Congratulations to Dr. Tehila Sasson, Assistant Professor of History and a new colleague in the Emory History Department, for receiving the International Global History Research Award for 2016. Given by the The Universities of Basel, Heidelberg and Sydney, the award supports Sasson’s proposed conference, titled “Global Histories of Natural Resources.” Read more about the award, conference, and Professor Sasson’s work here.
“Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes” Featured as Timely, Creative, and Cool Course
Photo from the Bom Retiro neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, the test case for “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes.” Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
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Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, History Department Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, will co-teach an interdisciplinary course, “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes,” in the spring semester 2017. Recently featured by the Emory News Center as a timely, creative, and cool course, the class will be led by Lesser along with Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences, and Ana Teixeira, Director of the Portuguese Language Program and Lecturer in Portuguese, Spanish & Portuguese. Guest lecturers will include Thomas D. Rogers, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History. Check out the course description below, and browse some of Emory’s other unique offerings this semester.
The course will analyze how “health” has been understood over time by both populations and providers using diverse methodologies, both traditional and novel. Using the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo as a test case, students will analyze disease patterns and prevention within a historical perspective. They will also analyze how questions of class, race and gender have led to historically different incidences of, and responses to, disease, understanding the relationship between cultural attitudes, exposure to diseases and access to health care.
Eric Goldstein in ‘The Atlantic’
Dr. Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, offered his expertise on questions of American and Jewish history and culture for an article in The Atlantic titled “Are Jews White?” The piece, written by Emma Green, explores how “Trump’s election has reopened questions that have long seemed settled in America—including the acceptability of open discrimination against minority groups.” Check out an excerpt from Goldstein’s contributions to the article below and read the full piece.
“Jewish identity in American is inherently paradoxical and contradictory,” said Eric Goldstein, an associate professor of history at Emory University. “What you have is a group that was historically considered, and considered itself, an outsider group, a persecuted minority. In the space of two generations, they’ve become one of the most successful, integrated groups in American society—by many accounts, part of the establishment. And there’s a lot of dissonance between those two positions.”
Patrick N. Allitt on CSPAN: American Environmental History and the California Gold Rush
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, recently delivered a lecture on the California Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century on CSPAN’s “Lectures in History” program. The lecture comes from a section of the class “American Environmental History” that Allitt gave on Emory’s campus in Atlanta on 19 September 2016. Check out the 50-minute lecture on the CSPAN website.
Alumna Sarah Van Dell on Beijing, UNO, and Serena Williams in ‘Medium’
Emory History Department alumna Sarah Van Dell, a former History major and Chinese Studies minor, recently published a terrific piece on the website Medium. The article, “22 Grand Slams? How I Beat Serena in UNO — at the Beijing airport,” chronicles Dell’s journey to Beijing to cover the China Open – the city’s first major tennis event – shortly after graduating in 2004. Enjoy the article here.
Dr. Belle Tuten (PhD alumna) on “The Mansplaining Hordes”
Dr. Belle Tuten, W. Newton and Hazel A. Long Professor of History at Juniata College, wrote a piece “The Mansplaining Hordes” on the blog Smart Women Talking. Tuten received her PhD from Emory’s History Department in the 1990s with Steve White. Read an excerpt of the post below and check out Tuten’s full post.
“As a college professor I have the luxury of having at least some claim to knowledge about my own expertise on my own turf (although many college students may not consider it knowledge worth having; that is a different problem). But I’m a professor in the humanities. There is certainly a different conundrum for my female and non-binary colleagues and colleagues of color in the social and natural sciences. I cannot help but think that as the humanities have more and more female etc. professors, the humanities get more and more sidelined by the “real” [read: quantitative?] social and physical sciences, from which female and nonbinary students and students of color are dropping out at demonstrably higher rates than straight white male ones. Is that also a statement on the nature of authority?”
The 2016 Election in the Classroom: History Department Courses and Contemporary Politics
The Emory News Center recently featured two History Department courses in a piece examining offerings across the campus this semester that are engaging contemporary politics and especially the 2016 election. The courses from the Department are: “Race and the American Presidency” (Dr. Brett Gadsden) and “Popular Culture and Politics in the United States” (Dr. Daniel LaChance). Read more about each of the courses at “Unprecedented election cycle provides focus for courses.”
