UCLA Department of History

Crisis, Unity, & Revolution: UCLA History's 5th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference
2021-04-23 10:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
Event Recording

The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives
2021-04-22 11:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
RSVP here

Dominique Kircher Reill, "Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire"
2021-04-21 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom RSVP
This is the first of a series of book talks hosted by Brian Griffith that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis. These book talks will be open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, and pre-registration is required.
Dominique Kircher Reill, Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard, 2020)
“The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.”
Zoom Registration Portal: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkf-qqpj4oHNfm0GbVXk0y6JrZxt8smPvs

Gideon Manning, “False Images Do Not Lie: Medicine, Editors’ Decisions, and the Case of René Descartes’s Treatise on Man.”
2021-04-19 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
April 19 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Gideon Manning (Cedars-Sinai)
“False Images Do Not Lie: Medicine, Editors’ Decisions, and the Case of René Descartes’s Treatise on Man”
How to discuss the role of illustrations in the early modern period in a way that is responsive to the concepts and vocabulary of the time remains elusive. In this talk, which builds from the medical tradition outward, I will suggest that the technical language of historia-actio-usus (history-action-use), which originates in Aristotle and Galen and is then standardized among anatomists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, provides us what has been missing. I will specifically consider the case of René Descartes’s posthumously published Treatise on Man, which appeared in Latin translation in 1662 and then in French in 1664. The original manuscript of the Treatise contained perhaps one or two images, but the text called for many more. Accordingly, the editors had to make numerous decisions. I will demonstrate how the language of historia-actio-usus, which Descartes also used, allows us to better understand the editors’ decisions and the many differences between the illustrations in the 1662 and 1664 editions of same text.
Zoom RSVP Link

Black Lives Matter in Belgium: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Violence, and Contemporary Racism
2021-04-16 10:00 - 11:45 | Zoom
From the UCLA International Institute: Black Lives Matter in Belgium: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Violence, and Contemporary Racism
Debora Silverman, Professor of History and Art History at UCLA, will be on the panel of speakers.
Download the flyer for Zoom registration details.

Barbara Krauthamer, "Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution"
2021-04-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of History, UMass Amherst
“Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution”
This presentation examines the lives of three Black women who had been enslaved in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution. The presentation reflects on their lives by considering the ways historians have navigated the archival gaps and silences about Black women’s presence. The presentation follows the women’s voluntary and forced migrations, their Diasporic routes, within the Americas and across the Atlantic. This focus on Black women’s routes of resistance, liberation and deportation adds a new dimension to the more familiar and male dominated stories of slavery, Black Loyalists and the American Revolution.
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Jiacheng Liu, "The Game of Love and the Performance of Masculinity: Courting Actresses in Republican China”
2021-04-12 19:00 | Zoom RSVP
Jiacheng Liu, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado, will be giving a talk based on her article “The Game of Love and the Performance of Masculinity: Courting Actresses in Republican China.”

Date & Time: April 12, 7:00 pm PST, in conjunction with Andrea S. Goldman’s History 282B seminar, Gender and Sexuality in Late Imperial and Modern China.

Participants are encouraged but not required to read the article in advance. The article and zoom link will be made available to participants who RSVP for the meeting. Deadline for the RSVP is on April 5th. Please send an email to rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu to RSVP.

ucLADINO Symposium, "Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads" - Day 2
2021-04-08 10:00 - 15:00 | Zoom
The theme of “Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads” will lay emphasis on heritage, culture, and communication related to Sephardic Jews. The music-filled program–all organized by graduate students–features panels on Ladino Linguistics, History and Memory, and Networks, a keynote address by Dr. Olga Borovaya (Stanford), as well as two concerts.
Please click here to register: https://bit.ly/ucladino

ucLADINO Symposium, "Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads" - Day 1
2021-04-07 15:00 - 18:00 | Zoom

Megan Rosenbloom, “Anatomized Bodies at Work: The Human Skin Book and its Implications for the Histories of Medicine and the Book.”
2021-04-05 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
April 5 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Megan Rosenbloom (UCLA)
“Anatomized Bodies at Work: The Human Skin Book and its Implications for the Histories of Medicine and the Book”
Please click here to access an abstract from Megan Rosenbloom’s new book, Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.
Zoom Register Link

Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, "East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries"
2021-04-01 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
“East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”
Atlantic historians tend to understand transoceanic crossings along an east-west axis, with people and goods seen as traversing the space between Africa and/or Europe, on the one hand, and the Americas, on the other. Yet in the early decades of the sixteenth century, even as the broader contours of Atlantic circumnavigation were becoming more evident to members of various maritime communities, impressions of transoceanic mobility did not yet assume the east-west axis as normative. Frequently traveled thoroughfares linking Seville to the Canaries, São Tomé to the Azores, and Cabo Verde to Rouen were themselves widely seen as transoceanic in scope, even if they hewed to the eastern side of the Atlantic. The weight of tradition lay behind this conventional wisdom. Maritime routes spanning the Gulf of Guinea, the Atlantic islands, and Iberia had since the mid-fifteenth century established patterns of voluntary and coerced movement that continued to be integral to an expanding Atlantic circuit even after 1492. In considering the shifting yet continually vital role of the eastern Atlantic corridor, this talk seeks to recover a largely overlooked geographic and temporal dimension of early Atlantic history. It does so by bringing together individual stories of conflict, negotiation, and struggle waged by a diverse range of individuals who interacted, in different ways, with the breadth and dynamism of the east Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Register

Indian Ocean Studies: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
2021-03-26 06:00 - 07:30 | Zoom
Indian Ocean Studies: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
A Historian’s Perspective
Speaker: Edward A. Alpers
Research Professor (Emeritus)
Department of History University of California, Los Angeles
RSVP via QR code above or here.

Jenna Gibbs, "Protesting Slavery, Asserting Freedom, and Defying Racism at the African Grove Theatre in New York in the early 1820s."
2021-03-11 12:30 | Zoom

Preston McBride, "Lethal Education: Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934."
2021-03-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Winter 2021 Colloquium
March 8 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Preston McBride (Dartmouth)
“Lethal Education: Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934.”

Zoom (RSVP Required): https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErcOmuqD8tE9MFnnblgFrfwqJstbN7N8_v

Professor Andrew Robichaud, “Animal City: The Domestication of America”
2021-03-02 11:00 - 12:15 | Zoom
Professor Andrew Robichaud, “Animal City: The Domestication of America”

Tuesday, March 2

11am to 12:15pm

Andrew Robichaud, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Boston University, will be talking about his book Animal City: The Domestication of America (Harvard University Press, 2019)

American cities were once full of animal life: cattle driven through city streets; pigs feeding in gutters and basements; cows crammed into urban feedlots; horses by the tens of thousands; dogs pulling carts and powering small machines; and wild animals peering out at human spectators from behind bars. In his recent book, Animal City: The Domestication of America, Andrew Robichaud reconstructs this evolving world of nineteenth-century urban animal life—from San Francisco to Boston to New York—and reveals its importance, both then and now.

Hosted by the U.S. History Series, the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World, and History 13B: History of the U.S. and its Colonial Origins: 19th Century

Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95986426972

From Farm Labor To Your Family Table
2021-03-01 15:00 - 2021-03-05 16:00 | Webinar

Sarah Johnson, "Between the Archive and the Speculative Turn: Notes toward a Biography of Moreau de Saint-Méry." - POSTPONED
2021-02-25 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
This talk has been POSTPONED. Future date TBD.
This talk considers the process of writing about the life and work of the Caribbean philosophe Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819). A lawyer, printer, naturalist, and translator who was at the forefront of revolutionary politics on two continents, Moreau was also a slaveholder who wrote about ideals of liberty even as he trafficked in human beings. An ardent defender of slavery as an institution, he nonetheless left some of the most detailed accounts of the social practices of enslaved women and men in the eighteenth-century Americas. This talk explores who knew what, and how, using as an example entries from his manuscript Repértoire des Notions Coloniales that I have refashioned into my own Encyclopédie noire. This work reconsiders how his production of colonial knowledge appears when assessed from alternate points of view. In a similar vein, I discuss the process and politics that surround a parallel project produced by Moreau’s brother-in-law, Baudry des Lozières. My methodology embraces the value of informed speculation—through chapters that experiment with form, visual imagery, and narrative voice—as a way to foreground the people of African descent who undergirded Moreau’s work on multiple levels, from those who managed his household to those whose knowledge about language, labor, and community became the basis of his work. I build upon fragmentary archival evidence to surmount the disproportionate influence of planters and administrators on Caribbean historiography.

