UCLA Department of History

Undergraduate Open House
2016-09-28 11:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

A Conversation with Rev. James Lawson: Nonviolence and Social Movements
2016-06-02 15:30 - 18:00
Rev. James Lawson is a leading theorist and practitioner of nonviolent social action. During the 1960s he advised Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and lead civil rights campaigns in Nashville and Memphis. Since the 1970s, his teaching on nonviolence has shaped the practice of social movements in southern California an across the country.
Vinay Lal is Professor of History at UCLA where he teaches courses on Indian history, postcolonial societies, and the contemporary world history. He writes about the politics of history for academic and popular audiences.

León García Garagarza - "The Aztec Healer, the Puppet King and the Mexican Inquisition: Noble Ailments and Colonial Imposition in Early New Spain"
2016-06-02 12:00 - 14:00
In 1539 the Apostolic Inquisition of Mexico accused Martin Ocelotl of idolatry, blasphemy, and other crimes against the Church. Martin Ocelotl was a traditional ritual specialist from the area of Tetzcoco who actively opposed the imposition of colonialism and called for the restoration of the traditional way of life. The files of his trial register that Ocelotl had clandestinely performed a traditional ritual healing on behalf of Don Pablo Xochiquen, a puppet ruler (cuauhtlahtoani) of Mexico Tenochtitlan during the early colonial era. While the folios of the Inquisitorial trial provide only incidental data about the nature of the therapy that Don Pablo undertook, an examination of other early colonial sources strongly suggests that it was the treatment “for the fatigue that afflicts those who administer the Republic and hold Public Office”, a culturally recognized disease in the traditional Materia Medica of Mesoamerica. The treatment of Don Pablo Xochiquen at the hands of Martin Ocelotl during the first decades of Spanish rule not only illuminates indigenous notions of the Nahua etiology of disease, it also reveals important clues about the clash between Aztec and Spanish medicine, and about the more general political and cultural dynamics of early colonial Mexico.

History Writing Center Workshop
2016-05-25 17:00 - 18:00
Join professor Benjamin Madley for helpful tips and feedback in this History Writing Center workshop.

Bunche Social Sciences Book Fair
2016-05-25 10:00 - 15:00
Free Books for Students! Stop by to browse an interdepartmental book collection, and go home with new reading material!
Books from Chicano/a Studies, Economics, Geography, History, and Political Science departments will be available.

William Deringer - “Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, 1688-1776"
2016-05-23 16:00 - 18:00
William Deringer (MIT)
“Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, 1688-1776″

2016 Alden-Berg Lecture
2016-05-18 19:00 | Fowler Museum at UCLA, Lenart Auditorium
Event Video

Stephen Aron
Professor and Robert N. Burr Department Chair
UCLA Department of History
Invites you to attend the annual
Alden-Berg Lecture
“Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles”
Featuring
John Mack Faragher
Howard R. Lamar Prof of History & American Studies and Director Howard R. Lamar Center, Yale University
With responses on the contemporary implications of Faragher’s research in his recent book Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.) by
Zev Yaroslavsky
Former Los Angeles County Supervisor
&
Jim Newton
Former Editor of Los Angeles Times

Wednesday, May 18, 2016
7:00 p.m.
Reception to follow
Fowler Museum, Lenart Auditorium
UCLA Campus

Self-pay parking available in Structure 4
Inquiries: CollegeEvents@support.ucla.edu or (310) 825-4038
————————————–
About the Speakers
About the Lecture
The Alden-Berg Lecture is named for two distinguished alumnae and friends of the Department, Dr. Geraldine Alden and Barbara Berg. Devoted students of history and mainstays of the Friends of History group, Jeri and Barbara have contributed in manifold ways to the well-being of the Department. Now in its 5th year, the lecture draws on the excellence of the History Department faculty to address important issues of the past and present.

Cuban Environmental History: From Imperial Exploits to Socialist Cows
2016-05-18 14:30 - 16:30
This event presents the work of two prominent environmental historians of Cuba with a comment by Sandro Dutra e Silva, visiting researcher, Department of Geography, UCLA.

