Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Winter Quarter instruction begins
2011-01-03 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
Classes begin in Winter quarter.If you are enrolled in a discussion section that meets before the main lecture meets, you should still attend section that week.
See calendar link below for details.
hm 12/7/10

The White Rose, or: German Students against Hitler
2011-01-06 00:00
The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies cordially invitesyou to the
Tenth George J. Wittenstein Lecture
Christian Petry’s lecture explores the question whether remembering past
acts of resistance against tyranny–such as that of the Munich student group
in 1942-43–can provide inspiration to face today’s political challenges.
The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent/intellectual
resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University
of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an
anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943,
that called for active opposition to dictator Adolf Hitler’s regime.
The six core members of the group were arrested by the Gestapo (German
secret police) and they were executed by decapitation in 1943. The text of
their sixth leaflet was smuggled by Helmuth James Graf von Moltke out of
Germany through Scandinavia to the United Kingdom, and in July 1943
copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled “The
Manifesto of the Students of Munich.”
Christian Petry is the author of Studenten aufs Schafott: Die Weisse Rose
und ihr Scheitern, 1968 (Students under the Guillotine: The Defeat of the
White Rose). He has published books, articles and films on student
resistance in Nazi Germany, on intercultural education and communication,
and on curriculum development and educational reform.
After studying history and sociology at the Free University of Berlin,
Petry first worked as a teacher and sociologist at schools in southern Germany
before starting a project for vocational and social integration of foreign
youth in Weinheim, Germany. He has served as director of a project network
to support ethnic minorities (“Regionale Arbeitsstellen zur Förderung
ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher”) in eight cities of the Ruhr area,
as director of a European Community model project to overcome youth
unemployment in the city of Duisburg, and as executive director of the
Freudenberg Foundation whose objectives include the integration of
immigrant children and adolescents in German civil society and the defense
and promotion of democratic culture. Petry has also served as Chair at the
European Foundation Centre, Interest Group Youth and Education. Since 2010,
he has been executive director of the Stiftungs- und Fördergemeinschaft
Modellprojekte GmbH, Weinheim.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
hm 11/30/10, 1/4/11

Strategies for Defending Higher Education
2011-01-08 00:00
This counter-conference will take place during the annual Modern Language Convention in Los Angeles, January 8th, 2011 from 1-5 at Loyola Law School (919 Albany St, 4 block from the Mariott, in Merrifield Hall). While thousands of people will be meeting at the traditional convention, UC-AFT will hold a one-day event centered on discussing actual strategies for making higher education more just. Speakers will present short papers on topics like the death of tenure, the corporatization of the university, the possibilities of unionization, direct social action, the use and abuse of graduate students, organizing contingent faculty, and taking back shared governance.
Schedule:Remaking the University of California: 1:00-1:45: Catharine Liu, Chris Newfield, Joshua Clover
Defending the Humanities and Shared Governance: 1:45-2:30: Cary Nelson, Jeffrey Williams, Michelle Masse
Organizing Labor and the Academic Class War: 2:30-3:15: Marc Bousquet, Maria Maisto, Joe Berry
Graduate Students and Precarious Labor: 3:15-4:00: Annie McClanahan (Harvard, former UAW bargaining unit), Jasper Bernes (GSOC, UCB), Stephanie Seawell (GEO, UI Champaign Urbana), Kerry Pimblott (UI Champaign Urbana)
Quality, Access, and Affordability: 4:00-4:30: Murray Sperber, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Bob Samuels
Open Discussion on Strategies for Changing Higher Education: 4:30-4:55.
hm 12/10/10

Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture
2011-01-12 00:00
Jas’ Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.
This talk is sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Department of History.
jwil 02.xii.2010

