Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Climbing a stairway to heaven: Rereading dream texts as lived religion and embedded emotion in seventeenth-century New England
2014-11-24 00:00 (America/Denver)
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

The Latino Generation
2014-12-04 00:00
Latinos are already the largest minority group in the United States, and experts estimate that by 2050, one out of three Americans will identify as Latino. Though their population and influence are steadily rising, stereotypes and misconceptions about Latinos remain, from the assumption that they refuse to learn English to questions of just how “American” they actually are. By presenting thirteen riveting oral histories of young, first-generation college students, Mario T. Garcia counters those long-held stereotypes and expands our understanding of what he terms “the Latino Generation.” By allowing these young people to share their stories and struggles, Garcia reveals that these students and children of immigrants will be critical players in the next chapter of our nation’s history.
This talk is part of the Chicana/o Studies Colloquium Series .
hm 11/24/14

End of Fall Quarter Instruction
2014-12-12 00:00
Classes end on Friday, December 12, 2014; Winter Quarter begins Monday, Jan. 5, 2015.
hm 10/4/14

Start of Summer Session B Instruction
2015-01-05 00:00
See the calendar at the link below.
hm 7/19/15

Sanctification of Mangoes: Symbol Creation in the Cult of Mao Zedong
2015-01-06 00:00
In 1968 during China’s “Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution,” the cult of CommunistParty Chairman Mao Zedong was at a high. A Pakistani foreign minister presented
Mao with a crate of mangoes that he re-gifted to the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda
Teams who were occupying the Tsinghua University campus. The gift of mangoes
happened to coincide with a shift in the leadership of the Cultural Revolution from
students to the military under the guise of the working class. Alfreda Murck will tell
the story of the improbable transformation of the mango from
then unknown fruit to a symbol of Mao’s love for workers, and
subsequently its consignment to the dustbin of history.
Special Lecture organized by
the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies.
Co-sponsored by the UCSB East Asia Center,
the Department of Art History, and the Department of History.
hm 1/2/15

Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Modern Japan
2015-01-12 00:00
Inaugural gathering of the UCSB History Department’s “Empires, Borderlands and Legacies” cluster.Space is limited, but guests are welcome.
hm 1/6/15

UCSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta
2015-01-14 00:00
Please join the UCSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta (History Honor Society) this Wednesday (January 14) at 6:30pm at HSSB 4080 for our First General Meeting of the Winter Quarter!
We will kickoff the quarter with an introduction to the History Club and our planned events and ongoing themes for the quarter as well as how to obtain membership to Phi Alpha Theta for new members. We will also be playing an opening game of History charades.
Free Pizza and Drinks will be provided!
Hope to see y’all there!
Darren Chen
UCSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta President
***Any questions regarding the History Club or membership to Phi Alpha Theta can be directed to ucsbhistoryclub1776@gmail.com
revised hm 1/12/15

Badash Memorial Lecture: The Materiality of the Virtual: A Global Environmental History of Computing from Babbage to Bitcoin
2015-01-21 00:00
Please join us January 21 at 5PM for the annual Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture. Prof. Nathan Ensmenger will be speaking about the intersection of the histories of computing and the environment.
Abstract
For most Americans, one of the defining features of the modern digital economy is the invisibility of its material infrastructure. Whereas previous technological and industrial revolutions were inextricably linked to the production of physical artifacts and the consumption of material resources — as we are all painfully aware, cars and factories pollute, large-scale agriculture wastes precious water resources, and our addiction to cheap consumer goods causes landfills to overflow — information technologies appear operate largely independently of the physical environment, and in fact enable us to transcend it. Seen from a global perspective, however, this is anything but the case. In this exploration of the life-cycle of a digital commodity (in this case a unit of the virtual currency Bitcoin) Ensmenger grounds the history of the electronic computer in the material world by focusing on the relationship between “computing power” and more traditional processes of resource extraction, exchange, management, and consumption.
About the Speaker:
Nathan Ensmenger is an associate professor in the School Of Informatics & Computing at Indiana University. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of software and software workers, the history of artificial intelligence, and issues of gender and identity in computer programming. His 2010 book, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, explored the rise to power of the “computer expert” in American corporate, economic, and political life. He is one of the co-authors of the most recent edition of the popular Computer: A History of the Information Machine. He is currently working on a book exploring the global environmental history of the electronic digital computer.
This lecture series is supported by the Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Fund
xy ?; hm 12/20/14, 1/20/15 link added

