LEWIS & CLARK IN INDIAN COUNTRY
Fred Hoxie, University of Illinois
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
This seminar will expand upon the traditional account of the Corps of Discovery's expedition by telling the other half of the story - the story of the Native Americans the explorers encountered in the West. Focusing on five communities the expedition team met in their journey to the Pacific Ocean, this seminar will incorporate an exploration of the native cultures that inhabited the “Indian Country,” detail the interactions between the explorers and western Indians, and consider the impact of those encounters on the past and present lives of those Indian tribes, as detailed in the concurrent Newberry Library exhibit of the same name.
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE: A NEW LOOK
Micael Clarke, Loyola University
Friday, October 28, 2005
Charlotte and Emily Bronte are Victorian sisters whose novels continue to rise in the estimation of both the popular and the scholarly reading communities. In this course we will read two of the sisters' works: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, as well as about ten of Emily's poems. Published in 1847, these two works represent a milestone in the history of the English novel. The class will be a seminar, in which each participant will take an active part, and a brief lecture will provide some background information on the Brontes and their writings. We will not focus on a single interpretive theme, but will explore a variety of ways of reading the novels, including, for example, as novels of social criticism and psychological insight, and as spiritual allegories.
CHICAGO'S CHANGING NEIGHBORHOODS: AN OVERVIEW 1837 TO TODAY
Dominic Pacyga, Columbia College
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
UN SOLDAT FRANCAIS EN AMERIQUE: JEAN FRANCOIS BENJAMIN DUMONT DE MONTIGNY
Carla Zecher, Newberry Library
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Le sujet de ce seminaire sera la vie de Jean Francois Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, un soldat francais qui a voyage a Quebec, aux Antilles, et en Louisiane pendant la periode coloniale. La vie de Dumont offre tous le elements d'un bon film d'aventures: pirates, naufrages, incendies, epidemies, duels. Nous regarderons l'autobiographie de Dumont, ecrite a la main, qui se trouve tracees pendant ses voyages. Ces documents pourraient bien servir de materiau pour les classes de francais au lycee, surtout en ce moment quand nous pensons beaucoup au passe et a l'avenir de la Louisiane.
AMERICAN INEQUALITIES AND THE “SAFETY NET”: OVERCOMING THE KATRINA DISASTER
Mark Leff, University of Illinois
Friday, November 4, 2005
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina extends far beyond New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. Nothing in recent history has so forced Americans to take a hard look at ourselves - to ask who gets left behind and what role government plays in our national experiment in the political and social consequences of growing economic inequality. This workshop investigates and attempts to historically contextualize these crises and the state of the government's “safety net” response.
NEO-CONFEDERATE NATIONALISM: THE POLITICS OF SEPARATISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Euan Hague, DePaul University
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The neo-Confederate movement in the United States has been growing steadily since the early-1990s. It comprises a wide range of contemporary organizations and individuals, primarily in the United States, who actively promote the political legacy of the short-lived nineteenth century Confederate States of America, whose secession resulted in the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War. This nineteenth century event defines the worldviews of neo-Confederates and influences how they perceive current debates over the meaning of the United States and American culture. Neo-Confederate ideology intertwines a range of political thought, theology and historical interpretation into a call for recognition of a specific Southern U.S. culture and various assemblages of what that culture means for the control of people and resources.
HENRY VIII AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
Ethan Shagan, Northwestern University
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
In one of the most famous stories in European history, King Henry VIII of England wanted to divorce his wife, Katerine of Aragon, so he could marry the beautiful young Anne Boleyn. When the pope refused the king's request for a divorce, in 1534 Henry broke England away from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself head of the Church of England, thus not only marrying Anne Boleyn but also beginning the English Reformation. The problem with this familiar narrative is both that it is misleading on several counts, and also that it glosses over several key questions in English history: How did this sordid affair in court politics translate into a religious Reformation? Why did Henry choose this “nuclear option” rather than some simpler way of resolving his conflict with Rome? How did the English people react to the sudden outlawing of Roman Catholicism? Just how “Protestant” was the English Reformation? And how did Henry VIII get away with any of this, anyway? This seminar will explore some of the ways that historians in recent years have tried to answer these and other questions about Henry VIII and the English Reformation.
