History Club Weekly Meetings
2020-05-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-06-04 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-06-11 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-06-18 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-06-25 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-07-02 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-07-09 19:00 - 21:00, 2020-07-16 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) and 12 more dates | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

History Department Awards Ceremony
2020-06-05 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us in honoring the recipients of this year’s History Associates and Department of History Awards.
You can join the ceremony via this zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/9444747636

History Department Graduation
2020-06-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department in a virtual celebration of graduating undergraduates and graduates! Use this Zoom link to join: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/98074114836

Annual Gender and Sexualities Graduate Student Workshop: Zoom Edition
2020-06-19 09:30 - 13:00
* For the Zoom link, email jhenderson@history.ucsb.edu.

9:30 AM – 9:45 AM – INTRODUCTIONS

9:45 AM – 10:45 AM – SESSION A
“Women, Children, the Idle, and the Infirm”: Making Mormon Silk Work in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Sasha Coles, History, UC Santa Barbara
This paper gives shape to the discourse and labors that facilitated the Mormon silk project in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. After members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints colonized the Great Basin region of the North American West in the late 1840s, church president and prophet Brigham Young tasked his followers with building a self-sufficient economy. He and other church authorities extolled the benefits of manufacturing iron, wheat, wool, cotton, silk, and other commodities at home. Their commentary about the ease with which “idle” household members could tend mulberry trees and feed silkworms in their “spare time” replicated widespread nineteenth-century ideas assumptions about the invisibility of domestic labor and the desire to extract productive working hours from “dependents,” namely women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Chapter 1 locates this boosterism alongside the on-the-ground experiences of people who made silk work 1850s and 1860s. Mormon women and children did most of the planting, pruning, feeding, killing, cleaning, reeling, and spinning required to make silk work. This chapter challenges the historiographical celebration of Mormon economic life as a radical, exceptional communitarian experiment. This study of the silk project reveals a gendered understanding of and experience with work that fell in line with nineteenth-century industrial capitalist ideology.

10:45 AM – 11:00 AM – COMFORT COFFEE BREAK

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM – SESSION B
Between Heaven and Empire: Esther Fahmy Wissa’s Advocacy in Interwar Egypt
Amy Fallas, History, UC Santa Barbara
This paper considers the long durée of Egyptian nationalist Esther Fahmy Wissa’s advocacy and examines how she became an important political liaison between Egypt and Britain during the 1930s. Wissa’s bold advocacy platform and mediation of diplomatic negotiations in the interwar period drew from her experiences in Christian Coptic communal politics at the turn of the twentieth century and her role in Egypt’s women’s movement following the Revolution of 1919. Utilizing archival material from Egypt, England, and the United States, this paper traces how Wissa fused Christian, national, and transnational solidarities to challenge the domestic and international political conditions of her time.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – ZOOM LUNCH

Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture: Sergey Saluschev, "Reluctant Abolitionists: Slavery, the Slave Trade and Abolition in the 19th-Century Caucasus"
2020-06-27 16:00 - 17:30 | CA, United States
History Associates presents the seventh annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Sergey Saluschev. He will present on his dissertation topic, “Reluctant Abolitionists: Slavery, the Slave Trade and Abolition in the 19th-Century Caucasus.”
This talk will focus on the slave trade in the Russian-ruled Caucasus between 1801 and 1917 and draws upon such primary sources as letters, petitions, slave sale deeds, and official correspondence. Although the tsarist state sought–at least rhetorically–to stamp out slavery in the empire’s peripheral regions, it paradoxically upheld serfdom. The Caucasus nevertheless remained a crucial hub for slave markets serving the Middle East. The speaker will describe the geographic scope of the trade, its variegated institutions, and the attempts by Russian imperial authorities to reform it. He will present previously unknown stories of a number of individual slaves which reveal hidden and often poignant dimensions of slavery in the region. His conclusion demonstrates how the legacies of slavery in the Caucasus left a clearly legible mark on the political discourse about the future of slavery in the United States and on the American popular entertainment industry.
This year’s Van Gelderen Lecture will take place as a Zoom webinar. Join us for this exciting event at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/97047834257.

