Elizabeth Buettner, "Postcolonial Migration Meets European Integration: Britain in Comparative Perspective"
2019-10-22 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Elizabeth Buettner, Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam, will present her paper “Postcolonial Migration Meets European Integration: Britain in Comparative Perspective” on Tuesday, October 22 at 4:00 in HSSB 4020.
How exceptional has Britain’s history of inward migration after 1945 been compared to that of other Western European countries? Like other former imperial powers, Britain became home to many peoples from its former colonies and Commonwealth, many of whom were not of European descent; moreover, like many of its continental neighbors Britain too attracted migrants from other European countries. How did common responses to newcomers from outside Europe resemble or differ from attitudes towards foreign Europeans, particularly those from within the European Economic Community/European Union? This paper will sketch out general issues and discuss changes over time, not least by comparing earlier decades to developments occurring after EU’s eastward enlargement since 2004 that have culminated in Brexit.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

Rosemarie Zagarri on "The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College"
2019-10-24 16:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
On October 24 at 4:00pm in HSSB 4080, Professor Rosemarie Zagarri of George Mason University will present a talk titled “The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College.” The event is free and open to the public.
This talk will examine the roots of the American system for electing its president and explore the possibility–as well as the feasibility–of changing the existing system. The origins of the Electoral College lay in a series of tumultuous conflicts at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At stake was not only what the presidency should entail but how the new chief executive should be elected. Memories of George III’s abuses of power haunted delegates. Fears of mob rule competed with anxieties over lodging too much power in the hands of a single individual. Representatives jealously guarded their own states’ prerogatives. The solution–the Electoral College–was a jerry-built compromise that satisfied no one completely.
Almost as soon as it went into operation, the flaws and defects of the Electoral College became evident. The emergence of a two-party political system intensified its structural weaknesses. Yet the system has endured. The question facing Americans today is: What can be done to remedy the inadequacies of the Electoral College?
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

Building a Green New Deal: Community, Coalition, Organizing for Environmental Justice: A Public Forum
2019-10-24 18:00 - 20:00 | HSSB 6020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In communities, classrooms, and protest sites across the country, people have embraced the call for a Green New Deal as a way of recognizing that climate change presents us with an unprecedented historic challenge—and the need for comprehensive and transformational reform. California’s Central Coast has a powerful tradition of grassroots activism to draw on in rising to the challenge, from the wide-ranging environmental movement sparked by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill to the multi-racial labor, immigrant and indigenous people’s rights organizations leading the struggle for economic justice region-wide. Together, these and allied organizations have formed the Central Coast Climate Justice Network, a regional coalition dedicated to developing a collective vision and coalitional strategy for achieving holistic and intersectional environmental justice in our region. Featuring presentations from Network member organizations, the aim of the forum is to launch a broad, publicly engaged conversation about the need for transformational thought and action in response to the challenges of climate change, and in the interest of a more equitable and resilient environmental future.
Co-sponsored by: The Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, Environmental Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Fund for Santa Barbara, and the Central Coast Climate Justice Network

History Club Weekly Meetings
2019-10-24 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-10-31 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-11-07 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-11-14 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-11-21 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-11-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-12-05 19:00 - 21:00, 2019-12-12 19:00 - 21:00 and 6 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.

Bernhard Rieger, "Making Society Work Again: Workfare in Transnational Context since the 1960s""
2019-10-25 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Bernhard Rieger (History, University of Leiden) will present “Making Society Work Again: Workfare in Transnational Context since the 1960s”.” Rieger’s research examines European history within a comparative and transnational framework. His publications include Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (2009) and The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (2013).

Steve Zipperstein, "The Impeachment Wars: What Lies Ahead"
2019-10-29 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Trump impeachment saga has gained startling momentum in recent days. As the proceedings accelerate, fascinating legal and policy questions arise. Can the president pardon people who have committed crimes at his behest? Can he pardon himself? Does impeachment require proof of a federal crime? Is the Senate required to hold an actual trial? Can nonfederal legal authorities—like the New York State Attorney General or the Manhattan District Attorney—bring criminal charges against the president while he remains in office? Steve Zipperstein explores these and other issues as he contemplates legal and political prospects in the coming weeks and months.
Steve Zipperstein is the former Chief Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles, where he served alongside current Congressman Adam Schiff. Zipperstein also served as Counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno, and as Counselor to then-Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller. Zipperstein reported directly to former and current Attorney General William Barr for more than a decade during their private sector careers. Following his tenure as a federal prosecutor, Zipperstein served as the Chief Legal Officer of Verizon Wireless and of BlackBerry. Zipperstein currently teaches in the Global Studies and Public Policy departments at UCLA and is a Senior Fellow at UCLA’s Center for Middle East Development. He has also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University. His forthcoming book, Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Trials of Palestine, will be published by Routledge in 2020.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