Roundtable, Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
2021-02-22 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Winter 2021 Colloquium
Feb 22 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Roundtable Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
with interventions by:
Terence Keel (UCLA), “The Demographic Future of the History of Science.”
Abstract: This talk draws from my involvement in a roundtable
discussion at the 2020 History of Science Society meeting this fall
where up for debate was whether or not /Isis/ and the history of science
more generally is up for the task of addressing the legacy of racism
within science and the current barriers that limit the demographic make
up of our discipline.
and
Cathy Gere (UCSD), “The Climate Crisis and Professional Equity in History of Science.”
Zoom (RSVP Required): https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkce-rqjsrGNLcii1yjLJfbh4xKJSSTSfx

Discussion of "The Notorious Mrs. Nobles: Jim Crow Gender and "Insanity" in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia"
2021-02-10 11:30 - 12:30 | Zoom
A Discussion of Rebekka Michaelsen’s article-in-progress “The Notorious Mrs. Nobles: Jim Crow Gender and “Insanity” in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia”
This article-in-progress recovers the case of Elizabeth Nobles, an elderly, poor white woman who conspired with her Black farm hand to murder her husband in rural Georgia in 1895. While other historians have demonstrated the importance of race and gender to the Jim Crow South, this paper shows how notions of disability, in this case “insanity,” reinforced Jim Crow. While, for Mrs. Nobles, “insanity” became a reputable legal defense to save her life as well as a rhetorical apology for her transgression of Jim Crow racial and gender hierarchies, “insanity” could simultaneously serve as way of “othering” and “defeminizing” Black women.
Date: February 10th, 11:30AM – 12:30PM
The zoom link and paper will be sent out a week in advance. Please email Rebeca Martinez at rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu to receive this information.

Hippolyte Goux, "Representation and Abstraction: Economic Models and the End of Man."
2021-02-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom RSVP
Winter 2021 Colloquium
Feb 8 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Hippolyte Goux (UCLA)
“Representation and Abstraction: Economic Models and the End of Man.”

Zoom registration link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvc-urqTwuE91JLUd7x9rXNoEATlDLZV74

Sasha Turner, "Negotiating Slavery and Motherhood on the Terrain of Feelings."
2021-02-04 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
This presentation centers on the story of Abba, an enslaved woman who was the mother of an unusually large family in eighteenth century Jamaica. Abba had been pregnant thirteen times. She had ten live births and one still birth. We come to know Abba’s story through the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, notorious among scholars of slavery because of his practice of diarizing how he daily tortured the enslaved. In addition to her large family, Abba stands out in the diaries because, despite Thistlewood’s notoriety as a sadistic enslaver, he whips Abba only three times in almost thirty years of claiming power over her life and body. By contrast, Thistlewood was exceptionally generous to Abba providing her with well needed material goods to support her family and permitting her to perform spiritual rituals, outlawed a felony, to grieve the death of her children. Reading Abba’s life against the 18th Century burgeoning culture of sensibility, including Thistlewood’s own displays of sympathy and grief to white community members, this discussion explores Abba’s deployment of feelings in negotiating her condition. How did Abba’s displays of feeling mirror Thistlewood’s, and what did Abba seek to gain by consistently exhibiting feelings in Thistlewood presence?
RSVP here

Philip Lehmann, “Polish Steppes and German Gardens: Climate Amelioration in the Generalplan Ost.”
2021-01-25 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom RSVP
Winter 2021 Colloquium
Jan 25 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Philip Lehmann (UCR)
“Polish Steppes and German Gardens: Climate Amelioration in the Generalplan Ost.”