TONI MORRISON
Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois at Chicago
Friday, December 2, 2005
As the most prolific and celebrated African-American author, Toni Morrison has had a profound impact on contemporary conceptions of black literary aesthetics and traditions. What aspects of Morrison's fiction might explain her canonization as the most influential African-American writer? What ideas about race and culture has Morrision's writing helped to popularize, and why have these resonated so powerfully with American readers in what is widely termed the “post-Civil Rights era&rdquot;? In this seminar, we will explore such questions by trying to situate Morrison's art in the social and political context in which it was produced. We will focus on selected scenes and passages from her novels as well as on two highly influential essays by Morrison that seek to define the distinctive stylistic elements and the social purpose of African-American novels.
CHICAGO'S CHANGING NEIGHBORHOODS: AN OVERVIEW 1837 TO TODAY
Dominic Pacyga, Columbia College
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
LEWIS & CLARK IN INDIAN COUNTRY II
Jay Nelson, DePaul University
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
This seminar will expand upon the traditional account of the Corps of Discovery's expedition by telling the other half of the story - the story of the Native Americans the explorers encountered in the West. Focusing on five communities the expedition team met in their journey to the Pacific Ocean, this seminar will incorporate an exploration of the native cultures that inhabited the “Indian Country,” detail the interactions between the explorers and western Indians, and consider the impact of those encounters on the past and present lives of those Indian tribes, as detailed in the concurrent Newberry Library exhibit of the same name.
VOICING ASIAN AMERICA
Karen Su, University of Illinois at Chicago
Thursday, December 15, 2005
This seminar will use a few short stories focused on Asian American experiences on bus rides as a starting point to examine where Asian Americans find their figurative as well as very literal places to sit within the U.S. racial and ethnic arena. We will explore the vicissitudes of individual and collective dynamics that often become vexed for Asian Americans in such public spaces as buses and trains: What kinds of dilemmas face the characters? What questions are raised by different ethnic and racial groups interacting on the bus? How do the characters gain an understanding of self and other? Through this topical approach centering on transportational encounters, the seminar will also trace key historical contexts as well as social and political themes in Asian American literature and culture.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AT 100
John Ireland, University of Illinois at Chicago
Friday, January 13, 2006
After the multitude of centenary celebrations on every continent of the world in 2005, what is the status of Sartre and existentialism today? Was the 20th century, as Bernard Henri-Levy suggested, Sartre's century? This seminar will look at defining moments of Sartre's career as a novelist, philosopher, playwright, and political thinker, as well as his relationship with contemporaries like Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. We will also talk about Sartre's complicated relationship with the United States.
THINKING ABOUT FASCISM, NAZISM AND THE HOLOCAUST
Peter Frietzsche, University of Illinois
Friday, January 20, 2006
This workshop is designed to discuss key questions about the nature of the Nazi phenomenon, the general rise of fascism between the world wars, and the reasons why Germans voted for the Nazi party. Here the crucial question will revolve around desire and circumstance, between the role of ideology and the press of economic crisis and Germany's defeat. We will also discuss the nature of support for the Nazis during the dictatorship: the parameters of dissent, appeal, and opportunism. And finally we will examine the Holocaust, its long-range planning, the context of the war, the motivations of perpetrators, and the response of the victims. Again, crucial questions about circumstance, radicalization, and intention will be central. The workshop is designed less to resolve questions than focus on the implications of various interpretations.
WORDSWORTH & BLAKE
James Chandler, University of Chicago
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Arguably the two most original writers in an age known for its originality, these Romantics produced experiments in verse that changed the course of English poetry. We will look at what they have in common - their sense of modernity, their ambition - and also what sharply distinguishes them, the one a London poet and the other a poet of the rural life. We will focus on their short experimental lyrics of the revolutionary decade: for Blake the Songs of Innocence and Experience, for Wordsworth the Lyrical Ballads. But we will glance as well at some short prose pieces and brief selections from a couple of their longer poems.
HERMAN MELVILLE'S BENITO CERENO AND THE ANXIETY ABOUT SLAVERY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA
R. Clifton Spargo, Marquette University
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Melville's classic work Benito Cereno is a cautionary tale about slave revolt. But insofar as its ironic technique measures antebellum America's anxiety about slavery, it may also seem an overly cautious tale. Does Benito Cereno develop an implicitly racist irony pandering to the fears of white society? Or does Melville rhetorically exploit the function of anxiety so as to challenge not just slaveholding ideology but also liberal complacency about slavery and race in America? In order to explore more fully Melville's ironic mode, we will compare this longer tale to other shorter stories with which it was published (in The Piazza Tales), and we will consider some brief relevant historical materials and sources.
