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

Click on link for Spring 2012 Courses: Spring 2o12

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.

Ruben Weltsch, the first head librarian at Stony Brook and a long-time member of the History Department, died last week.

Though it may seem strange to liken the extremely modest and gentle Ruben Weltsch to John Toll, they both shared the characteristic of being in the right place at the right time and of having a vision, or an agenda, they worked to pursue.  Ruben Weltsch presided over the building of the collections of the Melville Library at a time when there was an ample budget, money to hire staff (including many part-timers, often faculty and grad-student wives), and a lively market for new and used books.  He pushed to see that the collections grew as quickly as possible and to this day many of the treasures on the shelves are in place because of his enlightened and acquisitive approach.  Faculty were encouraged to provide lists of books, to point the library towards collections of unusual materials, and to help develop holdings in journals and in other-than-English materials at a time when standing orders with major presses were the accepted policy.

Ruben Weltsch was a graduate of Amherst College and he received his PhD in history  from the University of Colorado, under the tutelage of S. Harrison Thompson, the foremost American scholar of medieval Bohemia.  Weltsch turned his dissertation into Archbishop John of Jenstein (1348-1400), offering the tale of this important late medieval prelate in English so it could reach a wide audience.  In addition, at a time before electronic communication became the norm, Historical Abstracts was a major bibliographical and reference guide for the academic history profession and Ruben was a tireless contributor to it for many fields in early-modern and central European history.  At various times, when other duties permitted, he also taught courses in the History Department.

After his formal retirement Ruben served the Melville library for some years as a volunteer.  He was one of the pillars of the annual sale of un-needed duplicates and other items that were offered to raise funds.  More recently he served as a volunteer in the music library, even long after he was its interim director in the late 1980s.  In these labors on behalf of the music library his love of music, his concern for books and collections, and his generation-plus commitment to some aspect or other of the University were all brought into play.

Long before it became a trendy form of activity, Ruben Weltsch walked to work.  His path took him along a series of shady streets, to and from work, and he took quiet pleasure in being so close to a University he had served so well, and for so long, in numerous capacities and roles.  After living in near-by Setauket through his long career and his retirement, Ruben and his wife Pat, who survives him, moved to New Paltz to be near their daughter Debbie and her children.  His son Dannie lives in Washington, D.C.

To say that the head of the library loved books and scholarship seem an appropriate final tribute from a colleague who met Ruben while being interviewed for a History Department position in the very early days of the University.

Joel Rosenthal (with help from Andrew White and Karl Bottigheimer)

Department of History
7.22.11

Our Professor Sara Lipton, in her New York Times editorial, offers real “lessons of the past” for the current “Weinergate” scandal.  See link below for the editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17lipton.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper