It is often believed that the modern scientific study of race first emerged in and around the Enlightenment. During this time the study of natural history reached an unprecedented level of maturity and sophistication due largely to the discovery of novel plants, animals, and humans in the New World, and the increasing influence of materialist […]
History tells war stories. Memory recalls them. Some war stories are true; some are not. Of many it’s hard to say. “War in History and Memory” will tell a few war stories–true, mythic, and false–from Troy through Afghanistan. Sponsored by the 2012-2013 IHC series Fallout: In the Aftermath of War. John Talbott is Professor of […]
Come hear Princeton University historian Michael D. Gordin give an engaging public lecture on the "Pseudoscience Wars" and the birth of the scientific fringe. ???; hm 8/14/12
In this talk, Walton will discuss how the concept of reciprocity (in its reified, noun form réciprocité) emerged in the Enlightenment and was invoked to work through modern problems: political economy, rights, and citizenship. It was in the twentieth century that the term fell out of the modern/democratic lexicon to become associated with pre-modern societies. […]
"Experience, Imagination, and the Body of Ghosts: Examples from Ancient China" Poo Mu-chou Chinese University of Hong Kong What does a ghost look like? Does a ghost possess a body? How do we know it is a ghost? This talk attempts to answer these questions by using textual evidence from Ancient China. Using stories and […]
Through textual, visual, and interactive, virtual world-based analysis, this talk will examine and re-evaluate the visual argumentation employed during one of the most critical moments of image manipulation at Rome, the aristocratic funeral of the 2nd century BCE. Part of the presentation will take place within a multi-user, interactive virtual world. Attendees from the UCSB […]
Instruction begins on Monday. hm 1/4/13
On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation became law. Conceived as a pragmatic measure to hasten the end of a bloody civil war, the Proclamation declared millions of slaves to be “forever free.” Americans naturally identify this momentous event with Abraham Lincoln, who became widely known as “The Great Emancipator.” While Lincoln undoubtedly played a […]
In 2008, an unusual 17th-century Chinese wall map of East Asia surfaced in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, bearing almost no resemblance to any previous Chinese map. Were it not for its perfect provenance, it might have been dismissed as a fake. But it wasn't: it was simply drawn according to a completely different cartographic […]
In his new book, The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and mega-best-selling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, takes us on a mesmerizing journey into our rapidly vanishing past. Drawing on his fieldwork in New Guinea as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian and other cultures, Diamond explores how traditional […]