Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School
2010-02-17 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
A Native American perspective on Indian Boarding Schools, this film uncovers the dark history of U.S. Government policy which took Indian children from their homes, forced them into boarding schools, and enacted a policy of educating them in the ways of Western Society. It gives a voice to the countless Indian children forced through a system designed to strip them of their Native American culture, heritage and traditions.
Chip Richie, 80 min., 2008, English, USA.
hm 1/5/10

3rd Annual Ask-a-Vet Forum
2010-02-17 00:00
Student Veterans at UCSB, an organization of undergraduate and graduate students, will hold its third annual Ask-a-Vet Forum this Wednesday, February 17. The event will be at 7:30pm in the SRB-Multi Purpose Room. A panel of student veterans will discuss their experiences in the military and as returning students, and will respond to questions from the campus community.
For more information, click here.
jwil 14.ii.2010

Pythagoras the Theurgist: Images of the Ideal Philosopher in Late Platonism
2010-02-19 00:00
Heidi Marx-Wolf is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba.
This talk is sponsored by the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group and by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Ph.D. emphasis.
jwil 10.ii.2010

Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership in Europe: The View from Germany
2010-02-19 00:00
Professor Paul Spickard (Department of History, UCSB) is a specialist on Race and Ethnicity in the United States and in Comparative International Perspective. An award-winning teacher, among his many books are Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group Revised Edition (2009); Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007); and Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Identity Studies RFG.
For more information, please visit:
hm 2/10/10

Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire
2010-02-22 00:00
The Lawrence Badash Distinguished Lecture
Sponsored by the Lawrence Badash Speakers’ Fund and hosted by the UCSB Center for Science in Society
During the 20th century, the United States developed a unique kind of empire, one bound together less by military conquest and direct political administration than by the expansion of markets, corporate influence, and cultural exchange. The political and economic ties between the United States and the Republic of Liberia, cemented in the 1920s when the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company successfully established a major rubber plantation in the country, exemplify this new imperial relationship. Yet, the transformation of Liberia into America’s rubber empire depended on new tools of seeing and new forms of scientific and medical expertise. Through a focus on the Harvard African Expedition to Liberia in 1926, the motion picture record it gathered, and the place of rubber as a precious commodity in the global economy, Prof. Mitman’s talk will investigate the relationships between science, business, and the state in the economic transformation of nature and a nation.
Gregg Mitman is William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and professor of medical history and science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. His most recent books include Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, 2d ed. (2009) and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (2007).
This event is free and open to the public. The UCSB History Associates and the Department of History will co-host a reception following Prof. Mitman’s lecture.
jwil 08.ii.2010

Hauntings: Ghosts from a Nazi Childhood
2010-02-23 00:00
The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies cordially invites you to the eighth Dr. George J. Wittenstein Lecture.
Professor Mahlendorf will discuss some unexpected reader responses to her recently published memoir, “The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood”, and the ghosts they raised up for some readers and for herself.
Ursula Mahlendorf was a member of the faculty of the departments of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies and of Women’s Studies from 1957 to 1992. She studied, taught and wrote on 19th and 20th Century literature from a feminist, psychoanalytic perspective. Reader responses to her recently published memoir, The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood, will form the basis of her lecture/reading. Professor Mahlendorf is presently Dickson Emeriti Professor at UCSB.
hm 2/10/10

"The Ugly American" (1963)
2010-02-23 00:00
The Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will be showing the 1963 film “The Ugly American,” based on William Lederer’s and Eugene Burdick’s bestselling novel of the same name, which was first published in 1958.
Prof. Salim Yaqub will offer commentary and lead a Q & A session after the movie.
Harrison Carter MacWhite (Marlon Brando) is the new U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan, an imaginary country in Southeast Asia. Sarkhan is wracked by nationalist ferment, which MacWhite initially attributes to communist subversion. Eventually, however, MacWhite comes see that the politics of Sarkhan are far more complex than he realized, and that even well-intentioned U.S. policies can alienate the very people they are designed to help. Released in 1963, the film uncannily foreshadows the U.S. debacle in Vietnam.
hm 2/16/10

"Traces of Trade: A Story from the Deep South"
2010-02-24 00:00
In this feature documentary filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine cousins retrace the Triangle Trade and gain a powerful new perspective on the black/white divide.
Discussion with Professor Wade Roof and Dr. Gloria Willingham following the screening.
Katrina Browne, 86 min., English, 2008, USA.
hm 1/5/10