Rob Schraff - “Making and Unmaking Madness with LSD: From Psychotomimetic to Psychedelic and Back Again”
2016-05-16 16:00 - 18:00
Rob Schraff (UCLA)
“Making and Unmaking Madness with LSD: From Psychotomimetic to Psychedelic and Back Again”

John T. Sidel - "From Baku to Bandung: Republicanism, Communism, and Islam in the Making of the Indonesian Revolution"
2016-05-16 15:30 - 17:00
John T. Sidel, London School of Economics and Political Science. This lecture shows how Communism and Islam played a crucial, constitutive role in the making of the Indonesian “Revolusi,” suggesting the essentially cosmopolitan nature of its origins and its emancipatory energies. John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). This talk covers a set of chapters in a book he is completing, titled Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia, which he hopes to complete this year.

First Annual Undergraduate History Conference - "Power & Politics"
2016-05-13 08:30 - 18:00
— Agenda for the day —

Dena Goodman - “An Active, Intimate, and Regular Correspondence”: Invisible Labor and Scientific Exchange in Revolutionary France
2016-05-12 16:00 - 18:30

Aisha Finch - "Of Time and Sugar: Making and Unmaking Cuban Plantation Temporalities"
2016-05-12 12:00 - 14:00
This presentation explores the relationship between time – as it was regulated and embodied in the Cuban sugar plantation world – and the lived experiences of the people enslaved on these plantations. It juxtaposes the function of time as an ever-evolving technology of the plantation world, and its possibilities as a site of black fugitivity and regeneration. This split sense of “plantation-time” marked one of the most important tensions in the world of sugar production: slaveholders and managers sought to ration and appropriate time as a precious commodity, yet enslaved people consistently reshaped its strictures and repurposed its possibilities. Exploring the ways in which enslaved people were violently circumscribed by this plantation temporality, but also the creative means they found to circumvent it, will offer important ways to understand how they inhabited, negotiated, and resisted their enslavement.

Benjamin Cowan - "Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil" Book Talk
2016-05-11 15:00 - 17:00
In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Tracking how limits to Cold War authoritarianism finally emerged, Cowan concludes that the record of autocracy and repression in Brazil is part of a larger story of reaction against perceived threats to traditional views of family, gender, moral standards, and sexuality — a story that continues in today’s culture wars.

Edward D. Melillo - "Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection"
2016-05-10 16:00 - 18:00
Edward D. Melillo is associate professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College. He teaches courses on global environmental history, the history of the Pacific World, and commodities in world historical perspective. He is the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (Yale University Press, 2015), the co-editor Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), and the editor of Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming).

Adam Lawrence - “The Territory of Fables: Ecological Productivity in Nazi Germany's Imaginary Empire”
2016-05-09 16:00 - 18:00
Adam Lawrence (UCLA)“The Territory of Fables: Ecological Productivity in Nazi Germany’s Imaginary Empire”

Mario Biogioli - "Beyond Publish or Perish: Metrics and the New Ecologies of Academic Misconduct"
2016-05-03 11:00 - 12:15
Mario Biagioli – School of Law, Science & Technology Studies Program, Department of History, UC Davis.
Academic misconduct has traditionally been tied to the stress generated by the “publish or perish” culture and, more recently, to the new opportunities offered by electronic publishing. I argue, instead, that misconduct is undergoing a radical qualitative transformation, adapting itself to modern metrics-based regimes of academic evaluation and the new incentives and opportunities they provide. We are transitioning, so to speak, from “publish or perish” to “impact or perish.” These changes are affecting the practices as well as the discourse and conceptualization of misconduct. Traditional definitions of misconduct were rooted in oppositions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, honest mistake and fabrication, but some of the new metrics-based misconduct could be seen as a form of gaming rather than a clear violation of ethical norms or laws. The new metrics-based forms of misconduct are thus challenging us to redefine misconduct, but they are also, at the same time, asking us to rethink what we mean by “publication.”

Adam Mosley & Dibner Fellow - “Cosmographic Instruments, Sundials, and the Decline of Cosmography Revisited”
2016-05-02 16:00 - 18:00
Adam Mosley (Swansea University (Wales) and Dibner Fellow, Huntington Library)“Cosmographic Instruments, Sundials, and the Decline of Cosmography Revisited”

Bruno Cabanes - “Rights, not charity”. Rene Cassin, the Great War and the Rights of War Victims
2016-04-28 16:00 - 18:30

Maureen C. Miller - “Feuding Popes and Emperors: Characterizing the Investiture Conflict”
2016-04-28 16:00 - 18:00
Maureen C. Miller, Professor of History, University of California Berkeley – “Feuding Popes and Emperors: Characterizing the Investiture Conflict.” This lecture will argue for an updating of the conceptualization of the ‘crisis of church and state’ in the context of recent work on violence and conflict in Medieval Europe.