ROUNDTABLE: Natural Capital--How Much Is the Ocean Worth?
2015-01-22 00:00
Speakers:Peter Alagona (History and Environmental Studies, UCSB)
Sarah Anderson (Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UCSB)
Ken Hiltner (English and Environmental Studies, UCSB; UCSB Sustainability Champion)
Sharyn Maine (Santa Barbara Foundation)
Richard Widick (Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB)
Facilitator: Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook (English and Comparative Literature, UCSB)
How much is the ocean worth? Can we calculate the economic value of its contributions to human life- to the global carbon cycle; to ecotourism and recreation; to marine fisheries that feed the world? Would we use the ocean- or any other ecosystem- differently if we had to pay the actual dollar value of the functions it provides? Projects like the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment argue that establishing the value of ecosystem services allows us to materialize environmental risk and ground difficult policy debates amid twenty first-century global-scale environmental and economic crises. This pluri-disciplinary roundtable will examine how the idea of natural capital is shaping our relations to the environment. What happens when natural resources are brought into the marketplaces of the Anthropocene? What are the positive and negative effects, at different scales, of linking economic models to ecosystems? How will financial practices around risk and credit affect government policies on the management of natural resources? What are complements –or alternatives–to a ‘natural capital’ framework?
Sponsored by the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.
Thursday, January 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
More Information: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/natural-capital/
hm 1/14/15

Spring 2015 History Courses Informational Meeting
2015-01-22 14:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Spring 2015 Registration begins 02/04/2015.
Come learn in detail about all the exciting and new courses offered by the HISTORY department in Spring quarter. This includes not only courses which fulfill the major requirements, but those that simultaneously fulfill general education requirements in the College of Letters and Science and the College of Engineering.
THURSDAY JAN 22, 2015
2:00-3:00pm
HSSB 4020
For any Question please contact:
Monica I. Garcia, Ph.D.
Undergraduate Advisor, History
University of California, Santa Barbara
HSSB 4036
Advising Hours: 9am-12pm and 1pm-4pm
See you there!!
MIG 01/12/2015, hm 1/14

Liberal Arts Advantage Career Fair
2015-01-24 00:00
This is an opportunity for students to engage in conversations, learn about career paths, develop professionally, and network with alumni and other students.
Today, as much as ever, liberal arts students have skills and knowledge that are prized by employers. However, many students are often unsure about what they want to do for a career, and how to discuss their qualifications with employers. The Liberal Arts Advantage Career Conference is here to help you with these issues. By attending the conference, you will:
Hear liberal arts alumni discuss their careers in a wide variety of fields
Learn more about your own skills and how to market them to hiring recruiters
Experience a day filled with information, networking, and development
When: Saturday, January 24, 2015
Where: UCSB Corwin Pavilion
Who: Open to ALL undergraduate students with an emphasis on students in the Humanities & Fine Arts
What: Keynote speaker, panels of alumni, networking opportunity, buffet lunch and RAFFLE!
Click the link below for more information and to register.
hm 1/6/15

Who is Carrying the Temple Menorah? A Jewish Counter-Narrative of the Arch of Titus Spolia Panel
2015-01-26 00:00
Since antiquity, scholars have almost universally — and correctly ? interpreted the menorah bearers of the Arch of Titus spoils panel as triumphal Romans celebrating the defeat of the Jews in the Jewish War of 66-74. Jews, however, have developed counter-memories for this monument. Since the Renaissance, the menorah bearers have been identified as Jews carrying their holy vessels into Exile. This understanding was embraced by many fin de siècle Zionists, who sought to “reverse” this exile with their own actions. In modern Israel this rather minor detail has achieved apocalyptic significance for the religious radical right. This talk explores the perimeters of Pierre Nora’s work on Lieux de Mémoire to include the changing voice of those whose defeat is commemorated, with implications for viewing similarly active? and radioactive– “places of memory” in our own world.
Steven Fine is the Dr. Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and director of the Arch of Titus Digital Restoration Project. Fine’s Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World was awarded the Joshua Schnitzer Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies (2009). His most recent book is Art, History and the Historiography of Judaism in Roman Antiquity.
Sponsored by Ancient Borderlands RFG; the Dept. of Religious Studies; Division of the Humanities and Fine Arts.
More Information at the link below.
hm 1/20/15

