This illustrated talk will focus on what a wide variety of women who lived during the Third Reich -- from righteous Gentiles to Nazi party members, from countesses to Hausfrauen, from farm women to anti-aircraft gunners -- disclosed about their personal experiences in recollections offered decades later. Their reactions -- both during the Third Reich […]

Meg Jacobs is the author of the prize-winning Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2005); Julian Zelizer's most recent book is On Capital Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000 (2004). They are joint editors of The Democratic Experience: New Directions in American Political History (2003). Sponsored by the Program in […]

UCSB History Professor Paul Spickard will read from and sign copies of his new book, which revolutionizes our understanding of the place and meaning of immigration in US history.

Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman archaeological research in Greece and Turkey has traditionally been overwhelmingly weighted toward the excavation of monumental structures in urban centers. This work has in turn been the focus of attempts to use archaeological evidence to describe the context of early Christianity. The result has been a tendency to raise the social […]

Professor Mike Osborne lectures on the life, ideas and legacy of Charles Darwin. Darwin is almost 200 years old and his most popular work, The Origin of Species of 1859, is still talked about and still causing controversy. Come and find out why Darwin still matters, and join us afterwards for birthday cake to celebrate […]

Tom Sugrue is best known for his highly influential The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), which won the Bancroft Prize in History, among other awards. He has also written important essays and books on W.E.B. DuBois, affirmative action, deindustrialization, and 20th century unionism. Sponsored by the Program in Work, Labor and Political Economy and […]

Professor Stager will present the annual Hebrew Bible lecture, sponsored by the UCSB Department of Religious Studies and by Westmont College.

The language and conceptualization of love take for granted a supernatural element. From antiquity to today, we acknowledge the irresistible force of love by attributing to it the character of sorcery. We speak of an infatuated person as spellbound, entranced, enchanted, beguiled, charmed, or even bewitched by the object of desire. To fall in love […]

A new play by Robert Potter, UCSB professor emeritus of drama, "Last Days of the Empire" is set amid the ruins of Cyrene in Roman North Africa. It interweaves characters from the 5th century AD, World War II, and present-day Libya. "Plays always have to be about the present as well as the past," says […]

“To resist,” from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them. In her lecture, Claudia Koonz will discuss the appeal of the Nazis’ mandate to “Love only they neighbor who is like thyself.” Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Koonz will explore the moral […]