Dexter Gabriel’s Recently Published Book, Jubilee’s Experiment

Posted on by

A huge congratulations to Prof. Dexter Gabriel on the release of his new book, Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism, which examines how the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolitionism and African American citizenship from the 1830s through the 1860s to argue that the success of the formerly enslaved in the West Indies served as a focal point for North American struggles against slavery.

Prof. Gabriel also appeared on the Why We Argue podcast for a discussion on, “Seeing Truth in the Speculative,” where he discusses his relationship to truth and memory in both his fiction and non-fiction writing,

Dexter Gabriel, assistant professor of history, UConn

 

Graduate Students Spotlight

Posted on by

Join us in congratulating our past and present UConn History graduate students on their wonderful achievements!

 

Graduate student Constance Holden has been awarded the 2023-2025 UConn Greenhouse Studios Graduate Assistantship to Support Diversity in Digital Humanities.

Constance Holden, graduate student

Former graduate student and current New England Air Museum Curator Nick Hurley (MA ’15) has been named the 2023 U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH) Scholar in Residence.  This program is a professional development opportunity established in 2021 for Army National Guard and Reserve officers possessing advanced degrees in history. Participants spend one year on the rotating faculty of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point and another as a member of the CMH staff in Washington, D.C.

Britney Murphy has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of Alabama – Birmingham.
Britney Murphy, graduate student
Nicole Breault has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas El Paso.

Fiona Vernal Awarded Partnership Grant for Public History Work

Posted on by

UConn History and Africana Studies Professor, Fiona Vernal was awarded a $200,000 Partnership Grant from Connecticut Humanities for the expansion of her public history program, “An Integrated Framework for Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories” (or EPOCH), she founded in 2015. EPOCH fosters collaboration between UConn undergraduates and faculty, as well as community organizations and archivists to highlight both Connecticut and global histories. Past projects include child labor exploitation in global chocolate production and an 80-year history of housing discrimination in Hartford.  This recent partnership with Connecticut Humanities will allow EPOCH to collect community histories across Connecticut beginning with Bloomfield, Windsor, and Enfield. Prof. Vernal’s work and new partnership with Connecticut Humanities are featured in the UConn Today article, “EPOCH Shares Community Histories, From Connecticut to Côte d’Ivoire.”

Fiona Vernal, associate professor of history, UConn

Nuchi nu Miji – Okinawa’s Water of Life Screening at Avery Point

Posted on by

The UConn Avery Point Campus will host a special screening of the film, Nuchi nu Miji – Okinawa’s Water of Life at the Avery Point Campus in the auditorium on March 21st from 3-6 pm, organized by UConn History Prof. and Maritime Studies Affiliate Faculty member, Alexis Dudden. The film portrays Okinawans’ struggle for justice in one of the worst environmental catastrophes in modern Japanese history, where since 2016 nearly one-third of the population’s drinking water has been contaminated with military PFAS “Forever Chemicals.” It features interviews, archive footage and documents obtained via the US Freedom of Information Act, to uncover the truth of what has been happening in Okinawa, and the struggle of residents who feel ignored by both Tokyo and Washington. 

Both of the filmmakers, Shimabukuro Natsuko and Jon Mitchell, will also be present to meet.

  • Shimabukuro Natsuko is a director with Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Corporation. Her documentaries about Okinawan history, politics, and environmental problems have won Japan’s top TV prizes, including the prestigious Galaxy Award. She is a member of Waseda University’s Institute for the Next Generation of Journalism and Media.
  • Jon Mitchell is a correspondent with Okinawa Times and the author of four books about Okinawa’s environment, including Poisoning the Pacific (Rowman & Littlefield), a winner in the 2021 US Society of Environmental Journalists’ book awards. He is a visiting researcher at Meiji Gakuin University’s International Peace Research Institute, Tokyo.

Prof. Dudden’s research includes work on modern Japan, modern Korea, and international history and she is currently writing a book, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020, about Japan’s territorial disputes and the changing meaning of islands in international law.

Find more information about the event here.

