Author / abritt

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Lipstadt Describes “Surrealistic” Experience Testifying in “Unite the Right” Trial

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently recounted what she described as the “surrealistic experience” testifying in the Charlottesville, VA, trial against the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. Lipstadt served as an expert witness for the trial and was cross-examined by one of the defendants. Read an excerpt from the HuffPost’s coverage of the trial below along with the full article here: “Experts Describe ‘Surrealistic’ Process Of Putting Charlottesville’s Nazis On Trial.”

“On the stand, Lipstadt read aloud some of the planning messages sent by the event’s organizers. She testified that she was ‘taken aback‘ by the level of anti-Semitism and the adulation for Nazi Germany evident in the discussions.

“‘On one hand, I could feel like I was in the classroom, teaching about anti-Semitism and teaching about its connection to white supremacy,’ Lipstadt told HuffPost about her experience as an expert witness. ‘This was a call to arms. This was a call to violence. If you read their statements, it’s just overwhelming.‘”

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Anderson Discusses Rittenhouse Trial Verdict on WNYC’s ‘The Brian Lehrer Show’

Charles Howard Candler Professor Carol Anderson was recently a guest on the WNYC program ‘The Brian Lehrer Show.’ The conversation centered on the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, during protests in Kenosha, WI, in 2020. Listen to the full conversation here: “Professor Carol Anderson on the Rittenhouse Verdict.”

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Anderson Quoted in ‘AP News’ Article about Vigilantism

Dr. Carol Anderson was recently quoted in the Associated Press News article “2 trials, 1 theme: White men taking law into their own hands.” Following the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and the three men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the piece examines white vigilantism in historical and contemporary perspective. Anderson’s most recently book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), charts how anti-Black racism shaped the Second Amendment. Read an excerpt from the AP News piece below, along with the full article here.

“So much of this issue about protection and safety is about the safety and the protection of whites or white property,” said Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. “There is a hubris of whiteness. The sense that it is on me to put Black lives back into their proper place.”

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Strocchia’s ‘Forgotten Healers’ Wins the Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia’s book Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2020) has been awarded the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize from the History of Science Society. The prize is given annually in recognition of an outstanding book on the history of women in science. Forgotten Healers was also awarded the Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. Strocchia is Department Chair and Professor of History. Read more about the Rossiter Prize and browse the list of past winners here.

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Price Cited in ‘The Atlantic’ Article on COVID in Rural America

Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlantic. Titled “Rural America’s False Sense of Security,” the article focuses on the perception and reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in rural parts of the U.S. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article.

People who live in rural areas are also more likely to be Republican, and as COVID-19 became politicized, Republicans grew less likely to get vaccinated voluntarily or to endorse masking and other restrictions. Rural areas and red states issued fewer restrictions, such as mask mandates, throughout the pandemic, so it makes sense that they’d have fewer restrictions now. “This is a very long-standing difference in our country of what sort of pandemic measures we had,” says Polly Price, a law and global-health professor at Emory University. “You had different pandemic experiences depending on where you live.”

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Scully Quoted in ABC’s Digital Essay on Sara Baartman

Dr. Pamela Scully, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Affairs, Professor in WGSS and African Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a digital essay published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The piece, “The fight for Sarah Baartman,” discusses the life, death, and legacy of Sara Baartman. Scully and Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History, co-authored a biography of Baartman in 2009, titled Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton UP). Read the essay here: “The fight for Sarah Baartman.”

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Drs. Chira and Armstrong-Partida Publish Articles in September Issue of ‘AHR’

Two faculty members in the Emory Department of History have published articles in the September issue of the American Historical Review. Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor, published “Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation.” Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor, reflects on collaborative research with her co-author Dr. Susan McDonough in a piece titled, “Finding Amica in the Archives: Navigating a Path between Strategic Collaboration and Independent Research.”

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History Department Announces 2021-’22 Graduate Award Winners

Congratulations to the graduate students who won 2021-’22 awards in the History Department. These awards were formally announced at the fall Department of History party on Friday, October 29. See the names of the winners and details below.

The Ross H. and May B. McLean Prize, awarded annually to the first-year student/s in history who achieved the most distinguished record for the previous year.

The Francis S. Benjamin Prize, awarded for the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program.

The Blair Rogers Major and James Russell Major Dissertation Award, given annually to the most promising student writing a dissertation in the history of Europe and of European expansion (including the British Isles), from classical antiquity to the present. 

*As one-time special exception, due to COVID-19 and the inability to award it in 2020-21, two awards were granted in 2021-22.

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Dr. Navyug Gill (PhD, ’14) Publishes Article in ‘Past & Present’

PhD alum Dr. Navyug Gill has published an article in the journal Past & Present. Gill completed his dissertation, “Labours of Division: Peasant Castes and the Politics of Agrarian Hierarchy in Colonial Panjab,” in 2014 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Gill is now Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. Read the abstract of the Past & Present article below along with the full piece here: “Accumulation by Attachment: Colonial Benevolence and the Rule of Capital in Nineteenth-Century Panjab.”

A persistent theme in the emergence of capitalism is the displacement of peasants from the countryside into industrializing cities, with regions not undergoing such a transition usually deemed semi-feudal, proto-capitalist or pre-modern. Instead of separations, however, Panjab was the site of an altogether different dynamic of accumulation based on forging a series of novel attachments. This article begins by tracing the East India Company’s conquest in 1849, and the development of an ostensibly benevolent land revenue settlement based on surveying, measuring and calculating agrarian potential. Next, it examines how this process generated a set of natural and human contingencies so that certain castes were fixed to parcels of land, and expected to pay increasing rates while cultivating global commodities and conducting exchanges in cash. To make sense of this difference, it then contrasts the archive of settlement work with Karl Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation, to explicate the conditions and limitations of its universality. Together this demonstrates how caste-based peasant agriculture in Panjab was a new phenomenon implicated in a modern yet distinctive rule of capital. In a broader sense, this offers possibilities to rethink the politics of comparative analysis as well as the alterity of capitalist transitions across the colonial world.

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Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed”

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Surveying U.S. history since the eighteenth century, Anderson highlights a pattern of white supremacists endangering U.S. democracy and yet suffering few to no consequences thereafter. Anderson links this historical pattern to the results of current cases brought against the invaders of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed.”

“This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.”