Earlier this month, Alexis Dudden‘s article, “Alexis Dudden on the Firebombing of Tokyo and on Post-war Struggles to Keep it Remembered,” was published in The Economist. The article tackles the topic of the air raids in Japan of World War II, and the efforts to remember the civilians who were injured, perished, and made homeless by the bombings.
To read the article in The Economist: Article
To read the PDF version: Article
The History Department mourns the loss of Shirley Ardis Abbott, who passed away last month. The longtime director of the Vernon Historical Museum, she earned her PhD in the Department in 1997. Her dissertation “Building the Loom City: Rockville, Connecticut, 1821-1908” was later published as a book. Her obituary offers a sense of the rich life she lived: https://www.courant.com/obituaries/shirley-ardis-abbott/
Earlier this month, the “My Story, Our Future” exhibit opened at the Greenwich Historical Society. The exhibit, which will run from February 3rd to March 2nd, was a joint effort on the part of the Greenwich Historical Society, the India Cultural Centers, and the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. This is the program’s third year running, and was created “in alignment with Connecticut’s mandated K-12 Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) curriculum”. The goal of this initiative is to bring focus onto the voices of South Asian American youth in Connecticut through the collection of their stories, and explore the history of the South Asian American community in Connecticut. For this years exhibit, local students interviewed their family members about their experiences immigrating to North America from South Asia, and then learned how to create their own display of curated objects to help tell that history.
Dr. Jason Oliver Chang, who was a main proponent of the creation of the initiative and of the inclusion of AAPI curriculum in schools, spoke at the opening of the exhibit. Professor Chang “shared his experiences as faculty mentor and guide and spoke of the challenges and opportunities of introducing the AAPI curriculum to the state’s 170 school districts and to the teachers who have not previously studied it“.
The exhibit will be open to the public until March 2nd at the Greenwich Historical Society. To listen to the oral histories, you can visit the historical society’s website, where there is a link to their Spotify.
This Thursday, Professor Manisha Sinha will be presenting her talk, “The Fall of the Second American Republic” as speaker for the Joanna Dunlap Cowden 
Memorial Lecture. The event will take place at California State University Chico at 5:30 pm. The talk will draw from her book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
The memorial lecture was established in 2001 to honor the legacy and work of Professor Joanna Dunlap Cowden, a history professor who taught at California State University Chico for 25 years. Professor Cowden’s work focused on United States antebellum and Civil War history.
Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens has been named the Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence at Occidental College in Los Angeles California. This awa
rd is funded by the Stafford Ellison Wright Endowment, created by the Black Alumni Organization in honor of the college’s first black graduates, Dr. Janet Stafford, George F. Ellison, and Barbara Bowman Wright. Through this program, Occidental College is able to invite, “distinguished Black scholars, artists, elected officials, and others to spend time in residence at Occidental each year.“
Dr. Cooper Owens will be in residence between February 18th and 19th, 2025, visiting talking with students, as well as holding a healing circle on February 19th. On the 18th at 7pm, she will also present, “Slavery, Gynecology and Black Placental Resistance: Why Black Mothers Matter“, a free public lecture.
To read more about this impressive achievement: Occidental College
On the 1st of February, Professor Jeffrey Ogbar was interviewed by KPFA 94.1, a radio station based in California. The episode, titled “Carry the Light: Atlant
a: America’s Black Capital”, delves into “the history of the trials, tribulations, survival and triumphs of Atlanta’s Black citizens” and a discussion of these topics within the book America’s Black Captial. Professor Ogbar talks with Davey D, the founder of Hard Knock Radio and a Hip Hop Historian. This episode is part of a series of interviews by KPFA to celebrate and recognize Black history and culture.
In 2023, Dr. Jeffery Ogbar published America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy, which “chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement”.
To listen to the interview: Carry the Light: Atlanta: America’s Black Capital
To listen to the other episodes in this series: Carry the Light
MS. Magazine has named Manisha Sinha‘s book The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 as one of the top feminist books of
2024.
Karla Strand, a gender and women’s studies librarian, reviews Sinha’s book as: “With this groundbreaking volume, renowned historian Manisha Sinha offers a critical reexamination of the Reconstruction era. By extending the time frame and including other important events such as imperialism, conquest of Indigenous peoples and women’s suffrage, Sinha presents a new understanding of the consequences of its defeat.”
To read more of this article, and to learn more about the other books named: Ms. Magazine’s Top Feminist Books of 2024
In 2024, Professor Sergio Luzzatto published his book, Primo Levi e i suoi compagni. In this book, “Sergio Luzzatto returns to examine the figure of Primo Levi and reconstru
ct the story behind his writing, following the path that from leads the characters of Survival in Auschwitz to the real identity of his deportation companions, the European Jews forced “to the bottom” with him,”.
To read interviews about Primo Levi e i suoi compagni:
In September of 2024, Luzzatto was also awarded the Frulia Storia Award for his work, “Dolore e furore: Una storia delle Brigatte rosse“. The Award is awarded to an Italian nonfiction book for, “originality, scientific rigor and diffusion potential beyond the circle of professionals.”. The book must go through two rounds of judging, first by a jury of authors and scholars, and then by a jury of 300 readers.
To read more about this impressive achievement:
Description:
You who live safe/ In your warm houses … Meditate that this came about:/ I commend these words to you”: with unforgettable verses, of Dantesque proportions, Survival in Auschwitzopens, a text that has become over time the definitive book on Auschwitz, on the horror of the twentieth century. But what does Primo Levi mean when he says “you”? What, when he says “I”? And what, when he says “we”? The way in which the author, a master of the Italian language, has strategically employed – and bent – personal pronouns nests the tangle of good and evil, of innocence and shame in the Shoah: the idea, at once, of belonging and of distance, but also the pain of guilt, and the responsibility that derives from it. Starting from these questions, Sergio Luzzatto returns to examine the figure of Primo Levi and reconstruct the story behind his writing, following the path that from leads the characters of Survival in Auschwitzto the real identity of his deportation companions, the European Jews forced “to the bottom” with him. Who were the members of the chemical Kommando of Auschwitz-Monowitz? And who were, in particular, the companions represented by Levi as negative or even abject characters, Luciferian incarnations of evil? Perhaps Primo Levi would have become a writer even if he had not been deported to Auschwitz. Certainly he would have been a different writer, if the history of the twentieth century had not marked the life of the young chemist forever through the experience of that black hole. That is why his books today must be reread today with the tools of historians: to unravel the threads of a continuous – and problematic – fabric, between historical fact and literary transfiguration.
Professor Brendan Kane and former MA student Emmet de Barra, now a PhD student in Irish at Trinity College Dublin, recently gave a podcast interview on the Celtic Students Podcast about their work on the innovative and fun website to Learn Early Modern Irish Léamh.org.
Listen in for a interesting discussion of Celtic languages, grammar games, collaborative work, and the perhaps surprising utility of the digital humanities as a tool for language revival.