TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14th
1:00-2:15 PM
Social & Behavioral Sciences Bldg., Room N320

“A World of Many Flags: Privateering and the Strange Sovereignty of the Provincia Oriental”
Lauren Benton, New York University

Papers will be posted on the IHSS website:  http://www.stonybrook.edu/sociology/ihss/events.shtml

Suzanne Swartz, PhD student in Department of History chosen for Lipper Internship Program at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

Swartz, a PhD student in the Department of History, has studied the Museum’s exhibitions, heard testimony from Holocaust survivors and attended seminars led by Museum scholars. “Lippers” then begin sharing the knowledge they have obtained with their communities’ schools by giving presentations on Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. “Training was informative and supportive, but on another level personal and moving,” said Swartz. “It fully prepared me to begin working with students, and I am also taking new perspectives and insights with me about the importance of education and remembrance.”

The Departments of History and Geosciences and the Humanities Center

Stony Brook University

Present

Conevery Bolton-Valencius

Department of History, University of Massachusetts Boston

Vernacular Science of the New Madrid Earthquakes:

Creating Knowledge in the Early United States

In the winter of 1811-12, a series of sizable tremors rippled out from the middle Mississippi Valley.  What we now term the New Madrid earthquakes were of immediate and pressing concern to the North Americans displaced, shaken, or frightened by them.  This presentation, from a forthcoming book on changing historical understandings of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, argues that the intense public interest and discussion surrounding the New Madrid earthquakes reveals a multi-faceted world of vernacular science in the early United States.

During the long sequence of earthquakes and in the months, years, and decades after, observers took weather measurements; recorded the effects of the shocks on their homes, livestock, and their own bodies; created devices for revealing the intensity and direction of the shocks; and investigated a multitude of effects from fouled wells to strange mineral deposits.  They reported Native American accounts from near the epicenters and from further west.  In ways both idiosyncratic and creative, early Americans attempted to convey and come to terms with these sudden and disruptive temblors. Accounts of the quakes demonstrate the blurred nature of expert and nonexpert discussions in the early nineteenth century.  Because of the lack of clear consensus about the mechanisms or causes of earthquakes, people in borderland regions along the Ohio and Mississippi Valley became not simply witnesses but theorists of the dramatic seismicity they had experienced.  Their attempts to record and explain events that overwhelmed them reveal a broadly-shared and vigorous culture of science in the early United States.

This earlier history also highlights the surprising forgetting of the quakes in the late nineteenth century, a forgetting that took place for social and environmental as well as scientific reasons.  The New Madrid quakes represent an event once taken for granted that receded almost into tall tale for the better part of a century.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

1 p.m. Humanities 1008

A Continuing Series on Environmental Studies and History Presents:

A talk by Professor Andrew Hurley
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Interpreting History in 3D:Applications of the Virtual City
in Communities, Classrooms, and Scholarship

Professor Hurley, a leading environmental and cultural historian, will speak about his and colleagues’ creation of the Virtual City, a “simulated world of downtown St. Louis from 1850 to 1950,” with many uses.  Hurley is the author of Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (1995); Chasing the American Dream: A History of Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks (2001); and Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner-Cities (2010).

Monday, October 31, 2011
11:45 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
1008 Humanities Building (in the Humanities Institute)

Initiative for Historical Social Sciences (IHSS)

Wednesday, October 19th, 12:50 – 2:00 PM, SBS, Room N-320
New Interdisciplinary Perspectives – “Why State Strength and Weakness Persist: The Social Origins of State Power in 20th Century Latin America”
Hillel Soifer, Temple University – Department of Political Science

Wednesday, November 9th, 4:00 – 5:30 PM, SBS, Room N-318
Faculty Workshop – “The Third World in the Two Germanys: An Entangled History of the Cold War and Decolonization”
Young-Sun Hong, Stony Brook University – History Department

Click on link to open page:  2012 Winter Session Courses Offered

Colloquium Series held during Campus Lifetime (12:50-2:10 pm) in Room N318

Wednesday, September 21, 2011:
Marisa Balsamo, Rational Recreation in the Spectacle of Victorian London.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011:
Ying-Ying Chu, Measuring Cultural Change: A History of the Cornell-Peru Project, 1952-1964.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011:
Adam Charboneau, John Lindsay’s Fun City and New York’s Open Spaces, 1966-1973

Tuesday, November 1, 2011:
Andrew Ehrinpreis, Culture and Equality: the Emergence of a Creole Discourse of Legal-Political Equality in Peru, 1781-1828.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011:
Gregory Rosenthal, “Aloha with Tears:” Letters Home from Hawaiian Migrant Laborers.

SBS N-310

Wednesdays

5:20-8:10 PM

Taking oceans, rather than nations or empires, as key units for historical study focuses attention on the movement of people, ideas and commodities across space, and the political and cultural formations that emerge from these circulations. This course will accordingly consider several different stages of globalization from antiquity to the present along the Indian Ocean littoral. We will focus on South and Southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa, and West Asia (commonly known as the Middle East). A methodological section on oceanic history, and examples of concrete connections with other locations will take us, on occasion, beyond the limits of the Indian Ocean itself. The course will consider, both in minute detail and from a bird’s eye view, inter-regional connections spanning the Indian Ocean world forged by religious solidarities, far-flung trade networks, labor migration, imperial domination, and anti-colonial nationalism.

Spring 2011 Calendar:

Thursday, March 24th, 12:00 Noon to 2:00 PM
Social & Behavioral Sciences Bldg., N320
Author Meets Critic Session
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, New School, will comment on the recently published book “Human Rights and Memory” by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (Penn State Press, 2010).

Thursday, April 28th – Saturday, April 30th
Social & Behavioral Sciences Bldg., N320
National Borders in the 21st Century – XXXVth Conference of the Political Economy of the World System (PEWS)
Keynote Speakers include Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University, and Ulrich Beck, University of Munich and the London School of Economics.

http://www.stonybrook.edu/sociology/ihss/events.shtml

Mon 2:20-5:10

During the last several centuries, the global imperial ambitions of Europe (and more recently, the US) have remade politics and culture across the world. This course considers people and places linked together by Empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. In a context provided by historical and theoretical readings, we will explore the experience of colonialism through a variety of literary representations: novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, letters, music, films, graphic novels and other genres. These sources provide detailed, often personalized, accounts of the experience of the political, economic and cultural domination that colonialism entailed, and the forms of resistance it produced. The colloquium will examine the transformational historical trends of imperialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization and postcolonial migration through units exploring colonialism’s impact on education and identity, cities and mobility, and ideas about race and liberty. We will trace the dialogue between history and representation through looking at specific people, places and texts from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and metropolitan Europe, as well as recent imperial adventures of the US. Over the course of the semester, students will develop, research and write a term paper on a topic of their interest related to colonial or postcolonial history.