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Welcome to the History Department.Some
Recent Highlights
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As Britain's great power status came to be increasingly challenged in the decades before the First World War, one by-product of the resultant uncertainty was the weakening of the Victorian middle-class consensus of what constituted ideal manhood. Not only a source of wealth and power, Britain's empire also provided alternative models of masculinity and nationhold. Consequently, the empire and the commonwealth played an important role in defining imperial gender relations in both Britain and in the colonies and dominions. This groundbreaking book investigates the continual reassessment and reassertion of various masculine ideals associated with sport in the British empire between 1880 and 1935. "This book is a rare phenomenon in the new imperial history: it combines solid, original scholarship and sheer readability, resulting in a compelling and highly persuasive account of sport in the modern British empire."— Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois |
History Department Awards $112,000 in Scholarships to Grad Students
The Department is proud to announce that the Graduate Committee has awarded $112,000 in fellowships to a number of our most outstanding graduate students, including the Plesur Dissertation Research Fellowships. For a fuller list, see Grad Student Achievements page. Congratulations to the awardees.
Plesur Dissertation Research Fellowships
Joe Wilton “Blowing the Trumpet: The Culture of British National Advertising 1901 to 1930 ” (advisor: McDevitt)
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Steve Gill "'I must make a freer and better submission': Participation and Authority Under English Common Law" (advisor: Schen) |
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Mark Lempke “The Evangelical Roots of George McGovern's 1972 Campaign” (advisor: Radford)
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Tina Kibbe “Deviant Women, Toxic Bodies: Eugenics and Public Health in the United States 1900-1950 ” (advisor: Cahn) |
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Reg Gilbert "U.S. Citizens in Nineteenth-Century Cuba" (advisor: Seeman) |
History Department Awards $42,000 in Scholarships to Undergraduates
The Department is proud to announce that the Undergraduate Committee has awarded $42,000 in scholarships to a number of our most outstanding undergraduates. Congratulations to the awardees.
Plesur Scholarships: Argo Scholarship: |
Milligan Scholarships: Study Abroad Awards: |
Gaynor to Spend Year at Cornell as an Invited Fellow
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Jennifer Gaynor will be at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities for the 2008-2009 year, during which their focal theme is "Water: A Critical Concept for the Humanities." In addition to teaching a course on maritime Asia she will conduct research on changing European views of Southeast Asian sea people. |
Des Forges Recognized For Contributions to International Education
At an October 4th luncheon, the Council on International Studies and Programs recognized Roger Des Forges, Jose Buscaglia and Shaun Irlam for their work through the year promoting and supporting internationalism at UB. Des Forges received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education, a university-wide award to honor faculty and staff who have made exceptional and longstanding contributions to international education at UB. |
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Jason Young 's Book Released
Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery by Jason Young
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Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it. "A signal contribution to our understanding of the African diaspora. The author presents a vision of culture that is fluid and multidimensional, that allows for novelty and transformation, and that avoids ongoing debates over ethnic provenance."— Michael Gomez, Professor of History, NYU |
Kristin Stapleton' s Book Released
The Human Tradition in Modern China, edited by Kenneth Hammond and Kristin Stapleton
Through compelling biographies of a wide range of historical figures, this engaging text presents a panorama of modern Chinese history that illustrates the great social and political changes that have occurred over the past 500 years. Through the lives of both the famous and the obscure, the contributors explore such enduring themes of the flexibility of the definition of Chinese in an era of imperialism and revolution, the tremendous transformations in gender relations, and the wide gap between the lives of urban and rural Chinese. Richly researched, these biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style that will engage all readers interested in modern China. |
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Susan Cahn's Book Released
Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age by Susan K. Cahn
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This impressive history of the sexual cultures of southern black and white adolescent girls pays careful attention to social fears of sexual danger, state regulatory policies, and the experience of the young women who reshaped sexual meanings over the first half of the twentieth century. Cahn persuasively argues for the centrality of adolescent female sexuality to southern politics, from the changing racial focus of forced sterilizations to the shifting grounds for white resistance to school desegregation. --Estelle B. Freedman, Stanford University, author of Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics |
Susan Cahn's Other Book Released
Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader edited by Susan K. Cahn and Jean O'Reilly