Zoom registration link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqcOuuqjMqHNzVyDsxIPiFLgGCVb0u9BS_

Fateful Elections: Perspectives on Presidential Transitions
2021-01-14 16:00 | Live streaming via Zoom
Video Recording of this Event
————————–

Carla Pestana
Chair and Professor
Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World
UCLA Department of History

invites you to attend

Fateful Elections: Perspectives on Presidential Transitions
a panel discussion featuring

MARGARET O’MARA
Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History, University of Washington

JOAN WAUGH
Professor Emeritus, UCLA Department of History

moderated by
ROBIN D.G. KELLEY
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History
UCLA Department of History

Thursday, January 14, 2021
4:00 p.m. PST
Live streaming via Zoom

Please submit your questions in advance of the webinar via email to:
hnadworny@support.ucla.edu by Wednesday, January 13 at 12:00 p.m.
Instructions to join the webinar will be provided once your registration has been confirmed.

About the Why History Matters series: The UCLA Department of History is proud to present the series “Why History Matters.” The series is dedicated to the belief that historical knowledge is an indispensable, and often missing, ingredient in public debate. Over the course of the year, “Why History Matters” events will bring historians into conversation with prominent public officials and personalities on issues of contemporary relevance.

UCLA College
1309 Murphy Hall, PO Box 951413
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1413

Tawny Paul, "Commodified Bodies: Debt Bondage and Maritime Labor Recruitment in the British Atlantic"
2021-01-14 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
To RSVP, click here.

Grace Kim, “Preserving Art, Producing Science: The Microbiological Lives of Cultural Heritage.”
2021-01-11 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom RSVP
Winter 2021 Colloquium
Jan 11 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Grace Kim (Vanderbilt)
“Preserving Art, Producing Science: The Microbiological Lives of Cultural Heritage.”

Zoom registration link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97402888165?pwd=[REDACTED]

Brian J. Griffith, "Contesting the National Beverage: Wine, Beer, and the Battle over ‘Foreign’ Tastes and Habits in Interwar Italy"
2020-12-01 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Speaker: Brian J. Griffith, Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History
Title: “Contesting the National Beverage: Wine, Beer, and the Battle over ‘Foreign’ Tastes and Habits in Interwar Italy”
The recording can now be found here: https://fb.watch/26uKXr920X/.

Brief Abstract: “This paper analyzes the struggles between the Italian winemaking and brewing industries over the shaping of bourgeois Italian tastes and habits during the interwar decades. During the early 1920s, Fascist Italy’s Industrial Wine Lobby began unveiling a wide range of public relations and collective marketing campaigns, which were aimed at forging new ‘fashions’ or trendy collective practices among the country’s wayward middle- and upper-class consumers. The pro-wine lobby’s efforts, however, were obstructed by a variety of political and commercial challenges, including a growing competition with various ‘foreign’ beverage industries, such as coffee, cocktails, and, above all, beer. Between 1929 and 1931, Italian brewers’ commercial lobbying organization, the National Beer Propaganda Consortium, launched two ambitious collective marketing campaigns of their own, which were centered on discursively intertwining the beverage’s consumption with bourgeois sociability, domesticity, and ‘Italian’ identity. Unwilling to yield any commercial ground to domestic brewers, Italy’s Industrial Wine Lobby launched a follow-up, and wide-ranging collective marketing campaign in order to both defend ‘the world’s vineyard’ from the ‘invasion’ of ‘semi-barbarian’ preferences, as one wine lobbyist colorfully phrased it in 1935, and, equally as important, reposition Italian wine as a wholesome and fashionable ‘national beverage’ within the eyes of the peninsula’s middle- and upper-classes. By exploring these industries’ conflicts over the definition and articulation of ‘Italian’ taste and style during Fascism’s twenty years in power in Italy, this study aims to shed further light on the myriad, and oftentimes complex, relationships between popular consumption, industrial ‘fashion’ dynamics, and national identity.”
Event Host: UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies
Date/Time: Tuesday, December 1st from 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Zoom Registration Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4lFpMlUcRIiKcxvBkf4V3Q
Additional Information: See https://www.international.ucla.edu/euro/event/14684

