“A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science.” The idea of progress frames our modern understanding of understanding itself. It offers a historical account of the development of knowledge in space and time, with the natural sciences serving as both its mark and guarantor. This account has a distinctive history all of its own. Historians […]
POSTPONED: Anthony Grafton's talk scheduled for February 9th 4-6PM has been postponed to Spring Quarter. More information will be provided in the future.
The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in pre-colonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes, collecting and cultivating African plants and mapping the landscape and natural resources of the region. He traversed this landscape with a variety of African interlocutors and guides, whose knowledge inevitably, if often invisibly, informed his collections, […]
Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the […]
“Polio, Adventism, and Rehabilitation Medicine in Los Angeles.” Rancho Los Amigos was founded during the late nineteenth century as a poor farm but became a rehabilitation hospital for iron lung patients during Los Angeles’s 1950s polio epidemics. Following the polio vaccination campaigns, researchers received federal funding to test Rancho’s concept of care on other chronic […]
EUROPEAN COLLOQUIUM TALK BY WEBER POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR, BRIAN GRIFFITH 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 […]
