Department of History

Colonialism, Capitalism, Modernity

Early Modern Colonialism/Latin America:

Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent conquests : Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Capitalism/World Systems:

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and material life, 1400-1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The great divergence : China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Modern Colonialism:

Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Modernity:

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England]: Blackwell, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

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

Nation, Popular Politics, Culture

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991.

Hobsbawm, E. J, and T. O Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Scott, James. Weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of class : studies in English working class history, 1832-1982. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the past : power and the production of history. Boston  Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and materialism : selected essays. London : Verso, 2005.

[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]

Historiographies & Theory

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge [UK]: Polity Press, 1994.

Eley, Geoff. A crooked line : from cultural history to the history of society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Goody, Jack. The theft of history. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hobsbawm, E. On history. New York: New Press, 1997.

White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]

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

Click on link below for a complete list of Course Offerings: 
Fall, 2011 Grad Offerings

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