History of Science Colloquium: Claire Gherini (Cedars-Sinai Postdoctoral Fellow)
2020-11-30 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Fall 2020 Colloquium Schedule
We will meet on zoom from 4-5 pm. RSVP links will be circulated with the announcements for the individual talks.
Nov 30
Registration: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMldumtpz0sEtPww5ISb-MGdBajvEwO8SZP
Claire Gherini (Cedars-Sinai Postdoctoral Fellow), “Slavery’s Medicine: Making Medical Knowledge from the Garrison to the Plantation in the British Caribbean, 1763-1807”

History of Science Colloquium: Taylor Moore (UCSB): “Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt: A Decolonial Materialist History”
2020-11-23 16:00 - 17:00
Fall 2020 Colloquium Schedule
We will meet on zoom from 4-5 pm. RSVP links will be circulated with the announcements for the individual talks.
Nov 23
Registration: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYsdeGurzIqGtxldiJYGsO0ROwIFjd72WeD
Taylor Moore (UCSB): “Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt: A Decolonial Materialist History”
Co-sponsored by the European History Colloquium
Can emancipatory, decolonial histories be extracted from objects collected from—or made visible to history by—the archives of colonialism? This talk explores this question through the case study of the rhinoceros horn amulet (/qarn el-khartit/), an ethnographic object collected by British anthropologist Winifred Blackman during her fieldwork in Egypt in the 1920s. Markedly decentering the traditional colonial history of how the rhinoceros horn was collected and displayed as an object in European museums, I follow the trail of the rhinoceros horn back to the site of its collection in Egypt to reveal a strikingly different story: one of magic/medicine, gender, race, and enslavement—setagainst the backdrop of Egypt’s imperial pursuits in East Africa. As such, I demonstrate how to “read” the rhinoceros horn as an object-archive that illuminates the networks, actors, and economies whose bodies and labor are generally rendered invisible in Eurocentric histories of global science and medicine.
Taylor M. Moore is a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at UC Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersections of critical race studies,decolonial/postcolonial histories of science, and decolonial materiality studies. Her book manuscript, /Superstitious Women: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt/, uses modern Egyptian amulets as an archive to reconstruct the magical and vernacular medical life-worlds of peasant women healers, and their critical role developing medico-anthropological expertise in Egypt from 1880-1950.

Thabisile Griffin, "Black Militias in the Era of Revolutions: Politics, Race and Labor"
2020-11-19 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
November 19, 2020
12:30 – 2:00 pm
Thabisile Griffin, PhD Candidate, UCLA
“Black Militias in the Era of Revolutions: Politics, Race and Labor”
From 1781 to 1790, the British Caribbean military and colonial administrators struggled with renegotiating their racial truth systems – through a recalibration of defense. The last two decades of the century were ripe with not only the insurrections of enslaved Africans, but also threats from competing European powers and indigenous populations. In order to survive, there were constant re-adjustments made to garrison structure and fortifications, that ultimately disrupted racial sensibilities to security. A contentious reinforcement would develop in the 1780s, incentivized by previous strategies used during the American Revolution. Military officials and colonial administrators in the Caribbean were now reckoning with the possibility of employing and arming entire battalions of Black men for the British Army. The creation of this unit in the Caribbean, the Black Corps, was only possible through the evolving myths and villainization of St. Vincent’s Black indigenous population—the Black Caribs. Only through the narrative of the Black Caribs could the fantasy of the Black Corps be actualized.
Register

History of Science Colloquium: Celebration of Soraya de Chadarevian
2020-11-16 16:00 - 17:00
Fall 2020 Colloquium Schedule
November 16, 2020 | 4:00pm
Book Event: Presentation and celebration of Soraya de Chadarevian, Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Discussants: Ted Porter (UCLA) and Iris Clever (University of Chicago)
A copy of the introduction and epilogue of Heredity under the Microscope will be circulated to those registered on the day before the event.
This event is co-sponsored by The Institute for Society and Genetics.
To register for this event to receive the Zoom link for the discussion, click here.