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt on ‘Denial’ in the “Los Angeles Times”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH7ktvUWaYo]
The Los Angeles Times recently profiled Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, following a weekend where the showing of film Denial was expanded throughout the United States. Based on Lipdstadt’s 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, Denial tracks her 1996 libel case in a British court for accusing author David Irving of denying the Holocaust. Read the full piece here: “Denial’s’ real-life scholar who fought Holocaust revisionists says movie confronts those ‘who think it’s OK to change facts.”
“In a sense Lipstadt sees herself as similarly carrying on the legacy — speaking, via her scholarship, for a generation that can’t speak for itself. As depicted in the film, survivors would come up to her outside the trial and ask why none of them could testify; she had the difficult task of explaining to them, and herself, why the unimaginable possibility of silence was actually the wiser course and that allowing Irving to harangue them or twist their words in a cross-examination setting would do neither them nor the case any good.
“Lipstadt in this regard walks a fine line, feeling the emotion of the tragedy but practicing the rigor of its study.”
Tehila Sasson in the American Historical Review (October 2016), “Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott”
Tehila Sasson is a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. In 2017 she will join the History Department at Emory University as an Assistant Professor. She is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title We Are the World: The End of Empire and the Rise of Global Humanitarianism, which traces how in the second half of the twentieth century, ordinary people were mobilized to join a global community of aid. She is the author of “From Empire to Humanity: The Russian Famine and the Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism,” which appeared in the Journal for British Studies in July 2016. She is also working on an economic, legal, and environmental history of the rights to ownership of natural resources and the origins of global environmental justice in the twentieth century.
Abstract
This article traces the history of the Nestlé boycott, one of the most well-known and successful boycotts of the 1970s. As part of the campaign to end bottle-feeding in Third World societies, it called for the global regulation of controversial marketing strategies implemented by Western formula companies. The story adds a crucial yet understudied aspect of rights discourse in the 1970s, when humanitarian activists strove to reform the global market and create ethical forms of capitalism. The history of the boycott may seem like a marginal tale within this history, but it is illuminating both for what it teaches us about the role of multinational companies, ethics, and the market in the period, and for what it reveals about the global history of human rights and humanitarianism. The history of the campaign allows us to uncover how in the 1970s not only diplomats and non-governmental organizations, but also ordinary people, business experts, and even multinational corporations became part of the project of feeding the world’s hungry. By politicizing breastfeeding, the Nestlé boycott played an important role in changing how those in the Third World were conceived by aid programs, transforming them from producers to consumers in the global market. While international attempts to limit the power of these corporations have failed, the Nestlé boycott became a somewhat minimal solution that emphasized the moral responsibilities of corporations. It offered a “weak” form of utopianism that emerged after the end of empire and attempted to reform global inequalities through the market. Click here to read the full article.
AHR Cover Illustration: In 1977, a boycott was launched against the Nestlé corporation, a well-known manufacturer of infant formula. As part of a campaign to end bottle-feeding in Third World societies, humanitarian activists called for regulation of the controversial strategies being used by Western companies to market breast milk substitutes to women in underdeveloped nations. In the increasingly global and deregulated economy, they claimed, multinationals like Nestlé exploited vulnerable consumers in order to profit from Third World female poverty. Both citizens and aid experts took part in the boycott, which led to the creation of the first international set of standards regarding global corporate responsibility. In “Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott,” Tehila Sasson argues that while knowledge of the dangers of bottle-feeding had been circulated long before the 1970s, it was only in this period that a movement of “global citizens” mobilized and transformed such knowledge into a new moral and political economy of “ethical capitalism.” In the process, Sasson shows, boycotters positioned residents of the underdeveloped world as global consumers, not just producers. “Boycott Nestlé,” 1978. Artist: Rachael Romero, San Francisco Poster Brigade 1978.
Joseph Crespino in Conversation with Natasha Trethewey on History and Poetry at “Neil Asks” Event
Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, recently participated in a discussion about history and poetry with Natasha Trethaway, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, director of the Creative Writing program and former U.S. poet laureate. Moderated by Kevin Young, Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, the conversation marked the 8th edition of the “Neil Asks” event. Check out an excerpt from the Emory News Center article below and read the full piece.
Both Crespino and Trethewey agreed that, with history and poetry, “there is always borrowing across the line,” as she noted. Crespino views that borrowing as a necessity, saying that even with regard to 20th-century history, where we are blessed with so much source material, still “there are so many silences in the archives” that need unpacking, whether by poets or historians.