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men
2015-01-26 00:00
Eric Lichtblau unveils the secret history of how America became home to thousands of Nazi war criminals after World War II, many of whom were scientists and spies brought here by the OSS and CIA as possible assets against new Cold War enemies. Ironically, the Nazis began their flight to America in the months immediately after the war ended, even as thousands of Holocaust survivors were still being held in “displaced person” camps. Relying on a trove of once-secret government records and scores of interviews with participants in this little-known chapter of postwar history, Lichtblau tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler’s men.
Eric Lichtblau is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times and has written about legal, political and national security issues since 2002. Previously he covered the Justice Department in the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Courtesy of The Book Den, copies of The Nazis Next Door 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 UC Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by Department of Religious Studies, Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.
Website: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/endowments/taubman
More Information at the link below:
hm 1/20/15

Civil War and Revolt in the Achaemenid Persian Empire
2015-01-29 00:00
Sponsored by the History Department’s Pre-Modern Cultures and Communities research cluster.
rev. hm 1/11/15

Slavery in the Texas Borderlands
2015-01-31 00:00
This is the Second Annual JoBeth Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture.
To most Americans, the word “slavery” conjures
up images of plantations in the Old South. But in
the Texas Borderlands from 1700 to 1850, slavery
was much more diverse. In his lecture, Paul Barba
will explain how Spaniards, Comanches, Anglo
Americans, and Choctaws enslaved others through
processes of kin incorporation, making slaves by
making kin of their victims. In order to capture the
diversity of Texas slavery, Paul has been looking at
a wide variety of multicultural sources to construct a
more comprehensive picture of interactions between
these different cultures.
A luncheon of bbq beef and chicken will be served.
Cost is $20 for members, $25 for non-members.
Please rsvp: (805) 893-4388.
About the Speaker
Paul Barba is writing his doctoral dissertation,
titled “Enslaved in Texas: Slavery, Migration,
and Identity in Native Country’,” on a
fellowship from the University of California
Institute for Mexico and the United States. His
paper on “Peter Pitchlynn and the Navigation
of Choctaw-Anglo-American Narrativity” was
a finalist for the Organization of American
Historians’ Pelzer Prize.
UCSB Mosher Alumni House is at the entrance road for
Campbell Hall at the center of the campus, next to
convenient parking ($3 on weekends). For a map, go
to http://www.tps.ucsb.edu/mapFlash.aspx
hm 1/12/15

Geographies of the Holocaust
2015-02-02 00:00
Anne Knowles and Alberto Giordano will present Geographies of the Holocaust. This book is the result of a multi-year collective project that has explored the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies utilizing Geographical Information System (GIS) science, it brings together historians and geographers to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced.
Anne Knowles is Professor of Geography at Middlebury College. She is one of the pioneers in developing historical GIS as an interdisciplinary method to infuse historical research and teaching with geographical awareness and spatial analysis. She edited the first books on historical GIS, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002); and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008). In her own research, Knowles used GIS to build the empirical framework for her major study of the U.S. iron industry, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry 1800 – 1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She is Principal Investigator, along with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, on the first interdisciplinary project to explore the potential for using GIS and other geospatial methods to study the Holocaust. Knowles is lead editor of Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2014).
Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair in the Department of Geography at Texas State University. His current research interests are in the geography of genocide and the Holocaust, Historical GIS, and spatial forensics. His publications include a coauthored book (in Italian) on geographic data quality, and several journal articles and book chapters. He is co-editor with Anne Knowles and Tim Cole of Geographies of the Holocaust. He has been Co-Chair of the Historical Geography Network for the Social Science History Association and a Member of the International Cartographic Association commissions on Maps and the Internet and on Spatial Data Quality. He is on the board of the newly established National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE), a joint initiative of Texas State and the Association of American Geographers (AAG).
The presentation will be followed by a reception.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Geography, French and Italian, Jewish Studies, and History, as well as the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
hm 1/11/15

Warriors & Dissenters: The War Within the War of 1914-1918
2015-02-02 00:00
As we mark the centenary of the First World War, this epochal event is usually remembered as a bloody conflict between rival alliances of nations. But from 1914 to 1918 there was another struggle: between those who regarded the war as a noble and necessary crusade and a brave minority who felt it was tragic madness and refused to fight. In an illustrated talk, the award-winning writer Adam Hochschild describes this battle between the Great War’s staunchest advocates and its most ardent critics—the latter of whom, in some cases, denounced the carnage from jail. Mr. Hochschild’s talk touches on all the countries where this domestic battle took place but focuses on Britain, where it was most passionately fought. Following his presentation, the author will answer questions from the audience and then sign copies of his recent book on this topic, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.
About the Speaker
Adam Hochschild is a highly acclaimed historian, essayist, and travel writer. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. The New York Times called it “an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection.” It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa won a J. Anthony Lukas award in the United States and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. His most recent book, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, appeared in 2011. In addition to writing, Mr. Hochschild lectures on journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
jwil 05.i.2015