THE PROBLEM OF FEUDALISM IN JAPANESE HISTORY: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University
Thursday, January 26, 2006
When Europeans began studying Japanese history in earnest in the late nineteenth century, they detected apparent similarities between the warrior-dominated society of medieval Japan and their own “age of chivalry.” The crucial bond of loyalty and service between lord and vassal - characterized as “feudalism” - became the focus of historical attention, and eventually a presumed “fact” in Japanese historiography. In recent decades, however, historians of Japan have increasingly questioned the utility of this term for describing the nearly seven centuries in which samurai rulers governed Japan. Indeed, feudalism as a form of social and political organization is no longer universally accepted among historians of medieval Europe! This seminar will discuss the concept of feudalism as it applies to Japan and the evolution of lord-vassal relationships from roughly the tenth through nineteenth centuries.
ORIENTALISM AND AFTERWARDS: EDWARD SAID AND CONTEMPORARY RELATIONS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES, EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University
Friday, January 27, 2006
Edward Said (1935-2003) was one of the pre-eminent literary scholars of his generation. In perhaps the most influential of his books, Orientalism (1978), Said described Orientalism as a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident,” as a way of thinking which based itself on the dichotomization of the Orient and the West as two distinct and fundamentally different civilizations, and as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. Orientalism, according to Zachary Lockman, denotes all the texts, institutions, images, imaginings and attitudes through which Europeans (and later Americans) had created a certain image of the Orient, an image that had little to do with what the parts of the world so depicted were actually like. This seminar will use Said's problematic of Orientalism and the debate surrounding it as a springboard into a broader discussion of (at least) two subjects: 1) historical and contemporary relations between the West and the Middle East and their relationship to the politics of Orientalism; and 2) the ways in which an understanding of the limitations imposed by the boundaries and categories that we deploy in the production and transmission of knowledge changed the nature and objectives of teaching and learning more generally.
HENRY VIII AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
Ethan Shagan, Northwestern University
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
In one of the most famous stories in European history, King Henry VIII of England wanted to divorce his wife, Katerine of Aragon, so he could marry the beautiful young Anne Boleyn. When the pope refused the king's request for a divorce, in 1534 Henry broke England away from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself head of the Church of England, thus not only marrying Anne Boleyn but also beginning the English Reformation. The problem with this familiar narrative is both that it is misleading on several counts, and also that it glosses over several key questions in English history: How did this sordid affair in court politics translate into a religious Reformation? Why did Henry choose this “nuclear option” rather than some simpler way of resolving his conflict with Rome? How did the English people react to the sudden outlawing of Roman Catholicism? Just how “Protestant” was the English Reformation? And how did Henry VIII get away with any of this, anyway? This seminar will explore some of the ways that historians in recent year have tried to answer these and other questions about Henry VIII and the English Reformation.
TONI MORRISON
Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois at Chicago
Thursday, February 2, 2006
As the most prolific and celebrated African-American author, Toni Morrison has had a profound impact on contemporary conceptions of black literary aesthetics and traditions. What aspects of Morrison's fiction might explain her canonization as the most influential African-American writer? What ideas about race and culture has Morrision's writing helped to popularize, and why have these resonated so powerfully with American readers in what is widely termed the “post-Civil Rights era”? In this seminar, we will explore such questions by trying to situate Morrison's art in the social and political context in which it was produced. We will focus on selected scenes and passages from her novels as well as on two highly influential essays by Morrison that seek to define the distinctive sylistic elements and the social purpose of African-American novels.
CONTROLLING PROGRESS: EUGENICS AND ITS LEGACIES
Maria Bucur-Deckard, Indiana University
Friday, February 3, 2006
Before the human genome project, the legal-ethical human cloning debates, and the “intelligent design” disputes, there was eugenics. A term coined by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's son-in-law, eugenics (the science of improving humanity by manipulating reproduction in humans) came to dominate the imagination of biologists, sexologists, social reformers, doctors, and politicians until World War II, when this pseudoscience became one of the rationales for genocide. But eugenics was a very popular idea and had many supporters on the left and right of the political spectrum. Over the past two decades, a large number of monographs and other studies on eugenics has in fact turned the clear-cut depiction of eugenics as “Nazi science” into a more complicated picture that helps us understand the wide appeal of this notion of trying to control human reproduction for the sake of progress. For indeed, socialists, feminists, communists, liberals, nationalists, in addition to Nazis and fascists, saw in eugenics a worthy and noble science. In addition, the legacies of eugenics, and indeed the resurgence in the basic ideas advocated by eugenicists before World War II, to promote progress by manipulating reproduction, are still with us. This workshop will examine some of this recent scholarship on eugenics to explain the central place of this utopia/dystopia in modern history. The focus of the readings will be on Europe, but we will briefly touch on the US and Asia as well.