Cultural Diffusion Across Eurasia, 500 BC-AD 200
2010-02-24 00:00
The transmission of a vast number of art motifs, technologies, and cultural traits from West to East in prehistoricperiod was due to the speed of communications and trading networks across the Eurasian Steppes beginning in the
second millennium B.C.. The formation of larger territorial states, nomadic confederations and empires (such as the Xiongnu) beginning in the first millennium BCE also facilitated these transmissions, which before then had mostly consisted of sporadic, cultural diffusion between the Western borders and China’s Inner Asian frontier. In this talk Prof. Barbieri-Low examines four case studies of cultural transmission, which date from between 500 BCE to around 200 CE: glass eye-beads, Chinese patterned silks, Roman silver plate, and the Ionic capital. Prof. Barbieri-Low investigates not necessarily how these features were diffused or by what route, but how the indigenous societies chose to adapt (or not to adapt) new ideas and technologies according to their pre-existing cultural preferences and repertoires.
Sponsored by the IHC Archaeology Research Focus Group and the East Asian Cultures Research Focus Group.
jwil 20.ii.2010

Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State
2010-02-26 00:00
The Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Economy hosts JENNIFER KLEIN (Yale, History) and EILEEN BORIS (UCSB, Feminist Studies) this Friday, February 26 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building. They will discuss their paper, “Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.” A copy can be downloaded from the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy web page at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/labor/.
Klein is Professor of History and the author of For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (2003). Boris is Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and the author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework (1994).
A light lunch will be served at the workshop.
hm 2/22/10

Was it the Boston Tea Party? Why Americans Drink Coffee
2010-03-02 00:00
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 Irvine, where he concentrates on world history, with an emphasis on Latin American and especially Brazilian history. His latest works focus on commodities as a means of studying world history and include The Second Conquest of Latin America (1997, with Allen Wells); The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America: 1500-1989 (2003, with William Clarence Smith); and From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (2006, with Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank). He is currently working on a world history of coffee from 1500 to today.
Sponsored by the IHC Food Studies Research Focus Group.
jwil 22.ii.2010

