and A Serious Endeavour: Gender, Education and Community at St Hughs, 1886-2011 (Profile Books, 2011). Her current research looks at the relationship between ‘first wave’ feminism and early domestic workers’ struggles.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice/Hull Chair and the departments of History and Feminist Studies.
hm 10/25/13

University Press Publishing in the Age of Kindle
2014-11-05 00:00
In spite of the frequent coverage in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Publishers Weekly, Inside Higher Ed, and on listservs, websites, scholarly journal articles and beyond, the students, assistant professors, and even published authors at higher ranks has failed to keep up with the very rapid pace of change in scholarly publishing. Most faculty are unaware of how open access, consortia of presses selling e-books to libraries, the decline of bookstores both chain and independent, cutbacks in library funding, competition of book sales with expensive journal purchases by libraries, decline of review media, and general lack of funding in academia are made after successful review of manuscripts.time, they also need advice about how to do that successfully. Discount schedules, “crossover books,” and what it takes to reach so-called general or interdisciplinary readers are topics that few mystify many. Publishers need the help of faculty to publicize and promote their books in ways that were not previously needed, and more than ever before, they prefer to publish books by academics the issues Mitchner will address in her visit with faculty and students at UCSB.
Leslie Mitchner is the Associate Director and Editor in Chief at Rutgers University Press, where she has been acquiring books in numerous art history, African American studies, women’s and gender studies, Asian American studies, and more) for over thirty years. She oversees a department that has strong publication lists in anthropology, sociology, Jewish studies, human rights, childhood studies, higher education, criminology, and clinical health and medicine. A frequent participant on panels at national conferences and a guest speaker on Connecticut State University, Stony Brook University, Boston College, NYU, Virginia Tech, San Francisco State University) she gives talks to large and small groups of faculty on the constant changes in publishing publishers for their work. She has published articles in Cinema Journal and Scholarly Publishing.
Sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Studies, the Department of History, the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
hm 10/10/14

Open House at the SB Mission Archive/Library
2014-11-06 00:00
Join us for an Open House!
Help us thank the sponsors of our project to conserve the 21 paintings of California Missions by Edwin Deakin with this exhibit and reception.
You will have an opportunity to see some of the newly restored paintings illuminated by our new LED lighting system made possible by a generous grant from Wood Claeyssens Foundation.
Join us for an Open House!

Help us thank the sponsors of our project to conserve the 21 paintings of California Missions by Edwin Deakin with this exhibit and reception.
You will have an opportunity to see some of the newly restored paintings illuminated by our new LED lighting system made possible by a generous grant from Wood Claeyssens Foundation.
Thursday November 6, 2014
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
SBMAL Conference Room
Admission is free
Please join us and help us celebrate all the wonderful work we are able to do thanks to the support of friends like you!

Sincerely,
Monica Orozco, PhD
Director
Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library
Admission is free
Please join us and help us celebrate all the wonderful work we are able to do thanks to the support of friends like you!

Sincerely,
Monica Orozco, PhD
Director
Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library
hm 10/27/14

Land and Sea in the Mediterranean World
2014-11-07 00:00
The Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP is happy to announce our Fall 2014 workshop and symposium, hosted and co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara.Space is limited, please register now by contacting Courtney Mahaney (cmahaney@ucsc.edu).
Friday, 7 November – Symposium
12:30-6pm
This one day interdisciplinary meeting sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program at UCSB will examine the points of contact between the Mediterranean Sea and the land bordering it. These were places of control for exchange and conflict of people, ideas, and material goods.
Session I
-Glenn Bugh (Virginia Tech) “Fortress Morea: Venetian Defensive Strategy in the Peloponnese.”
-Nikki Malain (University of California, Santa Barbara). “Who are You Calling a Pirate? The Birth and Spread of the Term ‘Corsair’ in the Twelfth Century”.
-Aaron Burke (UCLA) Ioppa Maritima: “In Search of Jaffa’s ‘Solomonic’ Harbor”.
Session II
-Suzanne Akbari (University of Toronto) “The Door to the Latin Kingdom: Early Thirteenth-Century Views of the Port of Acre.”
-Michael North (University of Greifswald) “The Sea as Realm of Memory: The Straits of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles.”
This interdisciplinary meeting sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program at UCSB will examine the points of contact between the Mediterranean Sea and the land bordering it. These were places of control for exchange and conflict of people, ideas, and material goods.
Keynote Speaker:
*Julia Clancy-Smith (University of Arizona)
Saturday, 8 November – Workshop
9:30am-5pm
Daniel Hershenzon, Assistant Professor of Spanish, U Conn
-The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 1600-1650?
-Comment by Cristelle Baskins, Associate Professor of Art History, Tufts University
– Discussion by the Participants
Claudio Fogu, Associate Prof of Italian Studies, UC Santa Barbara
-From the Southern to the Mediterranean Question: Making Italians and the Suppression of Mediterranenan-ness?
-Comment by Pamela Ballinger, Associate Professor of History, Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights, University of Michigan
-Discussion by the Participants
Susan Slymovics, Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Cultures, UCLA
-Moving War Memorials from Algeria to France?
-Comment TBA
-Discussion by the Participants
To register and receive the workshop papers, and for further information, please contact Courtney Mahaney (cmahaney@ucsc.edu) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. UC-affiliated faculty and graduate students will be eligible for up to $350 for travel expenses; non-UC participants may apply for up to $350 in support (this will be granted as available).