A NEW DEAL FOR INDIANS?
Brian Hosmer, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt, is recognized as one of the most influential heads of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Under his stewardship, U.S. Indian policy underwent a substantial reorganization that is often considered a component of FDR's broader New Deal. Yet, the New Deal for Indians as framed and implemented by John Collier proved controversial, as many Indian groups rejected all or part of what Collier proposed. This seminar is designed to offer teachers ways to integrate the Indian New Deal into lessons that consider the impact of FDR's New Deal policies and consider larger questions about the place of Indians in U.S. History
THE NATIVE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE
Ann Brigham, Roosevelt University
Friday, February 10, 2006
In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn. That moment is often understood as the start of what is known as the Native American Renaissance, a period characterized by a broad interest in American Indian peoples and cultures (brought on partly by empowerment movements such as the American Indian Movement). During this time, literature by American Indian writers was published in unprecedented numbers. In this seminar, we will discuss this period, looking at a range of Native American texts written in the last 30-plus years. As we read short fiction, poetry and prose, we will focus on the writers' repeated and various engagement with the power of storytelling. We will look at how different writers convey the ways that words and the imagination shape the world, and link past, present, and future. We will also devote some time to student writing activities that are shaped by the themes of the literature.
GEOTECHNOLOGY: THE NEW GEOGRAPHY
Pat McHaffie, DePaul University
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
This seminar will present an overview of technologies that have changed the practice and position of geography over the last 20 years. In particular it will focus on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Brief introductions to these technologies will be presented with applications and resources for teachers of high school geography.
PULLMAN: LABOR STRUGGLE AND THE CITY
Sue Hirsch, Loyola University
Thursday, February 16, 2006
In this seminar we will use the Pullman Company, which was headquartered in Chicago, as a lens for exploring the impact of labor struggle on the city. The Pullman Strike of 1894 was one of the most important labor confrontations in the city and the nation. But the large and diverse Pullman work force was also involved in the major labor movements that shaped Chicago from the 1880s to the 1980s.
HEALTH, FITNESS AND BODY IMAGE IN BRITAIN, 1890s-1939
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, University of Illinois at Chicago
Friday, February 17, 2006
Contemporary anxieties about body image, rising obesity and the health implications of modern sedentary lifestyles can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. This session will place these issues within a historical context by exploring male and female beauty ideals, fitness culture and reducing diets in Britain from the turn of the century until the eve of the Second World War. “Body management”, that is the practice of exercise systems and dietary restrictions, was targeted at both men and women and the session highlights the distinctive nature of male and female fitness and reducing culture. The discussion will be based on articles from scholarly journals and primary sources such as photographs, articles and advertisements from contemporary magazines.
PULLMAN: LABOR STRUGGLE AND THE CITY
Sue Hirsch, Loyola University
Thursday, February 23, 2006
In this seminar we will use the Pullman Company, which was headquartered in Chicago, as a lens for exploring the impact of labor struggle on the city. The Pullman Strike of 1894 was one of the most important labor confrontations in the city and the nation. But the large and diverse Pullman work force was also involved in the major labor movements that shaped Chicago from the 1880s to the 1980s.
COMPOSURE, COMPORTMENT, AND COUNTENANCE: THE THREE C'S OF THE AMERICAN PORTRAIT
Amy Mooney, Columbia College
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Within American culture, guides as to how to comport one's self, how to dress, and affect speech patterns have facilitated the dream of social mobility. From the 1839 publication of Canons of Good Breeding to the 1980 Official Preppy Handbook, etiquette books have contributed to the myth of the self-made individual so central to American identity. This lecture will present how the tenets of these texts offered a means of social control by influencing the aesthetics of self-presentation within popular culture as well as the fine art of portraiture.