Blaming the past: Apologizing for ancestral misdeeds
2010-03-02 00:00
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 his TLS review “Beyond Repair: Apologies for the past replace our Hopes for the Future,” Times Literary Supplement (Nov. 24, 2006), pp. 3-4, which reviews:
John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and
Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006).
The full text follows below:
“Beyond Repair: apologies for the past replace our hopes for the future”
[review of John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006)], Times Literary Supplement Nov. 24, 2006, pp. 3–4
The Age of Apology peaked with 1990s’ contrition chic: Bill Clinton apologized for slavery, Tony Blair for the Irish Famine, the pope for the Crusades. Australia declared a “National Sorry Day” for past mistreatment of Aborigines, with little to show by way of present improvement. Posthumous mea culpas dispense cheap cheer. They show how venial are our own sins next to forebears’ crimes. Past sinners are excoriated for not thinking and acting as right-minded people do today. Censorious tracts name and shame perpetrators of history’s atrocities, demanding remorse and redress for victims’ heirs. A descendant of Sir John Hawkins, his T-shirt inscribed “So Sorry” and “Pardon”, marked the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade by kneeling in chains before 25,000 Gambians, asking forgiveness for his ancestor’s crimes. Hawkins was the second slave-trader thus chastised: the National Maritime Museum 1988 Armada show demoted Sir Francis Drake to a minor slot to “dissolve old myths and prejudices” (really a ploy, fumed an aggrieved Plymouth worthy, to mollify Spain in impending EC talks). And the habit persists: John Betjeman’s daughter has recently apologized to Slough
History is written by the winners, it is commonly said. But heritage—history shaped to present purposes—is increasingly fashioned by the losers. Ex-colonial peoples, minorities, tribal indigenes everywhere demand reparations—atonement for the suffering of those deprived of autonomy and agency, repatriation of treasures purloined or pillaged or purchased, compensation for past injustices. These claims carry much moral weight. Sacred writ in UN and UNESCO protocols, restitution diktats feature archaeologists’, art historians’, and museums’ codes of ethics .
Historical wrongs, however, are more rectified in rhetoric than in reality. When the Afro-Caribbean MP Bernie Grant harangued parliament to return the Crown Jewels to Africa, he specified neither which jewels nor to what country they should go. And reparations for recent injustices spawn perplexing and divisive issues. Should amends be personal or collective or conjoined, as in the symbolic imagery of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial? Should compensation be allocated in line with injury or need or faith or ancestry? Most reparations come from states; should firms and individuals also pay compensation? What about German and Swiss banks, French railways, global art and antiquity dealers found complicit in the Holocaust? What of ancient injuries that wound the pride, shrink the purse, cripple the power, or constrain the will of remote and perhaps putative descendants? How can reparations for lost land or houses, money or mementoes, be weighed against repatriation claims for human remains or against redress for slaughter or torture or incarceration? What recompense can succour children of Argentinean “disappeareds” told in their teens that their “parents” are in fact their parents’ murderers? Among millions maltreated by history, John Torpey notes, an unseemly contest for the status of worst-victimized often ensues.
Torpey’s short and scintillating book, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores reparation demands ranging from official apologies and admissions of wrong-doing to memorials, cash payments, health and welfare aid, and property return to groups and individuals. Chapters on post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa, on Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian Second World War internees, and on legacies of slavery that still disable African-Americans suggest his topical scope. But the book’s greatest merit is its profound and lucid critique of the causes and political, legal, economic, and symbolic implications of reparation claims . Compassionate erudition, deft demolition of holier-than-thou posturing, and clarity of expression make this a minor classic reminiscent of Paul Bator’s 1983 The International Trade in Art. Torpey rightly links current campaigns to redress wrongs with the broader trend, consequent on widespread public pessimism, refocusing attention from the future to the past. “The shift from the millenarian striving for a utopian future to the struggle to repair past wrong-doing” reflects convictions “that the transformative projects of the century just past have left little but brutality and dashed dreams in their wake.” This rude awakening began, in my view, with the existential angst of the Bomb and nuclear fallout. It culminated with 1970s’ collapse of confidence in vaunted technocratic cures for hunger, disease, racism, inequality, illiteracy; growing suspicion that environmental degradation and social dysfunction were incurable; and attendant misgivings about the sagacity or probity of statesmen, corporate leaders, and scientists. Torpey, in contrast, stresses the failed promises of socialism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet dissolution.
Coming to terms with past became an obsessive preoccupation, first in postwar Germany, then worldwide. Increasingly, nations and minorities dwelt not on past triumphs and achievements but on defeats and traumas, not sagas of progress but litanies of infamy and suffering. And post-colonial dogma (multicultural, feminist, indigenist) elevates blame for any imagined injustice into a call for restitution. Some fear, following the recent Armed Forces Act granting pardons to over 300 soldiers executed for military offences in the First World War, that compensation claims will swiftly follow.
The moral merit (if patchy fulfilment) accorded such claims would astound our forebears, just as their benighted views now appall those ignorant of history. Many today find it incredible that racism and genocide and gross inequality are the usual human condition; until recently most civilized people condemned not slave but free labour. Few recall that in the 1830s, when enlightened Britain ended slavery in its West Indian colonies, compensation went not to ex-slaves for deprivation of liberty but to slave owners for deprivation of property. We may well lament past misdeeds, but current morality cannot justify anachronistic defamation of their perpetrators, acting by the moral climate of their own day.
