Department of History

At the turn of the twentieth century, American Yiddish newspapers overflowed with advice columns offering implicit and explicit guidance
to readers about how to live their lives. From the Forverts’ famous “A Bintel Brief” to more practical advice columns, such as Der Tog’s “Letter Box” column, these publications printed countless letters from
readers asking editors to help them navigate personal tribulations, American political infrastructures, and Jewish communal life.

Editors and publishers introduced these features to entertain newspaper readers and to increase circulation. But these features also
encouraged audiences previously unaccustomed to reading
newspapers to view these publications as central sources for information and guidance about acclimating to American life. Eventually, these interactions spilled off the page, with Yiddish
newspapers hiring staff to correspond or meet with readers eager to receive personal counsel from their favorite papers.

This talk will explore the crucial role of advice columns in the development of the Yiddish press. It will highlight how these columns
shaped the relationships between newspapers and their readers and how central advice columns became to the acclimation process of
new immigrants anxious to learn more about American life.

Ayelet Brinn is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Hartford, where she holds the Philip D. Feltman Professorship in Modern Jewish History. After receiving her PhD in History from the University of
Pennsylvania in 2019, she served as the Rabin-Shvidler Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at
Fordham University and Columbia University, the Ivan and Nina Ross Family Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and a scholar in residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Her first book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the
Making of the American Yiddish Press, will be published this fall with New York
University Press.

Our first Transcribathon for Spring 2023 will start on the 2nd of February. We will share the document closer to the first meeting.

Join: EMSWG- Transcribathon
https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m3f488af42e86df49819687d3112650eb

Dr. Martín Medina Elizalde, Paleoclimatologist
Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences
UMass Amherst

Abstract:

The reasons behind the disintegration of the ancient Maya civilization during the Terminal Classic Period (TCP, CE ~800–1000) present a complex problem to disentangle. Was climate change the ultimate or the proximate factor in the disintegration of the Maya civilization? Diverse Paleoclimate archives support the hypothesis that drought created unfavorable conditions to sustain the Classic Maya civilization, while evidence has also supported the notion that socio-political context may have played a role in the abandonment of major Maya lowland centers. Did Classic Period Maya socio-political and economic factors make the Maya civilization particularly vulnerable to collapse? What lessons can we learn from the fate of the Maya civilization that are relevant to the future? We explore these questions and present evidence from speleothem paleoclimate records that climate change during the TCP was severe enough to impact the systems that sustained the development of the Classic Maya civilization.


Bio:

Dr. Martín Medina's research interests are in the areas of paleoclimatology and climate change with particular emphasis in reconstructing tropical temperature and hydrological variability during the Holocene, Pleistocene and Pliocene. He investigates the drivers of tropical climate variability during different climate states aiming to assess the Earth’s temperature and hydrological sensitivity to changes in orbital forcing and forcing by greenhouses gases. In addition, Martín investigates the impact of changes in rainfall amount in the development and collapse of the Maya civilization as an empirical means to assess potential societal disruptions driven by adverse hydrological conditions, and with the ultimate purpose of informing and stimulating human adaptive and mitigation responses to climate change.