Launch Party for the UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History
2021-03-02 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
The UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History is about to release its first issue, and its editors and contributors cordially invite the public to its Zoom launch party on March 2. The event will feature a short Q&A featuring four of the ten undergraduate authors and moderated by members of the editorial team.

To celebrate the Journal‘s launch, use this Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86005899456

Humanities Decanted--W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture"
2021-03-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Humanities Decanted series invites all to a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Audience Q&A will follow.
Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to create visually and sonically interesting multimedia works. This new artwork emerged from corporate laboratories, artists’ studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses and it involved some of the biggest stars of the art world. Less famous and often overlooked were the engineers and scientists who contributed time, technical expertise, and aesthetic input to these projects. These figures included the rocket engineer-turned-artist Frank J. Malina, MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes, and Billy Klüver, a Swedish-born engineer at Bell Labs who helped establish the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology. This book restores the role of technologists to the foreground, explores the era’s hybrid creative culture, and recounts the many ways that artists, engineers, and curators have collaborated over the past fifty years. Making Art Work shows that the borders of art and technology over the past half century are anything but fixed. Just as striking is that the original ideals and ambitions that animated the 1960s-era art-and-technology movement have not faded. Today, creativity, collaborations, and interdisciplinary research are promoted by academic and corporate leaders alike. What emerges is a long history of artists and technologists who have repeatedly built new creative communities in which they can exercise imagination, invention, and expertise.
W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara where his research, writing, and teaching focus on the histories of technology and science. Originally trained as a scientist, he is the author or editor of six books. McCray’s 2013 book, The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, won the Watson Davis Prize in 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”
Registration is required in advance. Register at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YAKxHjklSWqDzHO5Vs8Ngg.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

History Club Weekly Meetings
2021-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 | 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.

Public History Colloquium Event–”Abina and the Important Men: Graphic History as Public History”
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, March 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Trevor R. Getz (San Francisco State University).
Abina and the Important Men began as an attempt to address a classroom problem: how to teach students about the dual responsibilities of the historian to historical subjects and contemporary audiences. These goals both drove its development as a graphic history. Fortuitously, its publication caught the leading edge of the rehabilitation of that medium as a serious scholarly mode of communication. This great graphic shift is part of a wider realignment of both the history discipline and popular culture, and it provides both opportunities and pitfalls for the scholar who wishes to share their work with a broader public while retaining its authenticity and maintaining its accuracy. This is a discussion by the author of Abina and the Important Men about what he has learned since its publication in first edition in 2012, with some arguments about the future of the graphic history genre. The graphic novel can be obtained through the Oxford University Press website, or the community-built 2-D animated video version can be watched here (Password: [REDACTED]
Register for this Zoom event at http://bit.ly/abina-webinar.
Recommended video/reading/short links:
• “How to Design a Comix Page” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dQEfL2BfUM
• Julia Alekseyeva, “Form, Function, and Style in the Graphic Essay,” Sequentials Journal, 1.4 (May 2020).
https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue1.4/alekseyeva.html?fbclid=IwAR0_bxgktwVoNr6TEcWjSeVogcZjM_U36FhvB6GpHXs8mhSfMKSc9PgTz0k
Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois, “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti,” The Nib (Feb. 5, 2018).
https://thenib.com/haitian-revolution/
• Nick Sousanis, “No Sides,” Spin, Weave & Cut (blog), http://spinweaveandcut.com/no-sides/
• Charis Loke & Max Loh, “The Word for World is Image,” Singpowrimo, 20.2:
https://www.singpowrimo.com/features/wordimage?fbclid=IwAR2WSiuLQKWT3EkbJvtBPdC7UmLWquXuduKUGLibIi9sA5jby-sCf1cLqLg
Other recommended readings:
• Trevor R. Getz, “Getting Serious about Comic Histories”, American Historical Review, 2018, 123, 1596-1597.
• Barbara Tversky, “Visualizing Thought”, Topics in Cognitive Science, 3 (2011), 499-535.
• Neil Cohn, “In defense of a ‘grammar’ in the visual language of comics”, Journal of Pragmatics, 127 (2018), 1-19.

History Associates: Luke Roberts, "A Samurai Wife Divorces her Lout of a Husband"
2021-03-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Associates for an engaging presentation from UCSB History Professor Luke Roberts on a specific case that influenced gender roles in 19th-century Japan.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149
Mori Nao, a young samurai wife in Japan, desired a divorce from her abusive husband in 1824. Legally a man could divorce his wife but a wife could not divorce her husband. Nevertheless, she persisted in the face of his adamant refusal to divorce her. Soon her relatives mobilized their social networks to convince his relatives to pressure him to give her a divorce, but he still refused. Eventually most samurai in her lord’s domain in southwestern Japan were working to get her a divorce and even the lord became involved in supporting what she had no legal right to demand, and threatened the well-being of the husband’s kin group.
Finally, the husband divorced her. His angry kin put him in a cage in his backyard where he was forced to live for some months. No formal record survives, but a detailed diary of the process made by one relative of his house who played an important role in the negotiations reveals much about gender roles, family networks and common disjunctures between law-as-written and law-as-it-operated.