Reparations programmes leave much grief unresolved, sometimes exacerbated. Bitterly resented are disparities among claimants that stem from unequal social and political clout, access to media and legal aid public sympathy, and, not least, distance in time from the injustices complained of. Many jailed and tortured in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are still alive or leave children to plead their cause; fewer Holocaust victims remain; none survive from the Armenian massacre of 1911, no child of an American slave could now claim her 1865 promise of 40 acres and a mule. Endemic racism and accrued inequities impoverish slave descendants to this day, but since most African Americans have ancestors who were slave owners as well as slaves, even symbolic atonement seems unfeasible. This has not prevented fearful Brown University alumni from stipulating that their gifts not be used for reparations. No wonder pain persists. That it might now be hard to identify deserving victims of the Crusades does little to assuage Muslim feelings of victimhood, though what is sought is less reparations than revenge.
The global spread of reparations and restitution brings together victims and advocates the world over. Holocaust survivors, First Nations Canadian tribes, South African apartheid sufferers, Australian Aborigines, and American slave descendants deploy similar arguments and strategies. Some discomfiting ironies result. African Americans equate their historic wrongs with those of Holocaust victims’, whose reparations they eye with unrequited envy. Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa press for a British apology for forebears’ Boer War incarceration in “inaugural” concentration camps. Hereros in Namibia contend that German massacres there from 1904 to 1907 were a Holocaust dress rehearsal.
Five times longer than Torpey and weighing over four pounds, The Handbook of Reparations emanates from Pablo De Grieff’s International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. Its twenty chapters and appended primary documents deal only with recent and current issues. Strong essays on reparations psychology, mental health issues, and gender justice follow exhaustive regional chapters, most on Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and failed truth commissions in El Salvador and Haiti exemplify global reparations’ difficulties, notably victims’ conflicted feelings about monetary compensation: accursed consolation prizes for irretrievable losses? Attempts to “shut our mouths” by buying amnesty for perpetrators? But many case studies, laden with details of legislative history, legal cases, lists of grievances, categories of claims and claimants, are short on analysis. Useful insights are buried in a mass of miscellanea.
Payments discussed go beyond reparations strictly speaking. The UN Compensation Commission for 1990–1991 Gulf War damages in Kuwait settled three million claims with rare speed. But without apologies or cash from Iraq, UNCC payouts represent victors’ largesse, not retributive justice. Lavish US government payments to 9/11 victims’ families accompanied no finding of fault, let alone finding the perpetrators. Moreover, Congress set up the Compensation Fund not to succour the kin of victims, but rather to prevent economic collapse; aiding the bereaved was an afterthought appended to a fund “created out of fear that recourse to the courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry.”
The few overlaps are revealing. On Japanese-American reparations the Handbook stresses the mechanics of redress along with judicial and federal action following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Acknowledging accomplishment, the authors cite the danger of “enabling people to feel good about each other for the moment, while leaving undisturbed the attendant social realities.” Torpey is more subtle and incisive. He shows how, as with Jews who only “after they had become assimilated into and prosperous in post-war American society [sought] to call attention to the Holocaust,” post-internment success enabled Japanese-Americans to claim reparations as Americans. Furthermore, “precisely by speaking up about the injustices done them…the Japanese-Americans became more genuinely American.” On South Africa, Christopher Colvin’s Handbook overview and Torpey both highlight the paramount conflict between the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s overriding aim, enabling perpetrators to tell their stories without fear of reprisal, and victims’ needs for apology and frustrations when amnesty barred claims against perpetrators.. But while Colvin dwells on the constitutional dilemmas posed by amnesty, Torpey illumines local events in broader context. The widely publicized anti-apartheid movement alike drew on and energized world-wide crusades against racial injustice, and legal advocacy nurtured in the American civil rights’ movement shaped reparations’ strategies. Looking behind apartheid to native land claims that hark back to 17th-century European colonization, South African reparations claimants converged with tribal restitution crusades in the Americas and the Antipodes.
Reparations politics reflect two related fetishes. One is a quixotic yearning, amidst recent atrocities and present calamities, to restore a seemlier past. “In the absence of a plausible overarching vision of a more humane future society,” concludes Torpey, “the significance…of people’s recollections…become[s] magnified: righting past wrongs” supplants visions of tomorrow. The second fad is narcissistic therapy. We blame not only our forebears but our former selves; “people eager to be praised as the salt of the earth,” Russell Baker once wrote, “are apologizing for the low-lifers they used to be.” Reparation parlays confession into collective therapy. We innately long to make whole what has been smashed. Young children exhibit faith in restorative powers that rejoin things broken and bring the dead back to life. To restore something or someone to the state it was before harm was done is not only achievable, it is obligatory. As Brandon Hamber’s psychological essay in The Hanbdook notes, the child in us also feels responsible for causing the injury and must make amends—reparation—to relieve the guilt.
For society at large, therapy dwells on the past to secure future well-being. To heal social fractures, to assuage past wounds, to reunify citizens of nations requires Truth and Reconciliation, as South Africans saw. But “making good again” requires both repentance and recompense. Generosity to Israel and Jews in the biggest reparations programme ever implemented was essential, Adenauer saw, not only as atonement but to rehabilitate Germany in the global community. As Torpey writes, “the reckoning with abominable pasts becomes the idiom in which the future is sought.”
hm 2/22/10; 2/24

