Month / November 2020

by abritt

Lipstadt Joins ADL in Condemning Yad Vashem Post

Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlanta Jewish Times. The piece discusses Lipstadt’s opposition to the controversial nomination of former far-right politician and military commander Effi Eitam to head Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Shoah or Holocaust. Read the excerpt below along with the full article: “ADL and Lipstadt Condemn Yad Vashem Post.”

“Yad Vashem is one of the jewels in the crown of Israeli institutions,” said Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies. She said that, given Eitam’s “fringe views, views that separate and divide rather than unite,” his nomination is a “colossal mistake.” She told the AJT that she plans to voice her opposition to the controversial nomination.

by abritt

Anderson Pens Op-Ed in ‘The Guardian’: “Democracy won’t die on our watch”

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published an opinion editorial in The Guardian. Titled “Millions of Americans have risen up and said: democracy won’t die on our watch,” the piece outlines how U.S. citizens responded to efforts at voter suppression by casting an unprecedented number of ballots in the 2020 elections. Read an excerpt below along with the full article: “Millions of Americans have risen up and said: democracy won’t die on our watch.”

While the forces arrayed against the United States looked formidable, they were not invincible. Instead, they ran into something that is even more powerful than a president, a senate, or the US supreme court. The American people themselves and their belief in and devotion to democracy.

by abritt

Armstrong-Partida’s ‘Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia’ Wins Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender

Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor of History, published Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) with co-editors Alexandra Guerson (University of Toronto) and Dana Wessell Lightfoot (University of Northern British Columbia). Congratulations to Armstrong-Partida and her co-editors on winning the 2020 Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Read more about the volume and prize in the award citation below:

The awards committee praised the book for interrogating the very idea of what constitutes community, and demonstrating that examining women’s roles and activities beyond the family changes our understanding of gender and social networks. Rather than treating community as self-evident or static, the contributors “explore the multi-varied and interwoven networks that women of different religious, socioeconomic, and geographic regions were embedded within.” While the deeply researched and well-written individual chapters address communities of Jewish women, conversas, Moriscas, nuns, and widows, the volume ranges beyond these groups to include women whose communities were not defined by religion or in relation to men: victims of clerical violence; perpetrators of neighborhood feuds; recipients of charitable support; and writers of wills. The volume amply fulfills its goal of “more clearly see[ing] women’s ability to navigate a multiplicity of identities and roles—and moves beyond the traditional approach of studying women within the confines of their families.” By treating community as a category of analysis, it reframes our understanding of the roles of women in medieval and early modern society. 

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Strocchia’s ‘Gender, Health and Healing 1250-1550’ Wins Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender

Congratulations to Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, whose co-edited volume Gender, Health and Healing 1250-1550 (Amsterdam, 2020) has won the 2020 Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Strocchia edited the volume with Dr. Sara Ritchey, Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Read more about the innovative volume in the prize citation below:

The awards committee stated that the book is exciting in conception and breadth, using “an integrative, hybrid model of analysis” that ranges far beyond “the narrow terrain of academic, text-based medicine” using new types of evidence about women’s “acts of caring and curing.” In eleven tightly argued and evidentially rich essays on engaging topics (including Ottoman healing baths, Caterina Sforza’s famous Ricettaria, and the care of the breast, among others) contributors manage to fulfill the promise of the Introduction: “to reimagine the lived experience of healthcare beyond the limited sphere of scholastic or theoretical medicine,” using non-traditional materials drawn from Christian and Islamic worlds to provide “a more nuanced picture of what people actually did to sustain or recover good health and the ways in which they understood their own bodies.” 

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Emory Historians Discuss “Legacies of Reconstruction”

Emory historians will gather via Zoom to discuss the “Legacies of Reconstruction” on November 10, 2020, from 1:00-2:00 pm EST. Panelists include Dr. Susan Ashmore, Charles Howard Candler Professor of History, Emory Oxford, and Dr. Alyasah A. Sewell, Associate Professor, Emory Department of Sociology. The panel will be moderated by Camille Goldmon, a PhD candidate in the History Department. The event is a part of the Lift Every Voice seminar series, organized as a tribute to the late Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III. Find more details about the event, including registration, here: http://emorylib.info/lift-nov.

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Anderson Analyzes 2020 Election for ‘Democracy Now’ and ‘The New York Times’

In the lead up to and shortly following the 2020 election, Dr. Carol Anderson contributed political analysis and historical context to two major media organizations. Four days before the election, Anderson was a guest on the Democracy Now segment, “‘Fighting for Democracy’: Carol Anderson on Voter Suppression & Why Georgia Could Go Blue.” Her prediction that Georgians may vote for a democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992 seems likely to come true. Three days following the election, while officials in Georgia and other battleground states continued to count votes, Anderson offered historical context for The New York Times on the links between U.S. slavery and the Electoral College. Read an excerpt from that article below along with the full piece: “The Electoral College Is Close. The Popular Vote Isn’t.” Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department.

“We look at a map of so-called red and blue states and treat that map as land and not people,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University who researches voter suppression. “Why, when somebody has won millions more votes than their opponent, are we still deliberating over 10,000 votes here, 5,000 votes there?”

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Wiggins (18G) to Speak on “Legacies of Reconstruction” in “Lift Every Voice” Seminar Series

Dr. Danielle Wiggins, a 2018 graduate of the History PhD program, will join other panelists on November 10, 2020, to discuss the legacies of Reconstruction. Wiggins is Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. PhD candidate in History Camille Goldman will moderate the conversation. The event is a part of the Lift Every Voice seminar series, organized as a tribute to the late Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III. Find more details about the event, including registration, here: http://emorylib.info/lift-nov.

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Anderson Discusses Slavery and the Origins of the Electoral College for NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” Anderson, an expert in public policy with a focus on race, justice and equality, discusses how politicians from slaveholding states successfully lobbied for the creation of what became known as the Electoral College at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Listen to the piece at the following link: “The Electoral College: Why Do We Do It This Way?“

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Strocchia’s ‘Forgotten Healers’ Awarded 2020 Marraro Prize

The Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) has awarded the 2020 Marraro Prize for the best book in Italian history to Prof. Sharon Strocchia’s Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). The prize committee offered the following appreciation of Prof. Strocchia’s work:

“Drawing on extensive work in Florentine archives, Strocchia develops a sophisticated and incisive investigation of the manifold roles women played as protagonists in Renaissance health practices. Her case studies illuminate the contributions of convent pharmacies and pharmacists, of aristocratic women who prepared and employed household remedies, and of the poor young women who worked as nurses in the pox hospital. More suggestive than conclusive, this pioneering work opens up inviting pathways for further investigation.”

Read our Q&A with Dr. Strocchia about Forgotten Healers from earlier this year: “New Books Series: Q & A with Sharon T. Strocchia about ‘Forgotten Healers.’”

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Pugh and Webster Win 2019-’20 McLean Prize

Congratulations to History graduate students Aleo Pugh and Anjuli Webster on winning the 2019-’20 Ross H. and May B. McLean prize. Established to honor Dr. McLean at his retirement in 1957, the prize is awarded each year to the first-year student/s in the History graduate program who achieved the most distinguished record for the year. Pugh’s graduate work, which is advised by Profs. Walter Rucker, Jason Ward, and Carol Anderson, examines African American history, social history, memory studies, and Black feminist theory in the Twentieth-Century United States. Profs. Clifton Crais and Yanna Yannakakis advise Webster, whose research engages issues related to empire, law and sovereignty in southeastern Africa. Find previous winners of the McLean Prize here.