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 […]
Ancient Corinth was the first, major long-term excavation undertaken in Greece by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Begun in 1896, these investigations have continued with few interruptions until today. A commercial powerhouse, Corinth has been overshadowed by Athens, about which a great deal more is known in the ancient sources. A review […]
Kruse is the author of the prize-winning White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2006) and the editor, most recently, of The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012). His new book project is “One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity and the Roots of the Religious Right.” His paper can be […]
Dr. Harper's talk centers on the identity of Susan Bonga, who was a member of the Pillager band of Ojibwe Indians residing in northern Minnesota and the daughter of a prominent fur trader of mixed African-Ojibwe ancestry. A moment of crisis in her life is analyzed by discussing the contexts of the federal “civilizing” program, […]
Theater of War is an innovative project that presents professional actors reading scenes from ancient Greek drama about soldiers returning from war. Following the reading, a panel of veterans and community members will offer their personal responses to the play in order to initiate an audience discussion about the psychological, physical, emotional and social challenges […]
Captain Cook’s encounter with Hawaiian society in 1779 was the first to document a society of laborers, craftsmen, and a chiefly elite: a society that anthropologists of today classify as an archaic state. Research on the evolution of that state is ongoing in Hawaii, and currently a multidisciplinary team including archaeologists, ecologists, soil scientists, demographers, […]
The last decade has seen the elaboration of histories of trans exclusion from feminist venues, and also the institutionalization of the term "cis." Both pose binary oppositions between transgender and not-trans that emphasize trans bodies as the critical signifier of gender identity. In this talk, I first consider narrative tropes of 1970s feminist exclusion of […]
AbstractShortly before the release of id Software’s computer game, DOOM, at the end of 1993, id released a news release announcing the game and promising to “push back the boundaries of what was thought possible” on contemporary computers. The press release is a remarkable litany of innovations in technology, gameplay, distribution, and content creation. It […]