Statewide Day of Action about Education Funding Crisis
2010-03-04 00:00
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 ago California was already 47th in the nation in per pupil funding, and we are undoubtedly further down the list now.
These cuts mean layoffs of certificated and classified school employees in K12 and community colleges, furloughed faculty and staff in UC and CSU, and loss of access to a quality education for millions of Californians.
For more information, see this History Department News item: “News & Analysis about the UC Budget crisis.”
March 4th Schedule (updated 2/27/10)
March 4th Schedule of Events:
7:30-9:30am- Bagel breakfast in the Arbor with rally info and social. Hosted by CUE (Coalition of University Employees).
12pm- Rally and press conference in the Arbor with students, workers, faculty, staff, and local politicians speaking.
1:00-3:04pm- Carpools/busses from NH bus loop to downtown.
1:30pm- Critical bike mass begins at Pardall Tunnel (bike downtown)
3:45pm- Gather to march on State Street with SB Teachers Association, UCSB folks, community members, and parents.
Demand Sacramento to invest in public education!!
The March on state street begins in De La Guerra Plaza, and goes to the courthouse.
People can down to State Street from on campus through either
1. carpool
2. the bus service (24x and 11)
3. Biking to state street
4. we’re trying to get funding to reserve buses to take extra students downtown.
UCSB Humanities and Fine Arts, and Social Sciences Department Chairs have signed the following letter of support:
We, as Department Chairs in the Social Sciences and Humanities and Fine
Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, endorse the statewide
Day of Education on March 4, 2010. We support the efforts, organized by
representatives of the entire educational community–administrators,
teachers, staff, students, alumni, and concerned parents and students of
the UC, CSU, CC and K-12 systems–to demonstrate the need for a renewed
commitment to public education. As UC faculty, we struggle with increased
workloads and reduced pay. We see austere student fee hikes, overcrowded
classes, graduate students squeezed, overworked and demoralized staff,
worker layoffs, shrinking departmental and curriculum budgets, and eroding
funding to student services. How long can the UC maintain itself as a top
quality, Tier I research university? Meanwhile, K-12 schools face severe
budget cuts and curricular pressures created by the demands for
standardized testing, a situation of concern to us since the products of
the K-12 system become our students and the country’s future citizenry.
It’s time to stop and reverse this steady defunding and degradation of our
educational system and to defend a first-rate public education.
We urge you to support our students’ organizing efforts in support of the
statewide March on Sacramento on Thursday, March 4.
Signed:
Department Chairs, Humanities and Fine Arts and Social Science, UCSB
Diane Fujino, Chair, Asian American Studies
Eileen Boris, Chair, Feminist Studies
Francisco Lomeli, Chair, Spanish and Portuguese
Patricia Clancy, Chair, Linguistics
Ulrich Keller, Chair, History of Art and Architecture
Howard Winant, Chair, Law and Society program
Verta Taylor, Chair, Sociology
Simon Williams, Chair, Theater and Dance
Elisabeth Saatjian Weber, Chair, German, Slavic and Semitic Studies and Comparative Literature
Lisa Parks, Chair, Film and Media Studies
Jon Snyder, Chair, French and Italian
Jeffrey Stewart, Chair, Black Studies
Colin Gardner, Chair, Art
Francis Dunn, Chair, Classics
Bill Powell, Chair, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies
Alan Liu, Chair, English
Ann Bermingham, Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
Michael Stohl, Chair, Communication
John Majewski, Chair, History
Aida Hurtado, Chair, Chicana and Chicano Studies
Katharina Schreiber, Chair, Anthropology
Giles Gunn, Chair, Global and International Studies
John Woolley, Chair, Political Science
Matthew Turk, Chair, Media Arts and Technology
Paul Berkowitz, Chair, Music
The state branch of the national organization BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) is circulating a petition with the following call:
SHUT DOWN CALIFORNIA ON MARCH 4TH!
HELP ORGANIZE THE BOYCOTT OF ALL SCHOOLS!