WHOSE CRUSADES? DEVELOPMENT IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE CRUSADES
Warren Schultz, DePaul University
Thursday, March 2, 2006
The Crusades are in the news again. President Bush used the term post-9/11 and was criticized for it. Jonathan Ridley-Scott recently directed a big budget Hollywood epic about the Third Crusade. Osama Bin Laden urges Muslims worldwide to rise up against the “Jews and Crusaders.” An oft-quoted “true-life novel” by the French-Lebanese intellectual Amin Maalouf concludes the Crusades are deeply felt today in the Arab world as an “act of rape.” In the midst of these very public discourses, what are historians of the Crusades doing? There has been an upsurge in the number of academic books about the Crusades published in the last five years, which builds upon a major series of revisions in Crusader historiography which took place in the last decades of the preceding century. This seminar will examine these revisions and survey the recent bounty of works which address the myriad topics subsumed by the label “Crusades.”
FAULKNER'S SHORT AMERICAN STORIES
David Krause, Columbia College
Friday, March 3, 2006
During this seminar, participants will share and generate approaches to teaching four short stories by William Faulkner, all of them frequently anthologized and incorporated into secondary school curricula: “Barn Burning;” “A Rose for Emily;” “Dry September;” and “That Evening Sun.” The emphasis will be on questioning why Faulkner's short American stories should remain on crowded multicultural and interdisciplinary syllibi in 2006, rather than on simply affirming their canonicity. What can we - and our students - possibly learn from reading Faulkner's stories that might help us better understand and negotiate our complex identities within multiple communities? How can the processes of trying to make sense of events and characters within Faulkner's fictional landscape make a difference in how we navigate our uncertain world at the beginning of the 21st century? Why, in short, do Faulkner's American stories matter?
EL IMMIGRANTE MEXICANO EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS
Juan Mora-Torres, DePaul University
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
El crecimiento de la poblacion latina no tiene paralelo y ha sido uno de los acontecimientos que mas friccion ha producido en los Estados Unidos. Aproximadamente un millon y medio de latinos viven en el area metropolitana de Chicago (la mitad vive en la ciudad de Chicago y la otra en los suburbios). Esta comunidad esta transformando tanto a la ciudad como a los suburbios de maneras muy profundas. Esta poblacion la componen unos 40 millones de habitantes - cantidad similar a la poblaciion de Espana y con escasamente un par de millones menos que la de Colombia - ; de esta manera, los latinos contituyen un 14% de la poblaciion de los Estados Unidos. Si se mantiene el presente porcentaje de crecimiento, se calcula que para el ano 2020 habra mas de 60 millones de latinos y solamente Brasil y Mexico tendran poblaciones mayores en el continente.
El curso se enfocara en las expresiones culturales e historicas de los inmigrantes mexicanos y las comunidades que han creado en este pais. Y nos enfocaremos particularmente en esta comunidad ya que los mexicanos representan dos terceras partes de la poblacion latina de los Estados Unidos. Ademas, en el ultimo siglo estos inmigrantes han transofrmado este pais tanto en el ambito laboral como en el campo politico y hasta la fecha no han recibido el reconocimiento que se les debe.
WHOSE CRUSADES? DEVELOPMENTS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE CRUSADES
Warren Schultz, DePaul University
Thursday, March 9, 2006
The Crusades are in the news again. President Bush used the term post-9/11 and was criticized for it. Jonathan Ridley-Scott recently directed a big budget Hollywood epic about the Third Crusade. Osama Bin Laden urges Muslims worldwide to rise up against the “Jews and Crusaders.” An oft-quoted “true-life novel” by the French-Lebanese intellectual Amin Maalouf concludes the Crusades are deeply felt today in the Arab world as an “act of rape.” In the midst of these very public discourses, what are historians of the Crusades doing? There has been an upsurge in the number of academic books about the Crusades published in the last five years, which builds upon a major series of revisions in Crusader historiography which took place in the last decades of the preceding century. This seminar will examine these revisions and survey the recent bounty of works which address the myriad topics subsumed by the label “Crusades.”
WHITMAN WITHOUT BORDERS
Matt Cohen, Duke University
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Walt Whitman would have loved the World Wide Web. The “bard of democracy” would have been thrilled by e-mail, blogs, Googling, perhaps even cell phones, as these technologies offer people unprecedented access to literature and to each other. But would Whitman - a staunch defender of copyright - have published his own work on the Web? Does Whitman's “body electric” prefigure and justify his widely accessible “body electronic,” or does that often-controversial body need password protection? This seminar will use the online Walt Whitman Archive to present the latest issues in the teaching of America's most famous poet worldwide, explore ways of teaching Whitman's poetry using online sources, and raise questions about literary pedagogy in the global, but not yet globally digital age.