José I. Fusté - “Historicizing Entangled Afro-Latinidades: Looking Beyond the Diasporic and/or National Subject”
2016-04-28 12:00 - 14:00
This presentation invites us to imagine afrodescended Latin@s—who live, think, and feel colonial modernity between different nations, regions, and subaltern positionalities—as subjects with inherently fragmented and “entangled” ontologies. Drawing from the writings of the Martinican poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant about the protean condition of the Caribbean (post)colonial subject, we will analyze various Cuban and Puerto Rican activist intellectuals from the early 20th century that self-identified as Black political subjects, but also as Latin Caribbean national subjects. Specifically, we will analyze traces left behind by those that sought to reconcile anti-racist and anti-imperialist/nationalist discourses and practices that were inherently contradictory due to the notion that in Latin America, the nation and Latin@ pan-ethnicity made racial alterity insignificant. A close reading of the identitarian aporias apparent in the letters, essays, and the journalism of those who sought to unravel these contradictions affords us a window for reconceptualizing the instabilities but also the possibilities of afro-latinidades as a spectrum of heterodox onto-political strategies that are inherently transnational and relational.

Kathleen Murphy - “Botany and Biopiracy along the Routes of the Asiento Trade”
2016-04-25 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Kathleen Murphy (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) “Botany and Biopiracy along the Routes of the Asiento Trade”

Ted Porter and Norton Wise - “Positivism and Revolutions: First-Generation Historiographies of Science”
2016-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Please note: This meeting is designed especially for graduate students, and will be organized as a discussion of short essays about Kuhn and Gillispie. Essays will be circulated to history of science grad students; anyone else who would like to participate can get the papers from Iris (irisclever@ucla.edu)

Presentation on Juana Inés
2016-04-18 11:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Students and faculty are cordially invited to a presentation on the critically critically acclaimed TV Series JUANA INES. Juana Inés centers on the personal life of the renowned writer and poet of the Colonial times in Mexico: Sor Juana. She is considered an outstanding early feminist of the Americas. The academic literature on Sor Juana is broad and spans across the world. Her life and works continue to be sites of criticism, debate and contemporary artistic activity.

Christopher L. Brown - "The British in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade"
2016-04-13 16:00 - 18:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Eric Hounshell - “A Feel for the Data: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research”
2016-04-11 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

John Laslett - "My Brother Peter, E.P. Thompson and Me: A Personal Memoir"
2016-04-05 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
John Laslett is an Emeritus Research Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on United States History: American labor and social movements; U.S., Asian, Black and Mexican immigration; and comparative Euro-American history.

Dan Stone - "Rethinking Liberation"
2016-03-31 16:00 - 18:00 | UCLA Faculty Center
Seventy years after the end of the war, the liberation of the camps is still relatively understudied by historians. In this lecture, Dan Stone will give an overview of the different sorts of liberation experienced by the victims of Nazism and explain the importance of the liberation and what followed for understanding the history of the Holocaust.
About the Speaker: Dan Stone is a historian of ideas who works primarily on twentieth-century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, and the cultural history of the British Right. His most recent publications include Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2015).
Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
1939 Society
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Germanic Languages
UCLA Department of History
Please RSVP at http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/rsvp-to-event/.

Nancy O. Gallman - “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty and Property in Colonial East Florida"
2016-03-31 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Nancy O. Gallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Early American History at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation, “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida,” is a comparative legal history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish–Native East Florida. It examines the interactions between Spanish colonial law and the customary law of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles to show how a broadly defined, pluralistic system of law shaped the development of East Florida, where neither the Spanish nor Native peoples could dominate but where both had to adapt to the other. She argues that, on the basis of mutual tolerance and restraint, this mixed legal culture reinforced Native sovereignty, promoted multiple conceptions of justice, race, gender, labor, and property, and, as a result, made East Florida a greater target of U.S. aggression in the early years of the new republic. This study of legal pluralism in East Florida refines our understanding of the role of Native law in the constitution of power in colonial North America.

Michael Rothberg - “Inheritance Trouble: Transmitting Holocaust Memory in a Society of Immigration”
2016-03-09 16:00 - 18:00
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and special issues of the journals Criticism, Interventions, Occasion, and Yale French Studies.