Alexis Dudden, professor of history, UConn

Kennan: A Life between Worlds

Posted on by

Frank Costigliola, Author

Princeton University Press, 2023

Abstract

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy—and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola’s authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.

Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin’s tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about—one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Kennan A Life Between Worlds book cover.

Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism

Posted on by

Dexter J. Gabriel, Author

Cambridge University Press, 2023

Description

Dexter J. Gabriel's Jubilee's Experiment is a thorough examination of how the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolition and African American citizenship in the US from the 1830s through the 1860s. It analyzes this public discourse, created by black and white abolitionists, and African Americans more generally in antebellum America, as both propaganda and rhetoric. Simultaneously, Gabriel interweaves the lived experiences of former slaves in the West Indies – their daily acts of resistance and struggles for greater freedoms – to further augment but complicate this debate. An important and timely intervention, Jubilee's Experiment argues that the measured success of former slaves in the West Indies became a crucial focal point in the struggle against slavery in antebellum North America.

Jubilee's Experiment book cover

Brendan Kane Hosts “Dialogues for Common Ground”

Posted on by

Brendan Kane a professor in the Departments of History and of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, is also the Director of the Democracy and Dialogues initiative (DDI) at the Dodd Center for Human Rights. In 2017 he pioneered the Encounters dialogue series that created a model for community dialogues across Connecticut. A recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant and the Connecticut Humanities Council enabled Kane to expand his previous work into a new conversation series, “Dialogues for Common Ground: American Identity and Connecticut’s Civic Reconstruction.”  which allows community members to work through primary source documents in small groups, discuss later in a larger group, and then finish with an expert Q&A.

Read more about this program in “Dodd Impact Team Seeks ‘A More Perfect Union’ Through Community Conversation” a recent article by UConn Today.

Brendan Kane, Professor of History, University of Connecticut

History Alum Kate Aguilar on Black Quarterbacks in Super Bowl

Posted on by

UConn History Alum Kate Aguilar, now an Assistant Professor in History at Gustavus Adolphus College, contributed a thought-provoking piece to the Washington Post about race and football ahead of the first contest between two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl, “It took until 2023 for two Black QBs to start in a Super Bowl. Here’s why.” The article explores how narratives about Black people during slavery “being athletically superior but intellectually inferior” have impacted where white owners and white coaches have allowed Black players to participate on the football field. Her hope is that the attention to this historic moment will draw attention to the barriers placed on Black athletes historically and in the present, which will “help fans better understand how slavery — and the noxious, racist ideas that came with it — still affect how we see race, sports and leadership in the 21st century.”

Kate Aguilar’s research focuses on the intersection of Black student activism and the Black athlete at the University of Miami (Fla.)

“Liberty and Slavery at America’s Founding” with Manisha Sinha

Posted on by

Professor Manisha Sinha, History Department, University of Connecticut

Prof. Manisha Sinha, the James L. James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, and a leading scholar on the history of slavery and abolition, will be participating in a program through the National Constitution Center on “Liberty and Slavery at America’s Founding.” The program will take place Tuesday, February 28th, and will run from at 7pm ET. 

Prof. Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition will join historians Harold Holzer, author of several books on President Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America and Edward Larson for a discussion on Larson’s recent book American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. They will explore the paradox of liberty and slavery between Revolutionary America through the Civil War.

The National Constitution Center is hosting this free event and online registration is open.

 

Frank Costigliola’s New George Kennan Biography Garners Praise

Posted on by

Frank Costigliola, professor of history, UConn

University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Frank Costigliola‘s recently published biography Kennan: A Life between Worlds. His work offers a new picture of historian and diplomat George Kennan, whose foreign policy of containment of the Soviet Union fueled the Cold War, but who later would spend the next fifty years trying to end it.

Read about it in Michael Hirsh’s Foreign Policy piece, “Is Cold War Inevitable?” and also in Foreign Affairs, “George Kennan’s Warning on Ukraine.”

Visit KPFA to watch his interview with Mitch Jeserich on Letters and Politics, “George Kennan: The Cold War Architect Who Opposed the War.”

Or check out the video below.