See also the Mediterranean Seminar website: www.mediterraneanseminar.org.
The Mediterranean Seminar provides announcements of grants, fellowships, conferences, programs and events for third party institutions on a courtesy basis as we become aware of them. Any inquiries regarding such announcements should be made directly to the organizing party as listed in the announcement in question; the Mediterranean Seminar is not responsible for and does not provide any guarantee or warranty regarding these programs, their content, or the timing or accuracy of the information provided.
hm

Cashing the “California Banknote”: Anglo Settlers in Mexican California
2014-11-10 00:00
In this talk, I consider American expansion in Mexican California,a region seen as an important gateway to the vast Pacific beyond
its shores. The encroachment on Spanish and later Mexican
territory also permitted the development of a trade in raw materials
that, for instance, supplied the shoe factories that were springing
up all over New and Old England and required great quantities of
leather. These products were then sold back to the newly affluent
rancheros who had developed a taste for these American consumer
goods, in exactly the same way as East Coast Americans were
importing products made in Britain from their own raw materials.
This is one example of how the circulation of people and objects
through networks of exchange connected the Atlantic and Pacific
worlds.
Dr. Kariann Akemi Yokota is an associate professor and Associate
Chair of the History Department at the University of Colorado
Denver. She is the author of Unbecoming British: How
Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford
University Press, 2011) that was included in CHOICE’s
“Outstanding Academic Titles” list for 2012. Her forthcoming
book is entitled “Pacific Overtures: Early America and the
Transpacific World, 1760-1853.” Her research interests include
transnational relations in the era of the American Revolution,
interethnic relations in the twentieth century, and material and
visual culture.
hm 11/7/14

The War to End All Wars—What Have We Learned?
2014-11-11 00:00
A Special Centennial EventCo-Sponsored by the UCSB Affiliates, the UCSB Department of History & Center for Cold War Studies
On Armistice Day, a panel of UCSB faculty will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of WW I
with a discussion of the impact of this war that, far from ending all wars, left millions dead and ushered in
a new age of violent conflict. A panel led by Santa Barbara Independent columnist Barney Brantingham
as moderator will include Prof. Jack Talbott on the chain of events that led to the war, Prof. John Lee on
the thinking of the war planners, Prof. Mary Furner on the effects of the war in the U.S., and Prof. Steven
Humphreys on the changed map of the Middle East.
Light refreshments will be served.
Because of limited seating, reservations are advised. You can make a reservation by writing drake@history.ucsb.edu.
free and open to the public
hm 10/28/14

Beyond UCSB in History
2014-11-12 00:00
Hello Fellow Historians (and those simply interested in History),
Please join the UCSB History Club and Honor Society (Phi AlphaTheta) this upcoming Wednesday (November 12) for our third general
meeting of the quarter at 6:00pm at HSSB 4080.
Prof. McGee and Prof. Ann Plane will host a “Beyond UCSB in History” workshop for everyone interested in continuing a career in history following undergraduate. Even if you are not sure what you will be doing after UCSB (or have just begun your college career), this is a great opportunity to see what’s ahead in the field of history, graduate school and career wise.
Professors Sears McGee and Ann Plane will be presenting this special workshop along with first year graduate student Elyse
Finkel, an alumni of Cornell University.
Complimentary Refreshments and Drinks will be served!
It will be an awesome night and Hope to see you all there!
??? 11/2014; hm 11/10/14

Labor and Empire
2014-11-13 00:00
This talk inaugurates a conference on “Labor and Empire” that continues through November 15. Chibber is the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013). Conference participants include Sven Beckert, Avi Chomsky, Dana Frank, Julie Green, Paul Kramer, Jana Lipman, Elizabeth McKillen, and Steve Striffler.
Sponsored by LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies, and the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.
More Information,including a full conference schedule: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/labor-and-empire/
hm 11/12/14