Stuart Tyson Smith, "Black Pharaohs? Egyptological Bias, Racism, and Egypt and Nubia as African Civilizations"
2020-09-22 13:00 | Zoom, CA
Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research welcomes UCSB Professor of Anthropology (and History Department affiliate faculty member) Stuart Tyson Smith to the W.E.B. Du Bois Virtual Lecture Series. On Tuesday, September 22 Professor Smith will present his Zoom lecture “Black Pharaohs? Egyptological Bias, Racism, and Egypt and Nubia as African Civilizations.” Register in advance for this free event here. Please note that the lecture begins at 4:00 Eastern/1:00 Pacific time.
Professor Smith’s research centers on the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Nubia with a theoretical focus on the social and ethnic dynamics of colonial encounters and the origins of the Napatan Kushite state, whose rulers became Pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th Dynasty. He has published on the dynamics of Egyptian imperialism and royal ideology, the use of sealings in administration, death and burial in ancient Egypt and Nubia, and the ethnic, social and economic dynamics of intercultural interaction between ancient Egypt and Nubia. He has also participated in and led archaeological expeditions to Egypt and since 1997 to Sudanese Nubia, where he co-directs the UCSB-Purdue University Tombos expedition to the third cataract of the Nile. This research has been funded by multiple grants from the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. In addition to fieldwork, he is also engaged in a long-term study and write-up of the UCLA excavations conducted by the late Alexander Badawy at the fortress of Askut in Sudanese Nubia. In a new line of research, Smith applies a postcolonial approach to modern scholarly and popular views of ancient Egypt as not truly African and Nubia as its subordinate, confronting the intersection between racism and longstanding academic and political bias. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Smith has published three books, Askut in Nubia: The Economics and Ideology of Egyptian Imperialism in the Second Millennium BC, Valley of the Kings (for children), and Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire. In 1993, he took a break from academia as Egyptological Consultant for the hit MGM movie Stargate, commenting on the script and recreating spoken ancient Egyptian for the film. He returned to Hollywood consulting in 1998 and 2000 for the Universal remake of The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, and most recently for 2018’s web production Stargate Origins: Catherine. Professor Smith holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

New Majors' Meeting
2020-09-29 11:00 - 12:30
Please joins us at the annual History Department New Majors’ Meeting! This meeting is great for incoming freshmen and transfer students, and any student that is new to our department. View the attached flyer for more details, and use this Zoom link to join: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/95769465508

New Majors’ Meeting 2020 (1)

Conference: Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts
2020-10-01 - 2020-10-03 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts proposes new considerations of realism on stage. Since its association with 19th-century innovations in European and American drama, theatrical realism has largely remained limited to Euro-American definitions. We explore conventions of realism in culturally-specific locations and times across East Asia, articulating alternative histories of realism that extend from the premodern into the present. Through our individual inquiries, we aim to broaden the term’s analytic power and shed collective light on the diversity and versatility of this important representational mode. The conference will end with a play reading performed by LAUNCH PAD, UCSB.
View the complete schedule and conference information at www.realismseastasia.com. You can download the informational flyer here: Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts.

John Majewski, Living Democracy in Capitalism's Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery
2020-10-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom, CA
REGISTER NOW

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link
In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of slavery. While continuing to attack slavery’s physical cruelty, Black abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s increasingly highlighted the “mental darkness” of slavery, focusing on the systematic denial of literacy, learning, and creativity. Through their own creative labor, Black abolitionists made a compelling case for racial equality. The fate of Black creative labor after the Civil War, though, demonstrated the limits of using creativity as a way of obtaining citizenship, and raises important questions about how we in the 21st century “live democracy” in a society that valorizes creativity amidst growing inequality and systemic racism. Audience Q&A will follow.
John Majewski is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and Professor in the Department of History. His areas of specialization include American economic, social, and legal history; Southern history; and the U.S. Civil War. He is the author of A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Imagination of the Confederate Nation (UNC Press, 2009), and numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series
REGISTER NOW. ASL and Spanish interpretation will be available. To view ASL interpretation, please attend the webinar on a desktop computer.

Decolonizing California through Critical Mission Studies: The Reclaiming Homelands Project
2020-10-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Click link to register:, CA, United States
Ami Admire, Director, Rincon Youth Storytellers, Amrah Salomón J., President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (English) UC Riverside, and Ross Frank (Ethnic Studies) UC San Diego
Admire and Salomón will speak about an intergenerational cultural revitalization project bringing youth and elders together to revitalize Indigenous knowledge and training indigenous youth in conducting historical research to reclaim indigenous place names among the Kumeyaay, Payomkawichum (Luiseño), and Cupeño communities. Frank will contextualize this project within the larger collective of Critical Mission Studies, a multi-campus research effort at the University of California.

For more info on the multi-campus project, see https://criticalmissionstudies.ucsd.edu

To register in advance for this webinar and view recommended readings visit the Department Colloquium in Public History page.

EAP Information Session
2020-10-12 16:00 - 17:00
Are you interested in going abroad and taking major courses? Come and learn about how that’s possible with the Education Abroad Program (EAP). Please see meeting details on the flyer below.
