We are delighted to report that the UConn Humanities Institute awarded three dissertation fellowships for 2018-19, two of which will go to graduate students in History: Aimee Loiselle and Amy Sopcack-Joseph.

Aimee Loiselle has been awarded a UCHI Fellowship for her project “Creating Norma Rae: The Erasure of Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Southern Labor Activists in the Making of a Neoliberal Icon.”

 

Amy Sopcak-Joseph, who will receive a UCHI-Draper Fellowship to work on “Fashioning American Women:  Godey’s Lady’s Book, Female Consumers, and Periodical Publishing in the Nineteenth Century.”

On April 6, 2018, historian Julia Irwin will speak at the History Department as part of its Foreign Policy Seminar Series. 

Dr. Julia Irwin earned her PhD degree from Yale University; she is now an associate professor in the University of South Florida. Receiving the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award of USF in 2015, Irwin teaches classes focused on the history of the United States and its foreign relations. Her research centers on the place of humanitarianism, health, and welfare in 20th century U.S. foreign relations. Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening is Irwin’s first book and was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Making the World Safe tells the story of U.S. relief and assistance for foreign civilians in the era of the First World War, and focuses on both the diplomatic and the cultural significance of humanitarian aid in these years. Based on the records of the American Red Cross and key personnel, Irwin’s research “examines the lives of a cosmopolitan cadre of American civic leaders, philanthropists, and medical and social scientific professionals—individuals who embraced foreign assistance as a new way to participate in the international community” (p. 2) However, Making the World Safe not only focuses on ARC leaders and staff, but also examines the American public in the importance of foreign aid to American foreign relations. Besides the monograph, Irwin also published many articles that examine American humanitarianism, health, and social welfare as a window into both U.S. domestic and international histories. Some of the topics that she wrote about are child health, nursing, and ethnic tensions. Currently, Irwin is writing her second monograph, Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disaster. Her current research is to examine how the United States government, American charities and relief organizations, and the U.S. public have responded to disasters caused by overseas tropical storms, earthquakes, floods, and other so-called “Acts of God” since the late 19th century.

In addition to researching and teaching achievements, Irwin also participates in several professional programs. She is currently council member for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and member for the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Committee. She is also the membership secretary of Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

On March 23, 2018, historian Erez Manela will speak at the History Department as part of its Foreign Policy Seminar Series.

 

Erez Manela is a Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches international history and directs the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.  Most recently, Manela co-edited Empires at War, 1911-1923 (2014) with Robert Gerwath, which examines the outbreak of World War I as a “global war of empires” and expanded the time frame to include the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and conclude with the 1923 Lausanne Treaty. He is also currently a General Editor for the Global and International History series for Cambridge University Press.

Manela didn’t think he was going to study history.  Commenting in one interview with the Harvard Gazette he said “I didn’t yet conceive of it as something you could do as a profession, but rather something you might study to know more about the world.”  Originally from Haifa, Israel, Manela went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and stated that his experience there shaped the path that he would take.  “I realized that in the modern period…there were really fascinating parallels between the history of the Ottoman Empire and the history of East Asia, particularly China,” Manela said in that same Gazette article.  He wanted to consider that story in a broader context moving forward.  This approach shaped his scholarship that followed.

In doctoral studies at Yale, Manela focused on international history with a transnational approach.  His dissertation was the basis for his first book titled The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007).  Examining how the United States had an impact on the colonial world in the wake of World War I, with a focus on Egypt, India, China, and Korea, The Wilsonian Moment was very successful. The book was a major contribution to the field and seen by many reviewers as a groundbreaking study in transnationalism.  Lloyd Ambrosius for the Journal of American History called the book “excellent” and went on saying “Manela’s thoroughly researched and clearly written book is a fine contribution to international and transnational history.” Another reviewer wrote that Manela “brilliantly reconstructs the story of the colonial world at the end of World War I and the impact of Wilson’s new ideas for world peace and justice on the anticolonial movement.” The London Review of Books said that Manela “has produced an immensely rich and important work of comparative politics centered on the ‘Wilsonian Moment.’”

Manela is a very prolific scholar.  In addition to the aforementioned books he co-edited The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010), which explores the structural upheaval of the 1970s and how the international system was undergoing major transformations, and has articles in journals such as Diplomatic History, Reviews in American History, American Historical Review and Diplomacy & Statecraft.  Manela contributed a chapter on “The United States and the World,” which comments on the field’s methodology and historical questions, in American History Now (2011).

