2015-2016
Monday, April 4, 2016
Professor Vanessa Ogle, University of Pennsylvania
The Invention of Global Time
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Rooms 405/406, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
DATE: Monday, April 4, 2016
How did societies all over the world come to follow the same system of hour-wide time zones? And why did similar efforts to introduce a standardized worldwide calendar fail? Between the 1870s and 1950s, German and French government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats were joined together in a prolonged, contested, and only partially successful quest to get everybody on the same clock time and on the same universally standardized “World Calendar.” Logistical complications and outright rejection of such plans meant that the invention of modern time only succeeded much later than commonly assumed, while calendar reform never came to pass at all. It was only in the 1940s and 1950s that finally a worldwide system of time zones was widely accepted.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Professor Mary Frances Berry, University of Pennsylvania
We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home across the Atlantic World
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Montgomery Auditorium, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
DATE: Monday, November 16, 2015
We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home across the Atlantic World offers a new angle of vision for looking at racial identity, demography and migration as themes of our national history. This Colored Creole family contains overlooked heroes and scoundrels and ordinary folks trying to survive and thrive. Their experiences and especially the racial choices made enlarges our understanding of passing or deciding not to pass in its various manifestations throughout our history and today. The book discusses shifting forms of identification within an extended familial network and constrained by law and social reality.
2014-2015
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Professor David Ruderman, University of Pennsylvania
DATE: Wednesday, December 3, 2014
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
The Book of the Covenant [Sefer ha-Brit] was one of the most popular Hebrew books read by modern Jews, reflected in its forty editions spanning two centuries, including three Yiddish and six Ladino translations. Part scientific encyclopedia, part manual of mystical ascent, and part plea to Jews to embrace a universal ethics, the work was widely influential in an era of radical change and internal debate for Jews as well as for others. The amazing popularity of the author, the eastern European Jew Pinhas Hurwitz (1765-1821), stemmed from his kabbalistic pedigree. He offered his readers an exciting compendium of scientific knowledge they could read in their holy language under the pretext that its acquisition fulfilled their highest spiritual goals. The reception of The Book of the Covenant among modern Jewish readers allows us to understand more profoundly the ways in which a traditional society absorbed and creatively adopted aspects of modern science and cosmopolitanism. The book and its author open a wonderful window in studying the complex interplay of tradition, science, and inter-group relations in the modern era.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Professor Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania
"The Education of Barack Obama: Race and Politics in the Age of Fracture"
DATE: Monday, January 26, 2015
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
Professor Thomas Sugrue traces Barack Obama's evolving understanding of race and racial inequality throughout his career. In his lecture, Sugrue follows Obama from his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, to his time as an attorney and scholar, to his spectacular rise to power as a charismatic and savvy politician, to his dramatic presidential campaign, to his responses to the Trayvon Martin shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Sugrue looks at Obama's place in the contested history of the civil rights struggle; his views about the root causes of racial inequality in America; and the incredible challenges confronting his historic presidency.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Professor Tamara Walker, University of Pennsylvania
"Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Peru"
DATE: Tuesday, April 21, 2015
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
This lecture explores the role of clothing in the ethnically-diverse, urban slaveholding society of Peru. It considers specifically the ways that slaves and free blacks dressed to express their identities, negotiate their status, and challenge the dominant norms.
2013-2014
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Professor Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
"William Penn and Native Americans"
DATE: Wednesday, October 23, 2013
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
William Penn is deservedly remembered for his peaceful policies and fair dealings with Native Americans. Those memories of the peaceful founder, however, often make Penn seem an almost other-worldly figure, a saint whose Quaker beliefs set him utterly apart from other Europeans of his violent time and place. But, however admirable he was, William Penn was a human being who was a product of the era in which he lived. This lecture will set Penn’s policies in a broader context and examine how they related to late-17th-century English religious, political, and imperial trends and to the realities of interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Delaware Valley when Penn’s colonists arrived in the 1680s.
Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and Acting Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
This event is free and open to the public.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Professor Ben Nathans, University of Pennsylvania
"To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: Soviet Dissidents and Human Rights"
DATE: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
How did a small but determined cohort of dissidents inside the Soviet Union find their way to the doctrine of human rights - the world’s first universal ideology - and how did they apply their own brand of containment to Soviet power? Ben Nathans situates the history of the Soviet dissident movement within the larger contest of the Cold War, exploring the role of intellectuals such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn along with less well-known figures. With protesters in Russia today searching for a usable past, the legacy of Soviet dissent is taking on new meanings. And not only in Russia: the dissidents’ innovative mode of communication – the uncensored textual world known as samizdat - helps us think historically about the political possibilities of today’s internet and social media.
Benjamin Nathans is the Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. Nathans edited A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union [in Russian] (Moscow, 1994) and is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History.
This event is free, but tickets are recommended.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Professor Margo Todd, University of Pennsylvania
"Shakespeare and His Queen"
DATE: Wednesday, April 23, 2014
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108, 1901 Vine Street, 19103
Shakespeare, as we all know, was a history buff, and he particularly liked the tangled, often bloody history of English kings. What better source for dramatic plots, complex characters, and an abundance of moral lessons? But he wrote nearly all of his history plays during the reign of a queen, and a notably successful one at that. Although she is only mentioned in one of his plays (the co-authored and late Henry VIII), Elizabeth Tudor nonetheless established the context in which he wrote the rest, and her public persona both set the stage for contemporary dramatists and reflected their hopes for England’s peace and prosperity. This lecture will focus on both the queen herself and the visual and poetic propaganda that made her such a useful counterpoint to Shakespeare’s flawed kings.
Margo Todd is a Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, specializing in early modern English and Scottish history and in the culture of Reformed (Calvinist) Protestantism in Britain and early America. Her books include Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (winner of the Longman-History Today Prize and the Scottish History Book of the Year Award), and most recently an edition of the Kirk Session Books of Perth, 1577-1590.
This event is free, but tickets are recommended.
2012-2013
Wednesday, December 12
Professor Eve Troutt Powell, University of Pennsylvania
Other People's Help: Studying Slavery in Cultures Not Your Own
Wednesday, March 20
Professor Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
The Zoot Suit in American Culture
Monday, April 22
Jonathan Steinberg, University of Pennsylvania
Bismarck, Anti-Semitism and the Tragedy of German Jewry