*No more fee hikes, program, faculty or staff cuts in higher education
*A Massive Increase in federal funding for public higher education
*Defend public education from K thru 12
*Pass the Dream Act Now! Create Campus based Dream Scholarships to provide financial aid for undocumented students
*Stop the resegregation of higher education. Increase underrepresented minority student enrollment – Restore affirmative action now, no more separate and unequal!
*No more second class treatment of Latina/o students and students with and without papers – Make UCLA a sanctuary campus!
*Build the new civil rights and student movement!
hm 1/5/10; 2/3, 2/23, 2/25, 2/27

How Southern Backwardness Made Wal-Mart Executives Love High Tech and Low Wages
2010-03-04 00:00
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, scanners, satellite uplinks, computerized cash registers, and giant data warehouses proved some of the digital resources that Walton deployed to transform a regional chain of five and dime stores into an internationally pervasive big box phenomenon.
Nelson Lichtenstein directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at UCSB. He is now writing a history of how U.S. intellectuals have thought about capitalism since the end of the Civil War.
For additional information or questions visit cits.ucsb.edu/event/fls-nelson-lichtenstein or contact Melissa Bator at mjb@cits.ucsb.edu or 893-5910.
hm 2/24/10

What's Wrong with the One-State Solution: Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal
2010-03-04 00:00
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 to achieve and thus far elusive, are the only plausible and practicable Palestinian national strategy.
Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and Executive Director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership. Dr. Ibish has made thousands of radio and television appearances and has written for many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He was the Washington, DC Correspondent for the Daily Star (Beirut). Dr. Ibish is editor and principal author of three major studies of hate crimes and discrimination against Arab Americans and the author of numerous articles on Middle Eastern politics, U.S. policy, civil liberties, and Arab-American life. His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal (ATFP, 2009).
jwil 22.ii.2010

Neither Priests nor Consuls: Authors and Authority in Roman Prose (1st cent. BC)
2010-03-05 00:00
Sponsored by the Department of Classics.
jwil 16.ii.2010

The Empire of Cotton: A Global History
2010-03-05 00:00
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 path breaking 2004 AHR essay, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War” will shortly be posted on the web site of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.
As usual, a light lunch will be served
Nelson Lichtenstein
Director, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy
hm 2/28/10

Victory Gardens: Join the Garden Revolution!
2010-03-07 00:00
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 the way the local food-systems movement is addressing a wide range of challenges facing Americans today. The program will include a tour of historic Stow House and its beautiful gardens and a wine-and-cheese reception following the talk.
The talk will be held on Sunday, March 7, starting at 2:30 p.m. at the History Education Center of the Goleta Valley Historical Society, 304 N. Los Carneros Road, Goleta, CA 93117.
Directions: Exit Highway 101 at Los Carneros Rd and head toward the mountains. After Calle Real, the Goleta Valley Historical Society/Stow House is on the right. Park in the South Coast Railroad Museum (Goleta Depot) lot. The newly restored History Education Center is the old barn in the farm yard behind Stow House.
Rose Hayden-Smith is a PhD candidate in the History Department and a national Kellogg Foundation Fellow. She is a nationally recognized expert on the topic of Victory Gardens and food policy in America, and blogs for the Huffington Post, Civil Eats, and UC’s Victory Grower web site.
This talk is sponsored by the UCSB History Associates.
jwil 08.ii.2010

Barbarian 'Modernity' and the Endurance of Romanitas: Some Continuity Issues Revisited
2010-03-08 00:00
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

Reconstructing and Field Testing Ancient Greek Linen Body Armor: The UWGB Linothorax Project
2010-03-09 00:00
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 is poorly understood, and is known only through fragmentary descriptions in literature and from images on pottery and in sculpture. Employing only the materials and techniques that would have been available to the ancient Greeks, the UWGB (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay) Linothorax Project is investigating this mysterious armor by reconstructing and wearing examples of the linothorax, as well as subjecting test samples to attack with ancient weapons in order to determine the characteristics and protective qualities of this type of armor. This presentation will not only describe the project’s findings, but will also display a reconstructed linothorax and test samples for the audience’s examination.
Gregory S. Aldrete is Professor of History and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. His areas of specialization include the city of Rome, daily life in the Roman world, floods and their effect, military history, Roman rhetoric and oratory, and non-verbal communication. He holds degrees from Princeton (A.B.)and the University of Michigan (M.A. and Ph.D.), and has published a number of books and articles on his Roman research. He has received various awards for scholarship and teaching excellence, and has most recently been awarded a grant towards his Linothorax Project.
This is the annual Sandra Church Lecture, sponsored by the Santa Barbara Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.
For more information, please call (805) 893-3556.
jwil 08.ix.2009

Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
2010-03-09 00:00
Drawn from Prof. Vladislav Zubok’s new book of the same title (Harvard University Press, 2009), this talk examines one of the least-chronicled aspects of post-World War II European intellectual and cultural history: the the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic, socialist society, Russian intellectuals, writers, and artists contributed to the political disintegration of the communist regime. This highly educated and idealistic elite played a unique role in galvanizing their country to strive toward a greater freedom. Like their contemporaries in the United States, France, and Germany, members of the Russian intelligentsia had a profound effect during the 1960s, sounding a call for reform, equality, and human rights that echoed beyond their time and place.
Vladislav Zubok is Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including the two prize-winning books INSIDE THE KREMLIN’S COLD WAR: FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV with C. Pleshakov (Harvard University Press, 1996) and A FAILED EMPIRE: THE SOVIET UNION IN THE COLD WAR FROM STALIN TO GORBACHEV (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). He is a Fellow of the National Security Archive and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has served as a consultant to CNN. Prof. Zubok’s most recent book is ZHIVAGO’S CHILDREN: THE LAST RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA (Harvard University Press, 2009).
hm 3/1/10

Last day of Winter quarter instruction
2010-03-12 00:00
For detailed academic calendar information, see:
http://www.registrar.ucsb.edu/calinfo.htm.
hm 2/22/10

Winter quarter grades reported by midnight
2010-03-23 00:00

Start of Spring quarter instruction
2010-03-29 00:00

Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: The way Greek artists portrayed their culture's homoerotic customs
2010-04-02 00:00
jwil 29.iii.2010

"From Watts to Dakar: A View of African American Culture in Los Angeles and Beyond"
2010-04-06 00:00
The Center for Black Studies Research invites you to the eighth annual Shirley Kennedy Memorial Lecture
WHO: Jayne Cortez, award-winning poet, musical performer, filmmaker, and social activist
WHAT: “From Watts to Dakar: A View of African American Culture in Los Angeles and Beyond”
WHEN: Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 4:00 p.m.
WHERE: UCSB MultiCultural Center Theater
COST: FREE
We are excited to welcome poet, musical performer, filmmaker, and social
activist Jayne Cortez to the MCC Theater for the premier Black Studies
event on our campus. Ms. Cortez, who divides her time between New York City
and Dakar, Senegal, won the 1980 American Book Award for “Mouth on Paper.”
We hope you’ll join us at this year’s Shirley Kennedy Memorial Lecture.
===================================================================
About Jayne Cortez
Poet Maya Angelou has said of Ms. Cortez that she “has been and continues
to be an explorer, probing the valleys and chasms of human existence. No
ravine is too perilous, no abyss too threatening for Jayne Cortez.” Ms.
Cortez – whose career has encompassed writing, performing, and teaching –
is the author of twelve books of poetry and has performed her poems with
music on nine recordings. Her voice is celebrated for its political,
surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism, and for its visceral sound –
“Jayne Cortez’s poems are filled with images that most of us are afraid to
see,” according to novelist Walter Mosley. Ms. Cortez’s poems have been
translated into many languages and widely published in anthologies,
journals, and magazines. She is the recipient of numerous awards,
including: Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
International African Festival Award, the Langston Hughes Medal, and the M.
Thelma McAndless Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at Eastern
Michigan University. Her most recent books are The Beautiful Book (Bola
Press, 2007), On The Imperial Highway (Hanging Loose Press, 2009), and Jazz
Fan Looks Back (Hanging Loose Press, 2002). Her latest CDs with the
Firespitters are Find Your Own Voice and Borders of Disorderly Time (Bola
Press), and Taking the Blues Back Home (Harmolodic/Verve). Cortez also
directed the documentary films Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition &
Creative Progress (2009), Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting
Globalization (2007), and Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future
(1998). She is co-founder and president of the Organization of Women
Writers of Africa, Inc. and can be seen onscreen in the films Women In Jazz
and Poetry In Motion.
The Shirley Kennedy Memorial Lecture is the premier Black Studies event on
our campus. Dr. Shirley Kennedy was a social justice activist in Santa
Barbara, a faculty member in UCSB’s Black Studies Department, and the
community affairs coordinator in the Center for Black Studies Research.
This lecture series honors her memory as one who merged academia and
community service in her life and work. Past speakers have included Robert
Bullard, Lani Guinier, Manning Marable, and Beverly Tatum.
The Center for Black Studies Research gratefully acknowledges our
co-sponsors for this event: American Cultures & Global Contexts Center,
Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Chicano Studies Institute, Chicano/a
Studies, College of Creative Studies, Feminist Studies, Film and Media
Studies, Global & International Studies, Interdisciplinary Humanities
Center, Luis Leal Endowed Chair, Mbanefo Foundation, MultiCultural Center,
New Racial Studies, Office of Equal Opportunity & Sexual Harassment, Office
of the Chancellor, Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Office of
the Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy.
hm 3/30/10