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A spectacular transformation in women's sports has occurred over the past century in colleges, high schools, and recreational leagues across the nation. Gradual changes during the late 1950s and 1960s within the fields of women's physical education and amateur sport provided the initial energy for this transformation. But it took the rebirth of a grassroots feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s to catalyze the radical changes in women's athletic opportunities and attitudes toward female athletes. The assimilation of feminist principles into the broader popular culture solidified the belief that sport plays a positive role in the lives of girls and women. Political activists for women's rights codified this attitude with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, a law banning gender discrimination in educational settings, thus guaranteeing women's legal right to an equitable share of athletic opportunities and resources. |
Jonathan Dewald's Book Released
Lost Worlds: The Emergence of French Social History, 1815-1970 by Jonathan Dewald
| Today’s interest in social history and private life is often seen as a twentieth-century innovation. Most often Lucien Febvre and the Annales school in France are credited with making social history a widely accepted way for historians to approach the past. In Lost Worlds historian Jonathan Dewald shows that we need to look back further in time, into the nineteenth century, when numerous French intellectuals developed many of the key concepts that historians employ today. According to Dewald, we need to view Febvre and other Annales historians as participants in an ongoing cultural debate over the shape and meanings of French history, rather than as inventors of new topics of study. He closely examines the work of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, the antiquarian Alfred Franklin, Febvre himself, the twentieth-century historian Philippe Ariès, and several others. A final chapter compares specifically French approaches to social history with those of German historians between 1930 and 1970. Through such close readings Dewald looks beyond programmatic statements of historians’ intentions to reveal how history was actually practiced during these years. |  |
Pack Wins Best First Book Award from the Society For Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain by Sasha Pack
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In the three decades following the Second World War, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco’s Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe’s prosperous democracies. This book chronicles how their presence not only helped to strengthen the Franco regime’s economic and political standing, but also contributed to undermining the dictatorship’s moral austerity and economic autarky. This study looks beneath exotic imagery of bulls and flamenco dancers, and sensationalized stories of Francoist police persecuting bikini-clad foreigners, to examine how the advent of foreign tourism profoundly influenced the regime’s diplomatic and economic policies as early as 1945. In the 1960s, mass tourism provoked important shifts in the national political dynamic, contributing significantly to the conditions in which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was born. Pack's book was awarded the Society For Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies' Best First Book Award (2004-06). The committee wrote: "Pack's fine work on tourism and the Franco regime breaks important new ground. Its presentation is exceptional: the author writes with great clarity, moves deftly between narrative and analysis, argues carefully and has an unusual capacity to synthesize. In short, the command is striking in a first book. As a highly innovative and an important addition to 20th century Spanish society and politics, this book will doubtless remain influential for some time.” |
Georg & Wilma Iggers' Joint Autobiography Now Available in English Translation
Two Lives in Uncertain Times: Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens by Georg and Wilma Iggers is now available from Berghahn Books.
Wilma and Georg Iggers both escaped with their parents from Nazi persecution to North America where they met as students. As a newly married couple they went to the American South where they taught in two historic Black colleges and were involved in the civil rights movement. In 1961 they began going to West Germany regularly not only to do research but also to further reconciliation between Jews and Germans, while at the same time in their scholarly work contributing to a critical confrontation with the German past. After overcoming first apprehensions, they soon felt Göttingen to be their second home, while maintaining their close involvements in America. After 1966 they frequently visited East Germany and Czechslovakia in an attempt to build bridges in the midst of the Cold War. |
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Hal Langfur Receives “Honorable Mention” for the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize awarded by the American Society for Ethnohistory for the best book-length work in the field of ethnohistory published in 2006.
The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 by Hal Langfur
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The Forbidden Lands concerns a pivotal but unexamined surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil's most populous region, Minas Gerais. Focusing on social, cultural, and racial relations, it challenges standard depictions of the occupation of Portuguese America's vast interior, while situating its frontier history in the broader context of the Americas and the Atlantic world. The book argues that the key to understanding the colony's internal consolidation, ignored and misconstrued by scholars fixed on coastal events and export-led development, resides in the incompatible ways in which Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and seminomadic indigenous peoples accused of cannibalism sought to territorialize their distinctive societies. Forbidden Lands demonstrates that cultural conflict on the frontier was a defining characteristic of Brazil's transition from colony to independent nation and a fundamental consequence of its relationship to a wider world. The study moves Brazil to a prominent place in our understanding of the hemispheric sweep of internal colonization in the Americas.. |
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