Energy and Middle East History
2015-02-02 00:00
From the Bronze Age to the era of petroleum, the Middle East has experienced asuccession of energy profi les that helps to explain its political and cultural effl orescences
and stagnations. This presentation will discuss the ways in which chariots, camels, and
crude oil have shaped the region and distinguished it from the surrounding lands of
Europe, India, and Africa.
RICHARD W. BULLIET is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University
where he also directed the Middle East Institute of the School of International and
Public Affairs for twelve years. Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1940, he came to Columbia
in 1976 after undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard and eight years as a
faculty member at Harvard and Berkeley. He is a specialist on Iran, the social history
of the Islamic Middle East, the 20th century resurgence of Islam, and the history of
transportation.
His most recent scholarly work is Wheels: A Book about Invention (forthcoming 2015).
His earlier books include Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran (2009),
Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (2005), The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization
(2004), Islam: The View from the Edge (1994), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval
Period (1979), The Camel and the Wheel (1975), and The Patricians of Nishapur
(1972). He has also written six novels, beginning with Kicked to Death by a Camel
(1973) and ending with Chakra (2014), and is co-author of a world history textbook
The Earth and Its Peoples (6ed. 2014).
Sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies, R. Stephen Humphreys Distinguished Lecture Series
hm 1/20/15

"Death Ride of the Wehrmacht:" Russia 1941
2015-02-11 00:00
Sunday, 22 June 1941, was arguably the most significant day of the 20th century. For on that day Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed into the Soviet Union, launching a surprise attack which, despite ending in Germany’s defeat and the eradication of the Hitler’s Third Reich, changed our world forever. By virtue of any yardstick, the war between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia was the largest, and most costly, the world has ever seen, and its catastrophic effects still linger with us to this day – from the intractable conflicts in the Middle East to the more recent upheavals in Ukraine. Dr Luther’s lecture, based on his exhaustive new study, Barbarossa Unleashed, recreates the advance of the German Army Group Center along the bloody road to Moscow in the summer/fall of 1941 – an advance that pushed 1000 kilometers from eastern Poland to the very gates of Moscow, only to falter in the mud and snow outside the Soviet capital. His lecture provides a graphic and insightful account of this remarkable military campaign through the eyes of the German soldiers who experienced it.(Barbarossa Unleashed publisher’s webpage)
(interview by Claremont-McKenna college alumni magazine)
Dr Craig Luther is a retired U.S. Air Force Historian and former Fulbright Scholar (Bonn, West Germany, 1979-80). He completed his B.A. in Modern European History and Music at Claremont McKenna College (1973); his M.A. in Modern European History at SJSU (1976), and his Ph.D. at UCSB in 1987 (Modern European History). He has written several books and articles on German military operations in the Second World War. His latest book (2014) – “Barbarossa Unleashed. The German Blitzkrieg through Central Russia to the Gates of Moscow. June-December 1941” – has been well-received by reviewers and nominated by his publisher for the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History.
hm 1/29/15

Palestine, Academic Freedom, and the Demands of Civility
2015-02-17 00:00
Professor Steven Salaita is at the center of an international protest against academic censorship and the silencing of dissent. During the summer of 2014, he tweeted about Israel’s assault on Gaza. As a result, he was “de-hired” from his position as tenured professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois on the basis of “civility” when wealthy donors objected to his statement. Dr. Salaita’s most recent books, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan, analyses the rhetoric and myths of settlement in both North America and Israel and “patterns that connect Indigenous writing in both locations.” Other books include Israel’s Dead Soul; Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures & Politics; and Anti-Arab Racism in the USA.
*The UN estimates 1,523 civilians including 519 children were among the 2,192 dead in Gaza during the summer of 2014. Amnesty International condemned Israel for “displaying callous indifference” and flouting ‘laws of war” in their “disproportionate” attacks on Gaza.
Palestine, Academic Freedom, and the Demands of Civility
Sponsored by the UCSB Departments of History and Anthropology, The Center for New Racial Studies, Center for Research on Women & Social Justice, Hull Chair, and Carsey-Wolf Center
hm 2/9/15