Spring Insight Open House for prospective freshmen and transfers
2010-04-10 00:00
On Saturday, April 10, 2010, the History Department’s Table at the Academic Fair will offer friendly advice and information about the History major at UCSB.
Why study history at UCSB instead of at another UC campus? Besides the obvious advantages of our climate and location, UCSB’s History program offers a broad array of courses from all eras and most geographical regions.
Some of our special strengths are visible in the Affiliated Programs section at the bottom of our homepage (scroll down, list on the right): Borderlands, Cold War and International Relations, Gender Studies, Labor Studies, Medieval, and Middle East.
The History of Public Policy, in which we offer a separate major (requirements page), and the History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine (HOS field page) are also specialties.
Click on the FIELDS (here or in the menu bar above) for a list of possible concentrations.
The course requirements for the major are listed on our Undergrad Program page. In short, they are:
1. Two 3-quarter course sequences (3+3=6 courses), chosen from World History, Western Civilization, and US History;
2. Two lower division elective courses (freshman/sophomore level, no prerequisites; numbered 1-99);
3. Ten upper division (numbered 100-199) courses, at least one of which is a seminar (P or DR after course number).
In the case of double majors with other programs or departments (Global Studies, Political Science, for example), up to two courses from one dept. can be used to fulfill requirements in the other.
For a History Minor: 3 lower division and 5 upper division courses are the required minimum.
A special feature of this website allows you to view course syllabi of current and past courses, to find out the requirements (readings, papers, exams) and daily topics of most courses. Click the COURSES link in the menu bar above. You can see additional quarters from a drop-down menu there.
For more information on the open house, see the:
Official UCSB 2010 Spring Insight homepage with a schedule of events and maps.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Sincerely,
The UCSB History Department Faculty, Staff and Students
PS. You might be interested in this History Department News item about the history of Santa Barbara, and perusing the News on our homepage will give you an impression of some of the .
hm 3/30/10

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill
2010-04-14 00:00
Prof. Soto Laveaga will be lecturing on her book about the origins of the birth control pill in rural Mexico.
hm 3/31/10

Politics and the Chinese Language
2010-04-15 00:00
What distinguishes political language from daily-life language in thePeople’s Republic of China? In what ways have different sorts of
people (officials, protesters, ordinary folk) used or responded to the
official language? Ludwig Wittgenstein used the term “language game”
(Sprachspiel) to understand how people get through life using words.
Can this notion help us understand official language use in China?
Professor Link will investigate and answer these important and
fascinating questions.
hm 4/8/10, 4/9

Time's Witnesses: Narratives from Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen
2010-04-15 00:00
The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies cordially invitesyou to the Ninth Dr. George J. Wittenstein Lecture:
Referring to and proceeding from his book with the above title (co-edited
with Anette Storeide and published in 2006), Professor Lothe will focus on
both the possibilities and challenges of narrating about the historical
event of the Holocaust. He will also refer to Holocaust research in Norway,
including the projects pursued at the Center for Holocaust Studies where he
serves as a board member.
Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo.
His books include Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford, 1989) and Narrative in
Fiction and Film (Oxford, 2000). He is the author of numerous essays and
has edited or co-edited several volumes including, Franz Kafka: Zur
ethischen und aesthetischen Rechtfertigung (co-edited with Beatrice
Sandberg, Rombach Verlag, 2002), The Art of Brevity (University of South
Carolina Press, 2004), Literary Landscapes (Palgrave, 2008), and Joseph
Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre (co-edited with Jeremy Hawthorne
and James Phelan, Ohio State University Press, 2008). In 2005-2006 he was
the leader of the research project “Narrative Theory and Analysis” at the
Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo.
hm 4/14/10