Manela’s ongoing research interest is to examine the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Eradication Program from 1965-1980.  This endeavor “seeks to cast new light on important aspects of post-WWII international history, including superpower relations, the evolution of international development, and the role of international organizations.” Manela’s article, “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” which was published in Diplomatic History, discusses some of his findings. Manela is also researching United States visions for the world order during World War II, paying close attention to Asia. He contributed a chapter titled “The Fourth Policeman: Franklin Roosevelt’s Vision for China’s Global Rule” in The Significance and Impact of the Cairo Declaration (2014), which highlights some of his preliminary research.

When Manela was appointed as full Professor in 2009, Harvard University’s History Department Chair Lizabeth Cohen said “[Manela’s] work is very important because he is part of a very small group of historians who are moving the traditional field of diplomatic history, which for a long time had been concerned with the foreign policies of the largest, often western nations, to a more international history.”

 

Announcing the Draper Workshop Series for Spring 2018:

Thursday, April 19, 2018, 4:00-6:00 pm
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Gentry 131
Reception to follow
 
This workshop will feature scholars of history and law, who will share their current research to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary approaches to both areas of study. It will focus on how the law has helped construct and deconstruct notions of servitude, race, and citizenship in American history. The panel will speak on the following topics:
 

“Comparing Law, Slavery, Freedom and Race in the Americas.”
Ariella Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History, USC Gould School of Law

“Indentured Servitude, its impact and its legacy in North America”
Timothy Fisher, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law

“Why Prigg v. Pennsylvania was a Major Turning Point in Antebellum Politics and Law”
R. Kent Newmyer, Professor of Law and History, University of Connecticut School of Law

“Birthright Citizens: The Puzzle of Free African Americans in the Era of Dred Scott”
Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University

Moderator: Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut

 

If you cannot join us on campus, please join us on our livestream. For more information, contact Mary-Margaret.Mahoney@uconn.edu

Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History, has been selected as the winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her book “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition” (Yale University Press). Established in 1999, the Douglass Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. Sinha will receive the prize at a reception sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City on February 22, 2018. The latest of several awards, Dr. Sinha’s achievement is a source of great pride to all of her colleagues in the History Department and to the University of Connecticut at large.

To read the full press release from Yale University: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/uconn-professor-wins-19th-annual-frederick-douglass-book-prize

Nina Silber, David Blight, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage are all preeminent scholars of the Civil War and memory. They are three of many scholars who have entered the growing conversation regarding Confederate monuments and their place in our world. Silber, Blight, and Brundage have all contributed their thoughts on the matter to various publications, and will be continuing the conversation at the upcoming inaugural Draper Workshop Series event titled “Recasting the Confederacy: Monuments and Civil War Memory” on November 6.

Nina Silber, a professor of history and American Studies at Boston University, received her BA, MA, and Ph.D from UC Berkeley. She has published several books, including The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (1993); Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992); Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (2005); and Gender and the Sectional Conflict (2009). Silber is the president-elect of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her piece on Confederate monuments, “Worshipping the Confederacy is about white supremacy—even the Nazis thought so,” was featured by The Washington Post in August. Her current work focuses on Civil War memory during the Great Depression and the New Deal.

David Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale as well as the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He received his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and won the Bancroft prize for this book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). On October 23, Blight briefed Congress on the history of Civil War monuments. On the subject of Confederate monuments, Blight wrote “‘The Civil War lies on in us like a sleeping dragon’: America’s deadly divide—and why it has returned” for The Guardian in August. Blight is currently writing a biography of Frederick Douglass to be published in 2018.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor and Department Chair in history at UNC Chapel Hill. Brundage received his MA and Ph.D from Harvard. He has written several books and edited numerous collections, including Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930 (2011). Brundage’s piece, “I’ve studied the history of Confederate memorials. Here’s what to do about them” was featured on Vox in August. Currently, he is working on a project tracing the history of torture in the United States.