Barbara Walker, "Fathers and Sons and the Origins of Cold War ‘Area Studies’ in the United States"
2019-10-30 16:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Barbara Walker is Professor of Russian history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has published on a broad range of historical topics in the area of Russian and Soviet intellectual life and its economic foundations, social organization and culture.
More recently, she has branched out to explore the nature of expertise, specifically “information expertise,” in her current book project, A War of Experts: Soviet and American Knowledge Networks in Cold War Competition and Collaboration. Her book will present the intertwined stories of a variety of lively and committed “information experts” in the Cold War United States and Soviet Union, including early electronic computer designers, U.S.-Soviet research exchange scholars, journalists and Soviet dissidents. Information professionals in the area of intelligence make their appearance too. The book focuses on the efforts of these ambitious, often passionate “experts” to multiply their numbers and to expand the influence of their expertise in this period. To accomplish these goals, they built on networks and traditions reaching back into the 19th century, in which lay the origins of the professionalization of expertise in many areas.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

Brad Bouley, "To Catch a Witch: Gender, Politics, and Persecution in the European Past"
2019-10-31 12:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
As a special Halloween event, Professor Brad Bouley will present “To Catch a Witch: Gender, Politics, and Persecution in the European Past.” Join us at noon on October 31 in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020) for knowledge, pizza, and drinks. Undergraduates are especially welcome.

Tasting History - A Parents and Family Weekend Event!
2019-11-01 13:00 - 14:30 | HSSB 6020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the History Department this Friday, November 1st for our annual Parents and Family Weekend event! This year, the history department will be doing something a little different…
Tasting History

Come hear about the ways in which historians at UCSB study and teach about the history of food and drinks around the world. Sample historical recipes, browse through old cookbooks and advertisements, and talk to faculty and graduate students who argue that what we ingest can reveal insight into how ideas of community and family, nations, economies and empire, health and bodies have changed over time.

When: Friday, November 1st 2019, 1-2:30pm
Where: McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020

UCSB History Associates present: What Was "Royalty" in Early Modern England
2019-11-02 14:00 | Karpeles Manuscript Library, 21 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA, United States
The wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in June 2016 stimulated a new round of interest in and curiosity about the concept of “royalness.” Visitors to the Karpeles Library asked such questions as “will Meghan Markle ever be considered a queen,” “who gives titles of nobility” (princes, princesses, dukes, earls, etc.), and “how did royals get there?” This talk will compare the powers and position of Queen Elizabeth I, her Tudor predecessors, and some of her Stuart successors. Elizabeth II, the current queen, has very little political power, but in medieval and early modern Europe, monarchs had extensive prerogatives. That said, their power was by no means as absolute and complete as many people now think. They were believed to rule by “divine right,” a phrase which is often taken to mean they could do utter anything they wanted to do. Yet in fact, their powers were in practice limited in a variety of ways that require careful analysis if we are to understand the nature of royalty in a period when monarchical governments controlled all of Europe (except in the Republic of Venice and the Dutch Republic). Our speaker is Sears McGee, Professor Emeritus of History. He retired in 2018 after 46 years of teaching at UCSB, including 6 years as department chair. His courses explored the history of Europe (with an emphasis on England) from the High Middle Ages to the French Revolution. His books include a co-authored work, The West Transformed: a History of Western Civilization (Harcourt, 2000) and ‘An Industrious Mind’: the Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford University Press, 2015).

Eric Rauchway, "A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941"
2019-11-08 13:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Eric Rauchway (History, University of California Davis) will present “A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941.” Rauchway is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2003), The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015), and Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal (2018).