"Sub Conscious"
2015-02-18 00:00
“Sub Conscious” is a rather sardonic recounting of filmmaker Mel Halbach’s experiences aboard a nuclear missile submarine in the 1970s. Halbach himself will be present, and he will engage in a brief colloquy with the audience after the film screening.
Drawing on personal experience, Halbach takes us on a journey through a Cold War underworld–aboard a nuclear-missile submarine prepared to fight World War III. Through interviews, stock footage, and animation, Mr. Halbach recreates the extraordinary life he and his shipmates led as they prowled the ocean depths with their trigger fingers at the ready, sometimes relieving their anxiety with recreational drug use. After the film screening, Mr. Halbach will engage in a colloquy with the audience.
Mel Halbach’s curiosity about people sustains his 25-year career as an independent filmmaker. Frequent travels to Vietnam in the 1990s culminated in his award-winning film “The Long Haired Warriors,” a documentary about Vietnamese women who were soldiers, activists, and prisoners of war. Halbach has filmed stories from the wartorn countries of Southeast Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe and from the sandblasted desert of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. His last film, “Sub Conscous,” is about his experiences aboard a nuclear-missile submarine during the Cold War.
The film screening is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served.
The public is welcome to this disturbing but entertaining event!
Sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies.
hm 2/12/15

The Ayotzinapa Student Massacre and the Rural Teacher Training Schools in Mexico: A Historical Perspective
2015-02-23 00:00
On September 26 and 27, 2014, municipal police agents opened fire on students of the teacher training school Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa. The students were traveling in buses they commandeered in the city of Iguala, in the southern Mexican sate of Guerrero. The police assassinated six people, three of them students. One student remained in vegetative state and forty-three students were disappeared. Nearly five months later, their whereabouts are still unknown, save for one student, whose death was confirmed by the federal government and Argentinean forensic doctors. This massacre and disappearance of students, many of them indigenous youth who were beginning their studies to become teachers in one of Mexico’s most impoverished regions, stirred a strong social mobilization. The crimes exposed the links between drug trafficking and the government, the growing violence and impunity, and the increasing inequality sweeping Mexico, with 20,000 people so far reported disappeared. In this talk Professor Civera examines the history of the teacher training rural schools of Mexico, focusing particularly on Ayotzinapa. From this historical framework, she analyzes the disappearances of the students.
Rural teaching training schools, or escuelas normales rurales, were created by the federal government in the 1920s, after the Revolution. While historical and education scholarship has widely addressed their inception, scholars have overlooked their more recent trajectories. Conceived of as boarding schools for poor people in the countryside, the escuelas normales rurales have had problems coping with modernizing policies in the teaching profession including the federal state’s attempts to limit matriculations. The students of the rural teaching training schools have maintained their political organization, fighting against such polices. Starting in the 1980s, local newspapers criticized the political attitude of the students, charging them with being radical Marxists and with resorting to illegal fighting methods. One can conclude, analyzing the relationship between the government and students over time, that the disappearances and massacre of the Ayotzinapa students are, among other things, the result of years of abandonment and discrimination against rural sectors in Mexico.
Dr. ALICIA CIVERA CERECEDO is Principal Researcher at Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico City and founding member and current Vice-President of the Mexican Society for the History of Education. She is the author of La Escuela como opción de vida: la formación de maestros normalistas rurales en Mexico, 1921-1945 (2008), and editor of Culturas escolares, sujetos y comunidades en America Latina, among many other publications on the history of rural education in Mexico and Latin America. For more information see Dr. Civera’s faculty page.
More information about the massacre can be found on the Wikipedia page 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping.
This talk will be in Spanish with an English translation.
Organized by the Department of History with the co-sponsorship of the Departments of Anthropology, Spanish and Portuguese, the Programs in Latin American and Iberian Studies, and in Global and International Studies, as well as the Department of Education and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Free and open to the public.
hm 12/7/14, 1/11/15, 1/15, 1/23, 2/9, 2/16