David: The Divided Heart
2014-11-16 00:00
Of all the figures in the Bible, David arguably stands out as the most perplexing and enigmatic. He was many things: a warrior who subdued Goliath and the Philistines; a king who united a nation; a poet who created beautiful, sensitive verse; a loyal servant of God who proposed the great Temple and founded the Messianic line; a schemer, deceiver, and adulterer who freely indulged his very human appetites. David Wolpe, whom Newsweek called “the most influential rabbi in America” and the Jerusalem Post identified as “one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world,” takes a fresh look at biblical David in an attempt to find coherence in his seemingly contradictory actions and impulses. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of an exceptional human being who, despite his many flaws, was truly beloved by God.
David Wolpe, Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, is the author of eight books, including Why Faith Matters and the national bestseller, Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times. He regularly writes for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post’s On Faith website, and The Huffington Post. A columnist for Time.com, his work has been profiled in the New York Times. He has appeared on the Today Show, Face the Nation, ABC this Morning, and CBS This Morning.
Courtesy of The Book Den, copies of David will be available for purchase and signing at this event.
Sponsored by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UCSB.
hm 11/3/14

Greeting the Dead: Managing Solitary Existence in Japan
2014-11-19 00:00
At a moment when the population is declining, marriage and birth rates are down, one-third of people live alone while one-fourth are 65 or older, and reports of “lonely death” (of solitary people whose bodies are discovered days, or weeks, after death) are commonplace, the social ecology of existence is undergoing radical change in 21st century Japan. While long-term bonds?to company, family, locale?were once the earmarks of its “group-oriented society,” today it is living, and dying, alone that marks Japan’s new era of “single-ification” and “disconnected society” (muen shakai). How the rise of single-ification affects the management of death?both those already dead as well as those at risk of dying in/from solitude?is the subject of this talk. Looking at new practices of burying/memorializing the dead, new trends in both single and solitary lifestyles, and new initiatives in dealing with suicide, I consider how the neoliberal shift to “self-responsibility” plays out in the everyday rhythms of being with/out others for post-social Japanese.
Biography: Anne Allison is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology as well as Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Among many other publications, she is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (University of California Press 2000); Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006); and, her most recent Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013).
hm 11/5/14

Phi Alpha Theta/History Club Meeting
2014-11-19 00:00
Please join the UCSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta this Wednesday (November 19) at 6:00pm in HSSB 4080 for our fourth general meeting (and second to last one) of the quarter!
We will be celebrating the holidays with a Thanksgiving-style potluck complete with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and the works. We also will be showing the 1954 classic crime drama film, “On The Waterfront” starring the original godfather himself, Marlo Brando. The film is set in the historical time period of “Boss Tweed” New York and was selected by the American Film Institute as the Eighth Greatest Film of All Time.
All members and those attending are encouraged to bring a dish to share (it doesn’t have to be the size of a turkey) however we do welcome everyone to join us, with or without a dish!
Hope to see you all there!
Darren Chen,
​UCSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta President

Climbing a stairway to heaven: Rereading dream texts as lived religion and embedded emotion in seventeenth-century New England
2014-11-24 00:00
You are invited to the Pre-Modern Cluster’s second brown bag lunch of this year.
It is based on Prof. Plane’s newly published book:
Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England:
Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century
From angels to demonic specters, astonishing visions to devilish terrors, dreams inspired,
challenged, and soothed the men and women of seventeenth-century New England. English
colonists considered dreams to be fraught messages sent by nature, God, or the Devil; Indians
of the region often welcomed dreams as events of tremendous significance. Whether the
inspirational vision of an Indian sachem or the nightmare of a Boston magistrate, dreams were
treated with respect and care by individuals and their communities. Dreams offered entry to
“invisible worlds” that contained vital knowledge not accessible by other means and were
viewed as an important source of guidance in the face of war, displacement, shifts in religious
thought, and intercultural conflict.
Using firsthand accounts of dreams as well as evolving social interpretations of them, Dreams
and the Invisible World in Colonial New England explores these little-known aspects of colonial
life as a key part of intercultural contact. With themes touching on race, gender, emotions, and
interior life, this book reveals the nighttime visions of both colonists and Indians. Ann Marie
Plane examines beliefs about faith, providence, power, and the unpredictability of daily life to
interpret both the dreams themselves and the act of dream reporting. Through keen analysis
of the spiritual and cosmological elements of the early modern world, Plane fills in a critical
dimension of the emotional and psychological experience of colonialism.
Ann Marie Plane is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is
a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los
Angeles. She is coeditor of Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World,
also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
hm 11/10/14

Phi Alpha Theta/History Club Meeting
2014-12-03 00:00
Phi Alpha Theta and History Club Meeting HSSB 4080
6pm-8pm