“Recasting the Confederacy: Monuments and Civil War Memory” will be the first of many events in the Draper Workshop Series. Organized by Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, the series promises to bring leading scholars to the University of Connecticut to engage in conversation surrounding various historical issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/17/worshiping-the-confederacy-is-about-white-supremacy-even-the-nazis-thought-so/?utm_term=.7829bd1dd21f
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/20/civil-war-american-history-trump
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/18/16165160/confederate-monuments-history-charlottesville-white-supremacy
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/monuments-stand-article-1.3423887

On Wednesday, November 1, at 4:30 PM in the Konover Auditorium, Sir Hilary Beckles will give a talk titled “The Greatest Political Movement of the 21st Century: Global Reparations for African Enslavement, Native Genocide and Colonisation.”

 

Should the descendants of slaves be compensated for the work of their ancestors? How much wealth have slaves generated in economic capitol? Is it possible to calculate pain and suffering? If so, what is the formula? Sir Hilary Beckles is an economic historian and international thought leader whose contributions to the study of the slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean has positioned him to be one of the world’s experts and leading figures in the conversations dealing with reparatory justice for slavery. The Vice Chancellor at the University of the West Indies. Beckles also serves as the Chair of the Caribbean Commission on Reparations.

In 1979 Beckles received his PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. However, the study of psychology was Beckles original interest—and it is the interdisciplinary weaving of history, economics, and psychology which has positioned Beckles as one of the Caribbean’s best thinkers. In 1979 (the same year he received his PhD) Beckles began his professional career as a senior lecturer at the University of West Indies. After serving as Chair of the History Department and Dean of the Humanities Department, at the age of 36 Beckles became the youngest person to be promoted to the personal chair at the University of West Indies.

Beckles has published over 100 peer-reviewed essays and 12 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History to the sport of cricket. In his book Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide, Beckles explores the viability of reparations for Caribbean slavery. Slavery is very much so a personal topic for Beckles; he was born and raised on the Cumberbatch Plantation (a slave plantation) in St. Andrew’s Parish Barbados. In 2016, Beckles delivered a lecture at Oxford University where he recalls the experience of being born on a slave plantation. Beckles argues that colonial powers have left Caribbean countries with, which he terms, the “colonial mess” which includes social, economic, and political setbacks. Moreover, Beckles argues Caribbean colonialism has denied decedents of slaves’ access to their ancestry. For example, in the Caribbean 80 percent of black residents are unable to trace their ancestry beyond their great grandparents. Beckles connects this uncertain ancestry to his own ancestry by inquiring whether he is the cousin of actor Benedict Cumberbatch. And, unfortunately for Beckles (and most black people in the Caribbean) he will never have an answer. It is Beckles personal connection with slavery which drives his work and thinking about reparations. In addition to slavery and slave reparation, Beckles work focuses on the history the Caribbean and Barbados. In his book A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market, Beckles illuminates a history of Barbados, its origin and events that have shaped the country. Beckles has edited and co-authored 13 books. The most recent book he co-edited Rihanna: Barbados ‘World-Gurl’” in Global Popular Culture (2016), explores the rise of the global icon and musical sensation Rihanna.

In addition to his distinguished academic accomplishments, Beckles serves as a member on many United Nation Committees and Advisory Panels. In addition, Beckles is a member of UNDP’s Advisory Panel on the Caribbean Human Development Report.
Lastly, Beckles is a well-recognized and respected figure in Connecticut: in 2017, Hartford, Connecticut declared March 2nd “Hilary Beckles Day” in recognition of Beckles’ contribution to Caribbean studies, social justice and human equality. Beckles contribution to the field of economic history has provided new perspectives, ideas and has raised new questions to explore reparatory justice for slavery and the history of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.

On November 2, historian Nile Green will be at the University of Connecticut, speaking at the Fusco Distinguished Lecture Series. Dr. Green, a professor of history at the University of California – Los Angeles, will be presenting a lecture entitled, “The Muslim Discovery of Japan: Global History and the Inter-Asian Encounter.” Dr. Green’s lecture is related to his monograph, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam.

Dr. Green has published widely on Islam, globalization, and Muslim interactions with the non-Muslim world. Throughout his career as a historian, Dr. Green has traced the various Muslim networks that connect Afghanistan, Iran, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Japan, Europe, and America. His most recent monograph, The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London, is a microhistory that chronicles the journey of Muslim students from Iran to London, where they were tasked with learning scientific skills to bring back to their home country. In his 2015 monograph, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam, Dr. Green explores how interactions between Muslim and non-Muslim societies transformed both Islamic practices and the history of Islam. Further, Dr. Green sheds light on the growth of Islam in both Japan and America.

