Archive for December, 2009
December 16, 2009
Racist depictions of Chinese immigrants, like this postcard advertising buttons, proliferated in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This September the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City reopened in its new Soho location designed by Maya Lin. I visited in the fall and the two floors of simple but effective exhibits on the history of Chinese immigrants to the United States, dating from early nineteenth century, left a lasting impression. I knew, of course, about the Chinese laborers who helped to build the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But I had arrived in the United States in 1990 and belong to the new wave of mainland Chinese immigrants dating from the 1980s. The concept of long established generations of Asian Americans mostly only floated in the back of my consciousness. (more…)
Tags:borderless, Chinese history, Diaspora, globalization, World History
Posted in Asia, General, World | Leave a Comment »
December 15, 2009
Reproducing or recreating the past is a common tactic in public history, as any visitor to Colonial Williamsburg can attest. While museums and other historic sites use original artifacts when they are available, in many cases if the items have been lost, are privately held or just too fragile to display, reproductions stand in. They serve the important function of conveying to visitors what a building may have looked like, or how a fully furnished room may have appeared. Currently however, exhibits at the Science Museum in London, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California and the Oxford Museum of the History of Science focus on recreating the history that might have been. (more…)
Tags:Britain, British History, European History, History Compass, History Compass Exchanges, history of science, history of science and technology, Popular Culture, United Kingdom
Posted in Britain and Ireland, Europe, General | Leave a Comment »
December 14, 2009
With the recent University of California budget crisis and resulting decline in financial support for graduate students, a feeling of discouragement is endemic in my department. It’s difficult to be enthusiastic in the classroom when the UC President openly disses the Humanities and the job prospects are grim. Added to that is the trauma from the recent murder of a neighbor.
Shared via the Creative Commons from flickr user kendrak
Oh, and by the way, many of us graduate students just received letters informing us that we’ll soon be forced to move from our somewhat-affordable old campus apartments and into newer and more-expensive high-rise campus housing. Though staff and faculty are working hard to support us through this tough time (even while they, too, are taking similar hits in job security and/or salary), morale is at an all-time low. (more…)
Tags:budget, satire, UC
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
December 9, 2009
The Canadian and Northeast American Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS and NEASECS) recently held their annual conference in Ottawa on the theme of ’1759: Making and Unmaking Empires’. A number of papers – particularly those by Joan Coutu (Waterloo) and David McNeil (Dalhousie) – sought to represent the importance of this pivotal year through the reconstruction of both the short and long-term legacies of historical figures such as James Wolfe.
The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West (Wiki Commons)
While the papers were singularly relevant and useful for getting at a broader examination of the eighteenth-century empire-building process, the conference theme raised several important issues. First, the concept of employing historical anniversaries in order to publicize scholarly work is itself fraught with problems as it implicitly ties disciplinary considerations to the larger public processes of commemoration and political debate that are largely manifested outside of academia. (more…)
Tags:Academic Conference, British History, Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment, history, History Compass, History Compass Exchanges, Media History, Popular Culture, Popular History
Posted in Conferences, Europe, General | Leave a Comment »
December 8, 2009
Every postgraduate student perhaps encounters sooner or later the chilling phrase ‘publish or perish’. At the same time, some students inevitably become aware of academics that seem to some extent able to defy this rule, and of the mischievous musings of canteen gossipmongers on how this can be so. Against this background, postgraduates, anxious to ensure the occurrence of something greater than a blank space under the ‘Publications’ heading in their job-seeking Curriculum Vitae, flock to publishing workshops, there to seek guidance, inspiration and consolation. (more…)
Tags:Josie Dixon, NUIGalway, Postgraduates, Publish or Perish, Publishing Workshop
Posted in Britain and Ireland, General | 4 Comments »
December 7, 2009
As part of my interest in digitization and its influence on historical research, I recently attended a conference on digitization hosted by the Van Leer Institute of Jerusalem. One of the sessions, ‘Digitization and the Humanities’, dealt with the developments in the field of digitization, and in particular with an ongoing project, called The Friedberg Genizah Project, which aims to digitize the entire corpus of finds included in the Cairo Genizah. (more…)
Tags:Cairo, digitization, FGP, fragment, Friedberg, Genizah, manuscript, project
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
December 3, 2009
No battle at Battle? New site suggested for the Battle of Hastings
This week a new site for the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was put forward by amateur historian and archaeologist Nick Austin. The new site, which lies on the western side of the ridge that surrounds Hastings, is around three miles from the invasion camp of William the Conqueror and two miles nearer Hastings than previously thought. The site is confirmed by the discovery of a crossbow where Harold is thought to have made this last stand.
Austin has spent the last twelve years researching where the battle took place, until now thought to be located at Battle – the town named after the most famous early medieval battle in history. Does Austin’s theory carry any weight?
Image from Wikimedia Commons
(more…)
Tags:1066, Battle of Hastings, Battle site, Medieval and Renaissance Exhibition, The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, William the Conqueror
Posted in Britain and Ireland | 2 Comments »
December 2, 2009
I recently attended for the first time the History of Science Society’s annual meeting, which took place from November 19 to November 22 in Phoenix, Arizona. The schedule of panels covered topics both expected – on Darwin and Galileo, for example – and others on sixteenth-century charlatans, nineteenth-century public health, and the tobacco industry in the twentieth century, which highlight how as a field of study the history of science has come to embrace an inclusive view of “science” across regional, temporal, and disciplinary divides. I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of current research connected to the history of science, which seems to be on the cutting edge of historical research for many scholars whose background and primary interests do not necessarily fit within the purview of history of science programs. (more…)
Tags:asian studies, history of science and technology, World History
Posted in Africa, AHA, Asia, Australasia and Pacific | Leave a Comment »
December 1, 2009
I’m a historian because I’m haunted. The words and names from the archives surface in my thoughts and dreams…as I immerse myself in their world, their stories become mine. Am I like a clan storyteller, curating and re-telling the memories from long ago? Or am I merely that eccentric cat lady with no life of her own, her piles of papers and a worn laptop offering ample space for escape from the real world? Though I now sit in an overstuffed chair in my suburban living room with the ambient sound of a lawnmower outside, I am not really here. I am at the sickbed. Hearing a young child’s chest heave and rise, reminding me of my son. (more…)
Tags:disease, medical history, pertussis
Posted in North America | 1 Comment »
