Department of History

I’ve written an online blog entry for the journal Dissentthat may prove of interest.  The argument is based on those I and others made in our edited volume Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World (Temple UP, 2011).

“How Industrial Hazards Get Overlooked,” Dissent Blog (April 25, 2013)

Chris

Summer Session I (May 28 – July 4)

TuTh 1:30-4:55

This course explores the significance of Central Asian peoples, goods, and places in historical perspective. Specifically, this course will investigate transnational relationships, overlapping peoples and regions, and historical interdependencies on the eastern front of Central Asia, where Central Asia meets China. We will explore the famous “silk road” of the early common era as one manifestation of this history. We will go backward and forward through time to uncover other manifestations of enduring connections between China and Central Asia. We will look at Xinjiang and Tibet, in the western borderlands of modern-day China, as well as parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

(Urumqi, People’s Republic of China, 2004 [Source: Wikimedia Commons])

From ancient times to the present, we ask the following question: what forces have brought this region together over time, and what forces have pulled it apart? Students will be responsible for completing three quizzes and two response papers.

Jim Quigley of Stony Brook’s Sustainability Program, interviews Christopher Sellers, a Stony Brook historian, about his new book Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in 20th-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).  Their discussion explores Sellers arguments about the suburban origins of environmentalism and their implications for efforts toward sustainability today.

Audio file recorded November 27, 2012; broadcast March 8, 2013 on WUSB.

I’ll be giving a presentation at this year’s Susman Graduate Conference on my research into changing beliefs about magic and witchcraft in Enlightenment America (British colonial and early U.S.), and the links between these intellectual changes and the formation of national identity.

Accusations, trials, and persecutions of witches form a fascinating and peculiar episode in colonial American history, with the famous Salem trials as the most well-known example of what is often conceived of as a Puritan, New England, or 17th century phenomenon. However, the memory of earlier beliefs in magic and actions upon those beliefs still exerted influence over British-American colonists and U.S. citizens in the 18th century. A review of American magazines from this period reveals a continued, but different, preoccupation with magic and witchcraft. Elite Americans of this period thought about magic, but at a distance, with distaste and no small amount of shame. Published works repeatedly consigned it to a kind of local dark age; the colonial forefathers had to be defended from criticisms for their prosecution of witchcraft as a crime; and increasingly, magic became less a threat to be controlled, and more a mere “superstition” clung to by the “vulgar.”

A complex process was underway, by which early Americans disposed of their culture of magic, alternatingly forgetting and reconsidering it. Americans of the 18th century distanced themselves from their historical beliefs in magic, and then conceptually relocated this belief elsewhere, reattaching it to a variety of Others: the English, the French, Africans, Native Americans, and the superstitious masses, an “other within.” Through this transformation of memory and history, the myth of an ideal America – enlightened and reasonable, free of the irrational superstitions that plagued its past, its rivals and victims, and its own inferior members – was born. My upcoming paper on this topic will show how a sea change in early American perspectives on the supernatural influenced and constituted the formation of a U.S. American national identity.

The  35th annual Warren and Beatrice Susman Graduate Conference will be held on April 20, 2013 at Rutger’s New Brunswick campus. Its topic is “Myth, Memory, and History: New Approaches to an Elusive Past.”

I’ll be giving a presentation at this year’s James A. Barnes Club Graduate Student History Conference. My topic will be a summary of my research on the racial and sexual politics of the radical leftist organization Weatherman.

In the late 1960s, radical leftist activism was consumed by debate and strife over identity politics, leading to factional disputes and increasing extremism. In the eye of this political storm stood the arch-radical Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. These white radicals considered themselves allies of the vanguard of a people’s war against global imperialism. This worldview set the pattern for all their ideas and actions. Weatherman believed that it had answers for all the varied social-structural riddles posed by every form of oppression and exploitation, or rather, the answer: identifying the struggle against capitalism in its imperialist mode as the central conflict for liberation, they explained all oppressions as descending from capitalism.

My research details the effects of Weatherman’s ruling ideology on its interactions with other radical left groups and its own internal organization. I argue that Weatherman undermined its own goals by ideologically simplifying the complexity of identity politics. Although they claimed to fight on the side of Black Nationalists and Third-World revolutionaries, their conception of the meaning of revolution made effective work with these groups impossible. Likewise, they claimed to support women’s liberation and sexual freedom, but the demands of their unquestioning commitment to violent revolutionary struggle subverted these aims. This subversion was manifest in “smash monogamy,” a sexual policy that both abetted male sexual privilege and constrained its members’ genuine sexual desires and relationships. By studying the ways in which Weatherman’s liberatory aims were undermined by its ideological orientation, my research sheds light on the inherent danger in espousing a sweeping ideal of social justice while subsuming all causes and issues into one all-encompassing theory of oppression.

The 18th Annual Barnes Club Graduate History Conference will be held Friday evening March 22, 2013 and Saturday March 23, 2013, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at Temple’s Center City Campus in downtown Philadelphia.

Tu Th 11:30AM-12:50PM

Popular perceptions and representations of Islam and Muslims are often founded on ignorance and outright prejudice. Fundamental to these understandings are narrow and highly politicized notions of history, frequently accepted uncritically.  Accordingly, this course seeks first to introduce analytical approaches crucial to developing nuanced understandings of historical and contemporary depictions of Islam and Muslims. In addition, the course provides a broad outline of the history of Islamic Civilizations from Iberia and North Africa to South and Southeast Asia, and from the Mediterranean to Sub-Saharan Africa, and a basic understanding of key religious and secular institutions that characterize Muslim societies. While the course is broadly chronological, we will also examine key topics in detail, including the life of the Prophet, conversion and the global spread of Islam, colonialism and imperialism, radical militant and progressive Muslim politics, media representations, and Islam in the West. The course is not comprehensive, but seeks to provide a basic understand of the history of Islam from Muhammad to the present, and a solid empirical and methodological foundation for further inquiry.