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Nuclear Weapons and Humanity’s Future

11th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future Daniel Ellsberg is America’s best known whistleblower for his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a move that harkened an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and exposed government deceit and illegality at the highest levels. In the 1960s, he became a […]

The Cold War, Human Rights, and Self-Determination

During the Cold War countless peoples and movements in both the decolonizing world and the advanced industrial states mobilized under the banner of self-determination and sought to institutionalize its status as a human right in international law. In this talk, focusing on the end of European empire in the 1970s, Professor Simpson explains why self-determination […]

From Material Exchange in Eurasia to Liberating Appropriations in World Art

This talk will be divided into two parts. The first part will give two case studies of material exchange in Eurasia during the first millennium B.C. In the second part the implications of these examples of material exchange for the study of Chinese art will be given, using illustrations mainly from later Chinese art, after […]

Civitates Permixtae: Cicero, Arendt, Augustine

This talk is sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program, and the UC Multi-Campus Research Group on Late Antiquity. jwil 18.i.2012

“John Quincy Adams Pimped for the Tsar!” Political Rhetoric in 19th-Century America

Think America’s political discourse is nastier than it’s ever been? Think again. According to History Prof. John Majewski, the political scene now is downright genteel compared to what it was like in the days when America was young. Come hear what politicos said about each other in that era when Prof. Majewski speaks on “Political […]

Films of the Cold War: Countdown to Looking Glass

For over forty years, "Looking Glass" was the nickname of the Airborne Command Post--an essential element in the command and control of the Strategic Air Command's forces. This made-for-TV docudrama is a fictionalized account of how quickly a nuclear war could break out between the US and the Soviet Union over Middle East oil. This […]

New Discoveries in the Jewish and Early Christian Catacombs of Rome

The catacombs of ancient Rome form the single most important source of information concerning the rise of Christianity from an archaeological point of view. This lecture focuses on exciting new results produced by a science-based approach to these materials, as performed within the framework of a recently concluded international project based at Utrecht University in […]

From Imperial Capital to Polis: Sardis from the Lydians to the Hellenistic Period

Nicholas Cahill is Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Sardis Expedition. During the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the Lydians, a native Anatolian culture located in what is now western Turkey, established the first empire in this region since the Bronze Age. As they conquered Greek cities along […]

The Excavations at Sardis

Nicholas Cahill is Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Sardis Expedition. Please RSVP by March 6th by contacting Ryan Abrecht: ryanabrecht(at)umail.ucsb.edu Participants may wish to read the following article in preparation for the roundtable: N. Cahill "Mapping Sardis," in Love for Lydia: A Sardis Anniversary Volume Presented to […]

Theories and New Developments in Learning in History

Susannah McGowan, a Ph.D. candidate in Education, will be leading a discussion on teaching on Wednesday, March 14, at noon in HSSB 4020. Susannah will describe the some key theoretical ideas in the education literature that can be applied to history, and then discuss how how digital technology can be used to enhance learning in […]