America and the Holocaust
2011-01-18 00:00
Pierre Sauvage, award-winning documentary filmmaker and child survivor of the Holocaust, screens and discusses excerpts from his upcoming feature documentary And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille (2011), as well as his recent documentary short, Not Idly By–Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2010). His presentation addresses one of the enduring questions of the Shoah: What could have been done by the U.S. and its allies and by American Jews to save the Jews of Europe–and why wasn’t it done? Sauvage wrote, produced, and directed Weapons of the Spirit,which received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award honoring excellence in broadcast journalism and which is widely regarded as a seminal documentary on rescue during the Holocaust.
Profile of Filmmaker
Pierre Sauvage is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors. An Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sauvage is the President of the Chambon Foundation, which he founded in 1982. The Chambon Foundation was the first nonprofit educational foundation committed to exploring and communicating the necessary and challenging lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust’s unavoidable lessons of despair.
Sauvage’s recent documentary short, Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and Holocaust (2010) offers a portrait of a militant Jew born in Palestine who led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. According to historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, “This brilliant, galvanizing, and profoundly moving documentary celebrates Peter Bergson’s vigorous efforts to end the silence and the slaughter that defined the Holocaust.”
His latest film, And Crown Thy Good–Varian Fry in Marseille, will be released in 2011. A feature documentary, it tells the story of a New York intellectual who after the fall of France to the Nazis spent a year in the Southern port city of Marseille leading one of the most remarkable and successful rescue efforts of the Nazi era. While celebrating some remarkable Americans?Varian Fry, Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon Ball and Hiram Bingham IV?the documentary places the story in the context of those challenging times, addressing American policies towards the unwanted refugees. Both the Jerusalem Cinematheque and New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage have recently held retrospectives devoted to the filmmaker.
Sauvage is best known for his 1989 feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story the conspiracy of goodness of a mountain community in France that defied the Nazis and took in and saved five thousand Jews, including himself and his parents. Sauvage was born in this unique Christian oasis, Le Chambon, at a time when much of his family was being tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps. Only at the age of 18 did Sauvage learn that he and his family were Jewish and survivors of the Holocaust. Weapons of the Spirit won numerous awards and received two national prime-time broadcasts on P.B.S., accompanied by Bill Moyers’ probing 1989 interview of the filmmaker, and remains one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust.
A popular lecturer on the Holocaust and its continuing challenges, for over twenty years, Sauvage has been a student of what he calls the American experience of the Holocaust. He is one of a pioneering handful of experts on rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust–“righteous Gentiles”–and contends that they still have much to teach us. The son of prominent French journalist and author, Sauvage was 4 when he and his parents moved to New York City in 1948, returning to Paris at 18 to pursue his studies. After working briefly as a journalist, the Sorbonne drop-out fell in love with film at Paris’ legendary Cinémathèque Française, becoming a film scholar and landing a job there working for the legendary genius Henri Langlois. Veteran émigré producer Otto Preminger brought Sauvage back to New York as a story editor. After co-authoring a two-volume critical study of American film directors, American Directors, Sauvage finally got behind the camera himself as a staff producer-reporter for Los Angeles public television station KCET. While producing over 30 hours of varied programming, his first major success came when he decided to begin exploring those Jewish roots he had never known in Yiddish: the Mame-Loshn (1979).
Sponsors:
The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.
hm 12/7/10, 1/2/11

The Global Landscape of Holocaust Memorials since 1945
2011-01-19 00:00
Since the January 2000 Stockholm conference “The Holocaust – Education, Remembrance and Research,” which was attended by high-level representatives from 46 countries, there has been much discussion of a “globalization” of memory of the Nazi Holocaust. This lecture uses memorials and museums to trace the origins and spread of public awareness of “the” Holocaust and its changing meanings from the 1940s to the new millennium.
The presentation will be followed by a response from Richard Hecht (Religious Studies, UCSB).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Geographies of Place Series.
hm 1/3/11

Women in Prehistoric Greece
2011-01-21 00:00
This talk examines the lives of girls and women in the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the prehistoric Aegean (ca. 3000-1000 BCE). Testing modern assumptions and expectations against the archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence leads to some surprising conclusions. While Minoan-Mycenaean society was probably sex-segregated (Minoan perhaps more so than Mycenaean), there is almost no evidence for love, intimacy, sex, or marriage, but there is good evidence for women participants in some athletic events and the hunt.
John Younger is Professor of Classics and Director of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program at the University of Kansas.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 06.ix.10

The Crisis, Los Angeles Black Communities, and the Failed State Debate
2011-01-21 00:00
Please join us for a talk by Clyde Woods, Black Studies, UCSB, “The Crisis, Los Angeles’ Black Communities, and the Failed State Debate.” Woods is the author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (2000) and editor of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). He is now part of a community/academic team studying development policy in Los Angeles.
The talk, and subsequent discussion, is part of the History 294: Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy, 2010-2011 lecture series.
The Winter Quarter topic is “The Financial Crisis and its Origins.”
The Colloquium meets on Friday, January 21 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building.
jmj 01/03/2011

Some Problems with Hubris in Ancient Greek Law
2011-01-31 00:00
This paper will examine some characteristic problems and issues in the study of Athenian law, and of ancient Greek law more generally, through an analysis of the offense of hubris (“intentionally dishonoring behavior”). Topics to be discussed include (1) the Athenian law of hubris; (2) parallels with the laws and practices of other Greek communities and their ramifications for the question of the unity of Greek law; and (3) hubris and the categorization of shame.
David Phillips is Associate Professor of History at UCLA.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 05.I.2011
