Carol Anderson‘s The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide(Bloomsbury, 2014) was recently reviewed by Jesse McCarthy in The New York Times. McCarthy’s review, titled “Why Are Whites So Angry,” appraised Anderson’s work as an “extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy.” Professor Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies. Read the full review here.
Over the last year Dr. Mark Ravina and history major TJ Greer have collaborated on a digital humanities project examining the rhetoric of student activism and university administration responses through text mining. The project was recently profiled by the editors of the website Digital Humanities Now, where the study’s findings will appear in a series of blog posts. Read an excerpt from their first post below (“Mining the Movement: Some DH perspectives on student activism”) and check out the full run here.
This first blog reflects our first preliminary results, but even at this early stage we feel comfortable with two declarations: one empirical and one political. The empirical observation is that university administrations are largely talking past students, employing a radically different vocabulary than that of student demands. Our political observation is that universities need to address student demands seriously and directly, even if that means admitting that some problems are deeply structural and that solutions will require decades rather than months or years.
Professor Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, published The Congress of Vienna, Power and Politics after Napoleonwith Harvard University Press in 2014. The internet network H-Diplo recently selected Vick’s monograph for a multi-review roundtable and a response from the author. One of the reviewers, Jonathan Sperber (University of Missouri), praises Vick’s extensive use of primary sources and original approach. Sperber asserts that The Congress of Vienna for offers“a striking reinterpretation of the Congress, the practice of diplomacy and the political culture of post-Napoleonic Europe, which substantially enhances our understanding of the era while opening new possibilities for historical investigation and provoking scholarly debate.” Read the full set of reviews and Vick’s response here.
Retiring Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History, Dr. Jim Roark, will be honored with a scholarship for undergraduate research bearing his name. The Roark Prize will support rising seniors in the History Department pursuing research in the United States relating to their honors thesis. The idea for the prize originated with two former history students, Ben Leiner (’14) and Naveed Amalfard (’14), who counted Roark as an inspiring mentor and professor. Read the Emory News Center’s full report on the prize here.
The first-year cohort from the PhD program recently capped off the semester by presenting their research at the department’s annual Hi-Five event. The Hi-Five helps students develop their academic, presentation, and research communication skills and is based on the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition that originated at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. The format is also used by the Laney Graduate School for those students completing their Ph.D. dissertations. In presentations to the department, each student must adhere to the following rules:
Presentations must be five minutes or less. Presentations will be cut off after five minutes.
A single static PowerPoint slide is permitted (no slide transitions, animations or ‘movement’ in the slide, and the slide is to be presented from the beginning of the oration).
No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are permitted.
No additional props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory equipment) are permitted.
Presentations are to be spoken word (e.g. no poems, raps or songs).
Presentations are to commence from the front of the room and must be done while standing.
Presentations are considered to have commenced when a presenter starts their presentation through movement or speech.
Participating students and the titles of their papers are as follows:
Oskar Czendze – “Old Homes Made New: The Reinvention of Landsmanshaftn in the United States”
Mary Grace Dupree – “The Golden Chalice: Vision and Prophecy in the Narrative of Perpetua of Carthage”
Cheng-Heng Lu – “Double-edged Sword: The History of the Shi Clan in the Qing Empire”
Luke Hagemann – “Imperial Clementia in Late Roman Law”
Anthony Tipping – “A Coercive Public Health Campaign in Rio de Janeiro: The benevolent elite, the ignorant masses, and the revolta da vacina of 1904″
Alexandra Lemos Zagonel – “Secret Agent Men: Spying at Brazilian Universities in the Twilight of Military Rule”
Tim Romans – “Under the Vermillion Seal: Japan’s Forgotten Tokugawa Pirates”
Anthony Sciubba – “Ancient Arbitration: Conflict Mediation in Late Antiquity”
Illustration from John Frost’s 1860 biography, A Pictorial History of Andrew Jackson – Internet Archive
Professor Dawn Peterson was recently interviewed for a piece in Slate by Rebecca Onion. Prompted by discussions following the decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, the article hones in on one piece of Jackson’s life frequently cited by those who defend his legacy: his adoption of a infant Creek boy in 1813. Peterson offers historical context for the adoption of Lyncoya (the name given by Jackson to the orphaned boy) and the practice in southern society more broadly. These insights derive from Peterson’s recent research and especially her forthcoming book Indians in the National Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press in 2017). Read an excerpt from the piece below and check out the full article here.
Though they adopted native children, slaveholders like Jackson imagined “they were assimilating Native people and their lands into the confines of the United States. They believed that what they were doing was a benevolent act, but also understood it as a form of cultural genocide.”
In May of 2016 senior Takuya Maeda will graduate with highest honors in history. Maeda was recently profiled for his research accomplishments at Emory, most especially his work on the use of funds from the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 “set aside for the Japanese-American community to develop educational efforts and awareness about internment” during World War II. Maeda received a grant from the Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) program to conduct this research, which his mentor Professor Daniel LaChance described as “groundbreaking.” Maeda plans to continue and expand this project through graduate work in history. Read the full profile on Takuya here.
Dr. Leslie M. Harris, Associate Professor in the Department of History, recently lead off a panel discussion at the White House related the release of a new television drama titled “Underground.” The WGN America series tracks the story of the Underground Railroad and premiers this week. Harris’ scholarship, including her first book In the Shadow of Slavery, has helped to reshape prevailing conceptions the history of slavery in the United States, including its manifestation in the North and the importance of urban centers. Read the full story about Harris’ participation in the panel discussion here.
Tonio Andrade‘s The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton 2016) was reviewed by Jeffrey Wasserstrom in The Wall Street Journal on January 29, 2016. The article, available here, is titled “Flying Rats and Festive Fireworks.” Wasserstrom’s appreciative review describes the The Gunpowder Age as marking “a major contribution to a significant area of academic concern while opening the eyes of non-specialists.”
The description of The Gunpowder Age from Princeton University Press follows:
The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?
Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world’s great military powers.
By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.
In September Emory University teamed up with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) to sign an agreement of research collaboration. FAPESP is a highly respected public foundation in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, with numerous international collaborations. Emory also signed an agreement with Fulbright Brazil that establishes a Fulbright Professorship Award for Brazilian Visiting Scholars at Emory. These initiatives will benefit the already-rich community of scholars in the History Department and elsewhere working on Brazil and Portuguese studies. Read the full story from the Office of the Provost here.
