Public History Colloquium Event–”Telling Diverse Stories: The National Park Service Women’s History Initiative and Collaboration in Historic Preservation”

NPS Public History session on June 4, Page 1

Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, June 4 at noon for a Zoom talk by Christopher E. Johnson (National Park Service), Anne Lindsay (Public History, CSU Sacramento), and Jenni Sorkin (History of Art and Architecture, UCSB). This presentation describes collaborative work completed under the Women’s History Initiative, one of three national initiatives authorized by the Secretary of […]

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Center for Cold War Studies Talk: Nancy Mitchell, “Andrew Young: Challenging Anglo-Saxon Foreign Policy?”

Flyer for Zoom talk for The Center of Cold War Studies & International History by Dr. Nancy Mitchel - Andrew Young: Challenging Anglo-Saxon Foreign Policy on 5/20/21 from 11AM to 12:15PM PDT

Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides and a former member of Congress, served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations. Outspoken and controversial, Young questioned prevailing Cold War assumptions. “Communism has never been a threat to me,” he said. “Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.” Nancy Mitchell […]

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Public History Colloquium Event–”The Queerness of Home: Public History and the Domestic Archive”

Flyer for The Queerness of Home: Public History and the Domestic Archive on 5/7/21 at 12PM

Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, May 7 at noon for a Zoom talk by Stephen Vider (History, Cornell University). Histories of queer and trans politics and culture have centered almost exclusively on public activism and spaces. Stephen Vider will discuss how his forthcoming book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University […]

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Nelson Lichtenstein Publishes Two Edited Volumes from 2015 UCSB Conference

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession edited by Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O'Connor book cover

Journalists, politicians, and historians are comparing the Biden Administration’s ambitious economic and social agenda to that of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Illuminating that tentative and provocative judgement are two new collections of historical essays that were first offered as talks at a 2015 UC Santa Barbara conference. Entitled “Beyond the New Deal Order,” the conference was sponsored by the […]

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8th Annual Van Gelderen Lecture: Sasha Coles, “The Great Silk Experiment: Silkworms, Mulberry Trees, and Women Workers in Mormon Country, 1850s-1910s”

A black-and-white image of a group of women gathered around a pile of foliage.

UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Dr. Sasha Coles. From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and […]

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Humanities Decanted–W. Patrick McCray, “Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture”

Text of Humanities Decanted with wine being poured into a vase. Book cover of Making Art Work by W. Patrick McCray

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, […]

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CWWG Workshop–Addison Jensen, “WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs”

6 people in camoflauge uniform wading in a river. UCSB Cold War Working Group

On Saturday, February 27, from 2 to 4 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will host a workshop. They will read and discuss a dissertation chapter, “WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs,” by Addie Jensen, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department. This workshop is part of a […]

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Public History Colloquium Event–”Reinterpreting Slavery and the Emotional Labor of History”

Women in front of a The Little Round House sign with caption "Author discussing the Little Round House marker on a February 2020 Hallowed Grounds tour. (Photo by author)"

Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, February 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Professor Hilary N. Green (University of Alabama). Professor Green reflects on the powerful legacy of Jim Crow era efforts to erase the history of slavery from the landscape of her workplace, the University of Alabama, and shares a project she pursued to […]

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Public History Colloquium Event–”Public Lands, Public History: Putting History to Work for the United States Forest Service”

Flyer for USDA Forest Service History, 1960-2020

Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, January 15 at noon for a Zoom talk by Leisl Carr Childers and Michael Childers (Colorado State University). Childers and Carr Childers will discuss their current project, a new history of the USDA Forest Service from 1960-2020, and the historical methodologies that undergird their work. In particular, they will address […]

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Miroslava Chávez-García, “Migrant Longing”

Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Miroslava Chávez García book cover with flyer for Zoom Webinar with the author on 1/10/21 at 4PM

UCSB History Associates has partnered with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation to present a public lecture by UCSB Professor of History Miroslava Chávez-García.  Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Professor Chávez-García recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their […]

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ISRRAR Event–Dr. LaKisha Simmons, “The Ancestors and the Womb are One: Black Motherhood and Histories of Black Infant Loss”

Flyer for Zoom talk for The Ancestors and the Womb are One: Black Motherhood and Histories of Black Infant Loss on 1/26/21 at 4PM

Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant […]

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ISRRAR Event–Dr. Rasul Miller, “Black Internationalism and Black Sunni Muslims in America”

Flyer for Zoom talk for Black Internationalism and Black Sunni Muslims in America on 2/23/21 at 4PM

During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as artists, organizers, and propagators of […]

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Kendall Lovely, “Dismembering Classicism: Contesting Colonial and Classical Legacies in the Southwest”

Classicization in U.S. heritage narratives often involves the imposition of classical elements, derived from Greek and Roman civilization, onto narratives of colonial conquest in Southwestern borderlands and frontier spaces. Ongoing controversies surrounding statues of the conquistador, Juan de Oñate, reflect the ways in which the classical legacy remains prominent in public spheres of historical narrative. In providing a visual narrative […]

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Lizabeth Cohen, Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited

Flyer for Zoom talk for Struggling to Save America's Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited on 10/22 from 4-5PM

Click here to download the flyer for this event. REGISTER NOW Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts […]

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John Majewski, Living Democracy in Capitalism’s Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery

Black and white drawing of a woman with bonnet thinking about what to write with a quill in her hand

REGISTER NOW Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of […]

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Ronny Regev, “‘We Want No More Economic Islands’: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US”

On February 14 Ronny Regev (History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents, “‘We Want No More Economic Islands’: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US.” WWII ushered in an era of economic growth in the United States, which enshrined consumption as an integral part of liberal citizenship. African Americans were often excluded from the benefits of this […]

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Alumna Caitlin Rathe’s LBJ Podcast Now Available

The first episode of a podcast that alumna Caitlin Rathe (PhD, 2019) has been a part of creating since August 2018 has gone live! The NEH-funded project, LBJ and the Great Society, tells the story of Johnson’s remarkable domestic policy legacy piecing together oral histories, telephone calls from the White House, and other archival audio sources. The podcast website describes […]

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Jennifer Burns, “The Last Conservative: The Life of Milton Friedman”

As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Jennifer Burns (History, Stanford University) will present “The Last Conservative: The Life of Milton Friedman.” Professor Burns is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), and is now at work on a biography of economist Milton […]

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Panel Discussion, “Impeachment in Historical Perspective”

On Tuesday, February 11, from 4 to 5:30 pm in HSSB 6020 (McCune Center), the Center for Cold War Studies and International History and the Walter H. Capps Center will host a panel discussion titled, “Impeachment in Historical Perspective.” Three UCSB historians will speak on the following topics: Giuliana Perrone on the Impeachment and Senate Trial of Andrew Johnson Laura Kalman on Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal and […]

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Andrew Hartman, “Rethinking Karl Marx: American Liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War”

As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Andrew Hartman (History, Illinois State University) will present “Rethinking Karl Marx: American Liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War.” Hartman is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008) and the widely reviewed A […]

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Susan Lederer, “‘Send My Body to the Medical College’: Alternative Afterlives in Turn of the Century America”

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 […]

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Lisa Jacobson, “A Taste of Success: Whiskey Drinking, Masculine Identities, and the Sensory Imagination in the Postwar US”

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 […]

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Steve Zipperstein, “The Impeachment Wars: What Lies Ahead”

flyer for Steve Zipperstein, "The Impeachment Wars: What Lies Ahead"

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 […]

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Rosemarie Zagarri on “The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College”

flyer for Rosemarie Zagarri on "The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College"

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 […]

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Colin Gordon, “Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs”

Colin Gordon headshot

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, Colin Gordon (History, University of Iowa) will present “Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs.” Gordon is an historian of US public policy, political economy, and urban history. He is the author […]

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David Stein, “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979”

David Stein headshot with stone wall in background

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, […]

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Eric Rauchway, “A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941”

Eric Rauchway headshot

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 […]

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Nelson Lichtenstein, “A Fabulous Failure: Bill Clinton, American Capitalism, and the Origin of Our Troubled Times”

Professor Lichtenstein in his library

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, Nelson Lichtenstein (History, UC Santa Barbara) will present “A Fabulous Failure: Bill Clinton, American Capitalism, and the Origin of Our Troubled Times.” Lichtenstein is the Academic Senate’s 2019 Faculty Research Lecturer. He is the author of Walter […]

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