Maidservants' Tales: Domestic and Comparative Histories of Women in Early Modern Japan
2015-02-25 00:00
In 1839, a twice-divorced temple daughter from a small village in Echigo ran away to Edo. In a letter home, she wrote that she wanted to enter a daimyo’s service and learn “the conduct and manners of the upper class.” Her brothers, scandalized, demanded that she return immediately. Instead, she made a life for herself in the capital, working a series of temporary maidservant jobs and ultimately marrying a samurai in the service of the Edo city magistrate. This talk places her story of urban migration and service work in a global context. It considers how we might find a place for Japanese women in the history of global early modernity, which tends to emphasize instances of travel and exchange at the expense of the stories of the majority of individuals (particularly women), who stayed within “national” boundaries.
Amy Stanley specializes in the history of early modern and modern Japan, with a particular interest in how common people contributed to Japan’s political, economic, and social transformation in the mid-nineteenth century. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan was published by University of California Press in 2012. She is currently at work on a new project, which investigates a Japanese woman’s experience of urban migration, service work, and social mobility in early modern Japan.
This talk is sponsored by the IHC’s Reinventing Japan RFG, the East Asia Center, the Hull Chair, the IHC, and the departments of History, Global Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies.
hm 2/16/15

“To Trust is Good, But Not to Trust is Better”: The Italian Paradox
2015-03-02 00:00
How did the citizens of Italian communes learn to trust one another, trust one another enough to build the fundamental institutions of a civil society in which citizens enjoyed participatory politics, elected officials to administer the laws, and adjudicated disputes according to legal statutes? The answer to this question points to a peculiar paradox of Italian history in which vital, successful communities cohabited with pervasive violence manifest most infamously in feuding and vendetta. Trust and mistrust lived in the same house, on the same street, within the same city walls. This lecture argues that what made Medieval and Renaissance Italy so culturally creative were the many new ways people found to build trust, especially through written documents. It was literacy that made the trust necessary for modern life possible.
If you have any questions, please contact: english@history.ucsb.edu
Sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program.
hm 2/25/15

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
2015-03-03 00:00
“Gateway to Freedom liberates the history of the underground railroad from the twin plagues of mythology and cynicism. For anyone who still wonders what was at stake in the Civil War, there is no better place to begin than Gateway to Freedom.”—James Oakes, author of Freedom National, winner of the Lincoln Prize
A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history.
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century U.S. history. In 2011, his work The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize. The author or editor of 24 books, he has also been the curator of several museum exhibitions, including the prize-winning, “A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln,” at the Chicago Historical Society.
Copies of his new book Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad will be available following the lecture for purchase and signing.
Presented by UCSB Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life and Department of History. This event is cosponsored by UCSB Center for Black Studies Research, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, Department of Black Studies, Global & International Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and UC Center for New Racial Studies.
hm 2/8/15, 2/22

Burying "Nie Zheng’s Bones": The Making of Martyrs in 1911 China
2015-03-03 00:00
Ying HuAssociate Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature
University of California, Irvine
About the Talk:
This talk examines two cases of martyr-making, that of Qiu Jin (1875-1907), an anti-Qing revolutionary and beheaded for her involvement in armed uprising, and that of Liangbi (1877-1912), Manchu loyalist, commander of the Qing Palace Guard, whose assassination in January 1912 sealed the fate of the Empire. As canonization typically involves immediate associates, local elites and the state, the process, whether successful or not, gives us a privileged window for viewing different conceptions of virtue and community as well as divergent ways of writing history.

Organized and sponsored by the East Asia Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History & the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
aj 2/26/15

Winter Quarter Instruction ends
2015-03-13 00:00
Classes end Friday March 13.
Final Exam Schedule
hm 12/18/14

New Discoveries in the Ancient Synagogue at Huqoq in Israel's Galilee
2015-03-13 00:00
Jodi Magness has uncovered some stunning synagogue mosaics in her excavations at Huqoq and will be here to talk about them.
UCSB-Westmont Joint Lecture Series on the New Testament and Early Christianity
This is will be a seminar-style presentation with lots of Q and A, and a little light lunch.
hm 3/9/15

From Revolutionary Ideology to Intangible Cultural Heritage: The changing basis of legitimacy in China
2015-03-16 00:00
Professor Madsen is the author or co-author of twelve books on Chinese culture, American culture, and international relations. His best known works on American culture are Habits of the Heart and The Good Society. These books explore and criticize the culture of individualism and the institutions that sustain it. Habits of the Heart won the LA Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
His books on China include Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan, Chen Village under Mao and Deng, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village [winner of the C. Wright Mills Award], Unofficial China, China and the American Dream, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society, and Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society.
Books on social theory include: Meaning and Modernity, and The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World.
AJ 3-16-15
