2007-2008
Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University's School of Communications
Seminars are held on Fridays from 3:00-5:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated as email attachments. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org.
November 2, 2007—Daniel Headrick
December 7, 2007—S. Paul O'Hara
January 25, 2008—Ann Johnson
February 22, 2008—Burton Bledstein (Cancelled)
April 4, 2008—E. Joanna Guldi and Robert Buerglener
May 16, 2008—Mark Schmeller
Printable 8½” x 11” pdf Schedule
November 2, 2007— A Maritime Frontier: Portuguese-Ottoman Warfare in the Indian Ocean
Daniel Headrick, Roosevelt University
Textbook chapters on the expansion of Europe portray the sixteenth century as a time when the Portuguese dominated the Indian Ocean. Yet the Ottoman Empire, then the most powerful state in Europe, was adept at naval as at land warfare and dominated the Mediterranean Sea. The Portuguese interruption of the spice trade and their attacks on Muslim cities and ships brought them into confrontation with the Ottomans. On several occasions, Portuguese fleets entered the Red Sea. Several times Ottoman fleets ventured into the Indian Ocean to destroy the Portuguese. All of these expeditions failed, for Ottomans used man-powered galleys that were weak and vulnerable in the ocean, while the Portuguese used sailing ships poorly designed for the shallow waters of the Red Sea. Hence a century-long stalemate.
December 7, 2007— Cleansing the Body Politic: The Social Origins of Chicago’s Sanitary Canal
S. Paul O’Hara, Xavier University
Commentator: Louis Cain, Loyola University Chicago
In 1901 the opening of the Sanitary Canal, which permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River, promised to remove the industrial pollution of south Chicago from the city’s lakefront and drinking water. While it served as a triumph of modern technology, it was also an outgrowth of the Gilded Age’s concern over the social realities of modern industrial life. Sanitation became a way, I argue, for some Chicagoans to apply new forms of science, technology, and social reform to the issues of industrial pollution while reconfirming social standings and class hierarchy.
January 25, 2008— Engineering the Nation: Intersections between Intellectual, Political, and Economic Borderlands in the Early American Republic
Ann Johnson, University of South Carolina
Land surveys and fortification design were key activities in the formation of engineering practices in the Early American Republic. These projects were federally-overseen and, thus, provide a window on the changing ideals of the nation. Yet, local knowledge and conditions mattered profoundly, too. I suggest that thinking about borderlands should be expanded to include not only geographic borderlands and their interesting socio-cultural-political-economic exchanges, but also to locations where different forms of knowledge came into contact and conflict, in order to consider how technical know-how was also traded in the context of nation-building.
February 22, 2008—Session cancelled
Visual Thinking in Urban America: Jane Addams Encounters Lewis Hine's Photographic Intelligence
Burton Bledstein, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Diane Dillon, Newberry Library
April 4, 2008—Session will begin at 2 PM
Has the World Ever Been Flat? The Politics of Access in Britain, 1796–1851, and Manufacturing the Myth of Inclusion
E. Joanna Guldi, University of California at Berkeley
The history of the transport revolution is typically addressed as a story about inclusion. Such stories suggest that mobility gradually assimilated all economic classes and regional geographies into a nation characterized by access to print, democracy, and trade. Yet contemporary debates around the transport revolution were marked by deep concern about participation and access. Property rights, management, connectivity, and finance all represented zones where the common burden might be shifted to the benefit of a particular few. This paper discusses the two fiercest debates about inclusion: the status of expert versus local knowledge in who would manage the roads, and the balance of public, private, local, and national, in who would pay for them. It will suggest that both centralizers and localists engaged in manufacturing the myth that the world had become flat in order to prove that their system would inevitably assimilate the nation, solving the problems of exclusion.
Automobile Drivers in the United States, 1898-1918: Chaos or Control?
Robert Buerglener, DePaul University
In the late ninteenth and early twentieth century, automobile advocates and drivers in the United States made broad claims about the utopian promise of automobiles. However, it quickly became apparent that automobile drivers brought with them an enormous potential for social disorder, even death. As a result, many non-drivers called for stringent regulation. This paper examines drivers’ beliefs about regulation and law enforcement. In the context of Progressive Era debates over individual responsibility and the boundaries of private and public property, drivers took the side of individual autonomy rather than external control. Drivers’ beliefs about who should control their activities thus became an arena for the contestation of important issues of social privilege, class, and power in the years before WWI.
Commentator: James Akerman, Newberry Library
May 16, 2008— Manufactories of Public Sentiment:
Political Parties and the Concept of Public Opinion, 1787–1850
Mark Schmeller, Northeastern Illinois University
In 1787, Americans adopted a constitution designed to check the evils of political factions. Half a century later, organized mass political parties were a basic fact of national political life. Historians have long debated the meaning and significance of this transformation. Did the rise of the two-party system indicate a widespread acceptance of pluralism and liberal, interest group politics? This essay argues that changing concepts of public opinion played a vital yet often neglected role in legitimating parties. I first show how the anti-partyism of the founding generation rested upon classical humanist ideas of popular opinion as unstable and easily counterfeited. As these ideas fell into disuse, a new generation of politicians reconfigured the relation between party and public opinion. Democrats advanced a “constitutionalist” rationale for party government. They equated public opinion with the popular will, and saw parties as necessary means for implementing that will. Whigs developed a weaker “sociological” defense of party organization. They defined public opinion as a product of civilization and economic “improvement,” and argued that it would contain the violence of partisan conflict.
The seminar will meet on scheduled Fridays from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, to be followed by dinner in a local restaurant. Sessions will feature either an original paper or a particularly suggestive text. If you plan to attend, please email scholl@newberry.org, or call (312) 255-3524 to request a copy of the paper as an e-mail attachment. The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay, and that everyone who requests a paper will attend the seminar. Seminars are held at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
Please do not request the paper unless you plan to attend.