Dr. Green’s work on Islam has set him apart from other historians in the field due to the emphasis he has placed on religion in his scholarship. Rather than using the nation-state to frame questions and investigations into the past, Dr. Green emphasizes religion. In his scholarship, Dr. Green pulls from a wide range of sources, including diaries from traveling students, reports from missionaries, magazines, Bibles, and the first books printed in Arabic. Dr. Green describes himself as a historian of the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims.

Dr. Green was the founding director of the UCLA Program on Central Asia. He currently serves on the Association of Asian Studies’ South Asia Council, the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, and on the editorial boards of both Iran-Nameh and Afghanistan.

On Friday, November 3, at 10:00 AM, the History Department will be hosting the Fusco Workshop in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge. Dr. Green will be discussing a pre-circulated paper regarding a global intellectual history approach to Afghanistan. Interested graduate students and faculty are encouraged to attend.

Douglas Little of Clark University will be the second speaker in this year’s US Foreign Policy Seminar with a lecture entitled “Us verus Them: The United States and Radical Islam.” http://history.uconn.edu/about-the-department/foreign-policy-seminar-series/

First-year masters student Samuel Surowitz here offers a brief and compelling introduction to the work of this innovative scholar.
 

Dr. Douglas Little is the Robert and Virginia Scotland Professor of History & International Relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, he received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1972. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in 1975 and 1978, respectively, from Cornell University and has been at Clark since that time. Dr. Little’s areas of expertise include American foreign relations and twentieth century global history with a focus on American interaction with the Middle East. He is also affiliated with the program in Asian Studies. Dr. Little has written extensively about U.S. involvement in the Middle East, including articles he has published in International History Review and Journal of Cold War Studies. He has written book chapters for America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, and The Cambridge History of the Cold War, to name just a few. He is the author of American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 and is a winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Award from the New England Historical Association.
 
Dr. Little will be presenting a lecture on his 2016 book, Us versus Them: The United States, the Middle East, and the Rise of the Green Threat. Dr. Little describes the theme of an “us versus them” mentality which he places at the center of American society and foreign policy. This started with the “Red Threat” of the Native Americans, who were perceived by settlers to have “mounted the most sinister challenge”. Soon this progressed to the Founding Fathers, who identified the existential threat of European Monarchism as their great opponent. Dr. Little describes an unwavering tendency for American political actors and society at large to maintain this binary mentality in which Americans are pitted against a demonized threat.
 
Moving into the latter half of the 19th century, the “Yellow Peril” set Asians as a convenient nemesis. It allowed for legalized discrimination against Asian immigrants and provided an atmosphere ripe and abundant with hate crimes against them. Later, 20th century Americans would rally against Nazis in World War Two. The United States’ post war position would situate us well to take actions abroad against the new Soviet Communist “Red Threat” as well as oppressive domestic actions in response to the internal “Red Scare.” By the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, this tendency to view an “other” as the antithesis of the American and the American ideal has pointed the needle directly towards America’s most contemporary “them” – Islam. Islam has formed the new “Green Threat.” Dr. Little makes numerous references to the concept of a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which stereotyping a group as the enemy (rather than identifying more comprehensive and nuanced reasons for conflicts) ipso facto results in a breakdown in relationships in which the group becomes the enemy. This becomes apparent when preemptive military or political action creates actual conflict in place of perceived conflict. The concept of the “Green Threat” in the American psyche will be the focus of his presentation, a portion of which is informally titled “A Short History of Islamophobia from Reagan to Trump.” Spoiler alert: Steve Bannon may or may not be portrayed as Darth Vader…
 
In 1985, the same year that the UConn History Department initiated the Foreign Policy Seminar, Dr. Little published Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War. In 1986, UConn’s own Dr. Frank Costigliola (then at the University of Rhode Island) published a review of Malevolent Neutrality in The Journal of American History. He emphasized the importance of how Dr. Little shed light on the United States’ purposeful neglect of the left leaning Spanish republic when they called for aid. The republic, “turned increasingly to the Soviet Union, thereby adding credence to Anglo-Saxon suspicions that the republic had always leaned towards communism.” Dr. Little’s most recent book, Us Versus Them, provides structural integrity to the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy of othering. After identifying this theme over 30 years ago, it is exciting to see how Dr. Little has built upon it, and how after three decades this conversation among scholars is continuing.