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Elephants in Late Antique Iran: Symbols of Kingship and Warfare

The Persians used elephants in their military from the Achaemenid to the Safavid period. The talk discusses the importance of elephants forSasanian royal ideology as a symbol of kingship, and their use against the Romans in Late Antiquity. Touraj Daryaee is Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at […]

Senior Honors Colloquium

Honors Colloquium to Show Disease, Witchcraft, Murder by Dyne Suh and Nate Gelman, excerpted from Historia, May 2012 From televangelists to venereal disease, dictators to witchs' teats, 15 seminarians tested the full powers of their creativity and skill to compose theses examining a wide array of edgy paper topics stretching from antiquity to the Middle […]

Missionary Witchcrafting African Being: Cultural Disarmament

This paper examines 19th-20th century European missionary cultural attitudes, discourses and practices and their impact on African consciousness and socio-cultural security, read primarily through the prism of performative cultures (primarily song) in colonial Zimbabwe (1890s-1970s). For decades since their advent on the African continent, European missionaries rabidly assaulted African cultures, regarding them as special manifestations […]

Copyright, Piracy, and the Artist: Music and the Politics of Culture in Postcolonial Mali

The Orfalea Center Seminar Room is1005 Robertson Gym (detached office wing in front of main Ocean Road entrance) In Mali today, appeals to confront the “scourge” (fléau) of music piracy and affirm the intellectual property of professional musicians resound within the public sphere. These debates echo anxieties about the social and economic value of the […]

Constructing Expertise. Body, Mind and Forensic Medicine in 19th century Dutch Cases of Rape and Infanticide

Whereas nowadays ‘expertise’ has become a problematic concept, especially in regard to the doubt expressed against scientists participating in the debate over climate change, the role this notion played in the past has hardly been researched. Specifically, the function of forensic medicine and psychiatry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is now starting to […]

History Awards Ceremony

History Associates President Ann Moore and the members of the UCSB History Associates Board invite the interested public to this year's History Awards Ceremony, which will be held on Thursday, June 7 at 4 p.m. in the McCune Conference Room on the 6th floor of the Humanities and Social Science Building (HSSB), with a reception […]

Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State

Eileen Boris's new book, Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, explains how law makers, health care administrators, government officials, labor organizers, and millions of working women have constructed a distinctively new and controversial occupational category out of which hundreds of thousands of workers have been organized. The […]

Labor’s Fate after Wisconsin

"Labor's Fate after Wisconsin," featuring Heather and Paul Booth. Both are long-time political activists. Heather Booth founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for organizers, and she has worked closely with labor groups and the Democratic Party to register millions of new minority voters, advance the AFL-CIO health care agenda and the Dodd/Frank financial reform […]