Einstein’s War: How World War I Made Relativity (Matt Stanley, NYU)
2019-11-13 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for the next Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture…13 November 2019 at 4PM
About the talk: Einstein’s ascent to worldwide celebrity was, in large part, not his own doing. The 1919 confirmation of the German Einstein’s theory of general relativity by British astronomers soon after the end of the First World War made him an emblem of how science could rise above nationalism and petty patriotism. But in fact international science – and relativity with it – was nearly shattered by the war. It was only the dedicated efforts of pacifist scientists, chiefly A.S. Eddington, that pulled both Einstein and his theory from behind the trenches and onto the front pages of newspapers
around the globe.

About the Speaker: Matthew Stanley teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics, and the history of science and is interested in the connections between science and the wider culture. He is the author of Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I (Dutton, 2019), the story of how pacifism and friendship led to scientific revolution. He has also written Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago 2007) and Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon (Chicago 2014), which explore the complex relationships between science and religion in history.
A flyer describing the talk can be found here…

David Stein, "Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979"
2019-11-22 13:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, David Stein (African American Studies, University of California Los Angeles) will present “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979.” A UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Stein is the author of the forthcoming book Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986.

Lisa Jacobson, "A Taste of Success: Whiskey Drinking, Masculine Identities, and the Sensory Imagination in the Postwar US"
2019-11-22 15:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join the Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster for a paper workshop on Lisa Jacobson‘s “A Taste of Success: Whiskey Drinking, Masculine Identities, and the Sensory Imagination in the Postwar US.” The event will take place in HSSB 4020 on November 22 at 3:00. To obtain the paper in advance, email Jarett Henderson at jhenderson@history.ucsb.edu.
Please note that this event was originally scheduled for an earlier date, so you may have seen posters with an incorrect date and time.

Queen Victoria and the Making of the Modern Monarchy
2019-12-07 14:00 - 15:30 | Karpeles Manuscript Library, 21 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA, United States
In this talk, Dr. Erika Rappaport, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at UCSB and historian of British consumer culture, explores how Queen Victoria became the first media monarch. Queen Victoria was unmatched in bringing the monarchy into the modern age, becoming the subject of intense media attention, criticism and adoration. In her reign we can see the first hints of what has become the modern role of the monarchy as cultural icon and celebrity.
Erika Rappaport is Professor of History and Department Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton 2017); Shopping For Pleasure: Women and the Making of London’s West End (Princeton 2000); and is co-editor of Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury 2015), and is the editor of the forthcoming A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury 2020).
Original Manuscripts related to British Royalty will be on display.

Susan Lederer, "'Send My Body to the Medical College': Alternative Afterlives in Turn of the Century America"
2020-01-09 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Dr. Susan Lederer, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin Madison will be giving a talk on Thursday, January 9 at 5:30 pm entitled “‘Send My Body to the Medical College’: Alternative Afterlives in Turn of the Century America.”
In 1876 American and English newspapers reported the extraordinary will made by an American woman living in London. Inspired by Bentham’s 1832 bequest of his body, Susan Fletcher Smith approached the Royal College of Surgeons with the proposal that, upon her death, her body be “completely dissected in the most thorough manner known to science.” Moreover, she stipulated that preference be given to persons of the female sex who wished to inspect the body in the various stages of dissection. The President of the College agreed to accept her proposal. Smith’s donation was one of some 450 reported in the press in the years between 1870 and 1940. This talk explores how donating one’s remains to a medical institution was transformed in this period from a bizarre and macabre eccentricity into an exemplar of enlightened corporeal philanthropy.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

History Department Open House, sponsored by HIST Club/Phi Alpha Theta
2020-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 | 4041 HSSB, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The HIST Club of enthusiastic history majors and minors would like to invite you all to an Open House on Wed., Jan. 22, 4-5:30. That day is the day of our first faculty meeting so we are hoping you can stick around to grab some refreshments and chat with your students. They are super eager to meet you and other interested students and hope you can attend. Just as an FYI — we have some 20-25 active members and more than 50 members registered on campus. We are also in the process of preparing a student lounge! Partners and children are welcome. Please contact Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (mchavezgarcia@history.ucsb.edu) for more information.
When: Wed., Jan 22, 4-5:30 pm
Where: 4081 HSSB (across from 4020 HSSB)
Why: To promote and share our love of history!