LOVE IN THE MASTER'S HOUSE: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM AND THE MASTER BUILDER
Amelia Zurcher, Marquette University
Friday, May 12, 2006
Shakespeare's c. 1598 comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream offers us an unsettling collection of problems: how does erotic love fit into a patriarchal social system, and what are we to make of the relationship between conquest and marriage? does the metaphorizing power of art (or dream) smooth the potential opposition between love and power, to the point even of uniting them in one figure, or is it art's job instead to reveal the tension between them? Three centuries later Ibsen's 1892 tragedy The Master Builder takes on a strikingly similar group of questions and leaves us with just as ambiguous a resolution. In this seminar we will read these historically, generically, and stylistically divergent plays as a pair in order to get a sharp focus on some of the philosophical and aesthetic issues they raise. Participants should have recently read and be familiar with A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Master Builder.
BOOKS FOR KIDS: A BRIEF HISTORY
Paul F. Gehl, Newberry Library
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
This seminar will examine the history of children's books, beginning with medieval and Renaissance precedents for two kinds of children's publishing - the school book and moral literature for children. We will also discuss the advent of toy books and books for entertaining reading, the impact of mass production and color prining on children's literature in the 19th century, and the spread of children's books to the third world in the course of the 20th century.
THE CREATION OF RACIAL THOUGHT: A COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE FROM COLONIAL EAST AFRICA
Jonathon Glassman, Northwestern University
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Modern science tells us that racial categories have no basis in biology. That means that racial attitudes - not simply racism but also the very perception of racial categories - are historical products: ways of thinking and behaving that have arisen in speicific historical contexts and through specific historical processes. How then has racial thought come into being? Some scholars argue that race is a distinctly Western doctrine, and that when racial conflicts are found in other parts of the world, such as Rwanda, Zanzibar or China, it is a sign that they were exported there from the West. Others counter that intellectual and cultural history doesn't work that way; that thinkers in those places crafted their own versions of racial thought, based on local concepts of difference. What is racial thought? How does it differ from ethnicity and nationalism? Our discussion will begin from the perspective of some African experiences, and then broaden out to include other histories and experiences, including our own.
MARX'S TWO COMMUNISMS
Daniel Brudney, University of Chicago
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Marx's picture of communism has long been distorted through the lens of the Cold War. In fact, within a space of three years (1844-46), Marx gives us not just one but two distinct pictures of fully realized communism. Each is fascinating, each is challenging, and each has its problems. The seminar will examine the textual bases for each picture of communism, look at their similarities and difference, and assess their plausibility as descriptions of the good society.
WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Ray Clemens, Illinois State University
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
This seminar will examine the roles of women in Medieval European society, with particular emphasis on the writings of women. We will use the Newberry's collections to explore various images of women presented during the later Middle Ages and Reformation including the writings of and about religious women, women in the domestic sphere, and women's biology.
RECONSIDERING THE “SPANISH” CONQUEST OF LATIN AMERICA
Laura Matthew, Marquette University
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The conquest of Mexico in 1519 by Spanish conquistadors symbolizes a watershed moment in world history. The meeting of the “Old” and “New” worlds, the beginning of modernity and a global economy, the destruction of American cultures and environments by “The West” - historians employ lofty phrases to distill the meaning of this conquest, and all that followed. Recently, however, historians have questioned these grand narratives of the Spanish conquest. They point to the protracted nature of the various conquests across Latin America, so often described as if they were a single tumultuous event. They also emphasize the heavy participation of previously unrecognized players on behalf of the Spanish kings: Africans, and Native Americans themselves. As the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Mexico approaches, this new research is fundamentally altering the way the story of conquest is told. Ultimately, it challenges us to reconsider how exactly the conquest of Latin America was achieved, by whom, and to what ends.
SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN NORTH AMERICA
Margaret Storey, DePaul University
Friday, May 26, 2006
This seminar will explore the distinct features of North American slavery and emancipation, including the many different ways in which slavery developed in the British colonies, and later, the United States. Of importance will be a consideration of how staple crop economies, racism, and religious beliefs converged to shape the character of North American slavery, the lives of slaves, the anti-slavery movement, and, finally, emancipation in 1863-1865. We will read selections from scholarly monographs for an overview of the history of the institution, as well as primary documents created by slaves, slaveholders, and abolitionists.