Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, June 4 at noon for a Zoom talk by Christopher E. Johnson (National Park Service), Anne Lindsay (Public History, CSU Sacramento), and Jenni Sorkin (History of Art and Architecture, UCSB). This presentation describes collaborative work completed under the Women’s History Initiative, one of three national initiatives authorized by the Secretary of […]
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Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides and a former member of Congress, served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations. Outspoken and controversial, Young questioned prevailing Cold War assumptions. “Communism has never been a threat to me,” he said. “Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.” Nancy Mitchell […]
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Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, May 7 at noon for a Zoom talk by Stephen Vider (History, Cornell University). Histories of queer and trans politics and culture have centered almost exclusively on public activism and spaces. Stephen Vider will discuss how his forthcoming book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University […]
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Journalists, politicians, and historians are comparing the Biden Administration’s ambitious economic and social agenda to that of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Illuminating that tentative and provocative judgement are two new collections of historical essays that were first offered as talks at a 2015 UC Santa Barbara conference. Entitled “Beyond the New Deal Order,” the conference was sponsored by the […]
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UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Dr. Sasha Coles. From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and […]
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The IHC‘s Humanities Decanted series invites all to a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Audience Q&A will follow. Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, […]
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On Saturday, February 27, from 2 to 4 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will host a workshop. They will read and discuss a dissertation chapter, “WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs,” by Addie Jensen, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department. This workshop is part of a […]
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During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as artists, organizers, and propagators of […]
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The January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol brought to the fore the threat that white nationalist forces pose to our democracy. Join the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life for a conversation about these forces, their history, and what can be done to resist them. Our guests will be UC Free […]
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Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, February 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Professor Hilary N. Green (University of Alabama). Professor Green reflects on the powerful legacy of Jim Crow era efforts to erase the history of slavery from the landscape of her workplace, the University of Alabama, and shares a project she pursued to […]
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Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant […]
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Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, January 15 at noon for a Zoom talk by Leisl Carr Childers and Michael Childers (Colorado State University). Childers and Carr Childers will discuss their current project, a new history of the USDA Forest Service from 1960-2020, and the historical methodologies that undergird their work. In particular, they will address […]
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UCSB History Associates has partnered with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation to present a public lecture by UCSB Professor of History Miroslava Chávez-García. Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Professor Chávez-García recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their […]
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Professor W. Patrick McCray‘s new book Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (The MIT Press, 2020) has made a splash. The book explores collaborations between engineers and artists from the 1960s onward. It shows how the categories of art and technology (and artist vs. engineer) have blurred, changed, and transformed over the […]
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Classicization in U.S. heritage narratives often involves the imposition of classical elements, derived from Greek and Roman civilization, onto narratives of colonial conquest in Southwestern borderlands and frontier spaces. Ongoing controversies surrounding statues of the conquistador, Juan de Oñate, reflect the ways in which the classical legacy remains prominent in public spheres of historical narrative. In providing a visual narrative […]
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Click here to download the flyer for this event. REGISTER NOW Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts […]
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Join UCSB History Associates on Saturday, October 17 on Zoom for their first public lecture of the academic year. Dr. Sarah Case will survey the woman suffrage movement for the hundred years or so before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Her talk will consider why the idea of women voting was so controversial in the nineteenth century, and […]
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REGISTER NOW Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of […]
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On February 14 Ronny Regev (History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents, “‘We Want No More Economic Islands’: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US.” WWII ushered in an era of economic growth in the United States, which enshrined consumption as an integral part of liberal citizenship. African Americans were often excluded from the benefits of this […]
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On Tuesday, February 11, from 4 to 5:30 pm in HSSB 6020 (McCune Center), the Center for Cold War Studies and International History and the Walter H. Capps Center will host a panel discussion titled, “Impeachment in Historical Perspective.” Three UCSB historians will speak on the following topics: Giuliana Perrone on the Impeachment and Senate Trial of Andrew Johnson Laura Kalman on Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal and […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Jennifer Burns (History, Stanford University) will present “The Last Conservative: The Life of Milton Friedman.” Professor Burns is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), and is now at work on a biography of economist Milton […]
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The first episode of a podcast that alumna Caitlin Rathe (PhD, 2019) has been a part of creating since August 2018 has gone live! The NEH-funded project, LBJ and the Great Society, tells the story of Johnson’s remarkable domestic policy legacy piecing together oral histories, telephone calls from the White House, and other archival audio sources. The podcast website describes […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Andrew Hartman (History, Illinois State University) will present “Rethinking Karl Marx: American Liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War.” Hartman is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008) and the widely reviewed A […]
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Dr. Susan Lederer, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin Madison will be giving a talk on Thursday, January 9 at 5:30 pm entitled “‘Send My Body to the Medical College’: Alternative Afterlives in Turn of the Century America.” In 1876 American and English newspapers reported the extraordinary will made by an American woman living in London. Inspired […]
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Join the Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster for a paper workshop on Lisa Jacobson‘s “A Taste of Success: Whiskey Drinking, Masculine Identities, and the Sensory Imagination in the Postwar US.” The event will take place in HSSB 4020 on November 22 at 3:00. To obtain the paper in advance, email Jarett Henderson at jhenderson@history.ucsb.edu. Please note that this event was […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, David Stein (African American Studies, University of California Los Angeles) will present “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979.” A UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Eric Rauchway (History, University of California Davis) will present “A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941.” Rauchway is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2003), The Money […]
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The Trump impeachment saga has gained startling momentum in recent days. As the proceedings accelerate, fascinating legal and policy questions arise. Can the president pardon people who have committed crimes at his behest? Can he pardon himself? Does impeachment require proof of a federal crime? Is the Senate required to hold an actual trial? Can nonfederal legal authorities—like the New York State Attorney General […]
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On October 24 at 4:00pm in HSSB 4080, Professor Rosemarie Zagarri of George Mason University will present a talk titled “The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College.” The event is free and open to the public. This talk will examine the roots of the American system for electing its president and explore the possibility–as well as the […]
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On October 18 at 2:00 in HSSB 4020, Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, presents a book talk titled “How Did an Americanist Come to Write Transnational History?” in connection with the launch of her new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019. This event is hosted by the History Department’s Gender and […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy’s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Nelson Lichtenstein (History, UC Santa Barbara) will present “A Fabulous Failure: Bill Clinton, American Capitalism, and the Origin of Our Troubled Times.” Lichtenstein is the Academic Senate’s 2019 Faculty Research Lecturer. He is the author of Walter […]
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As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Colin Gordon (History, University of Iowa) will present “Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs.” Gordon is an historian of US public policy, political economy, and urban history. He is the author […]
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Book Launch: The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands Featuring: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor of History, UCLA Paul Spickard, Professor of History, UCSB and: Veronica Castillo Munoz, Assistant Professor of History, UCSB
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