María de los Ángeles Picone's new book Landscaping Patagonia Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina
Landscaping Patagonia
Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina
In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.
María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.
About the Author
María de los Ángeles Picone is assistant professor of history at Boston College.
Stacie A. Kent's new book Coercive Commerce Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire
Coercive CommerceGlobal Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire
An extensive analysis of the development of capital in Qing Empire China.
In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Stacie A. Kent reframes this century of intervention by shedding light on the generative force of global capital.
Based on extensive research, conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Coercive Commerce shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Capital, which had long been present in Chinese merchants’ pocketbooks, came to shape and even govern Chinese statecraft during the “treaty era.” This book contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality through taxation systems such as transit passes and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service by reorganizing Chinese territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale.
Offering a deep dive into the coercive nature of capitalism and the historically specific ways global capital reproduction took root in Qing China, Coercive Commerce will interest historians of capital and modern China alike.
About the Author
Stacie A. Kent is assistant professor of history at Boston College.
Joshua Donovan in The Washington Post
The Washington Post article
Christians in Aleppo fear for their future after Islamist takeover
-- December 6, 2024
Joshua Donovan
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Boston College
Nicole Eaton receives the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History for 'German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kalinigrad'
"Nicole Eaton's 2023 book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad—an examination of the Baltic Sea port city’s ordeal through brutal 20th-century geopolitics—was the winner of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, presented annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history. ASEEES also awarded her an honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, which recognizes an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past.
In addition, Eaton received an honorable mention for the German Studies Association DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in History and Social Science."
by Sean Smith | University Communications | November 2024
On Friday, Nov. 24, 2023, President Biden visited Nantucket Books and purchased a copy of “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” by Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, who interviewed Biden at the White House last year.
News article in wbur.org/news
ABOUT DEMOCRACY AWAKENING
New York Times Bestseller
“Engaging and highly accessible.”—Boston Globe
“A vibrant, and essential history of America’s unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals… It’s both a cause for hope, and a call to arms.”–Jane Mayer, author Dark Money
From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy — and how we can turn back.
In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.
In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.
Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”
Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.SEE LESS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is the cohost of the Vox podcast, Now & Then.
Heather Cox Richardson receives Tikkun Olam Award
Award for Scholarly and Professional Distinction
Tikkun Olam Prize for Promoting Public Historical Literacy
[Note: the formal translation of Tikkun Olam is “to repair the world.”]
The Tikkun Olam Prize for Promoting Public Historical Literacy addresses a major problem in American public culture, which inhibits the operation of democratic institutions, and processes: the breadth and depth of historical illiteracy. This prize honors individuals whose work has promoted literacy in public culture, with the abiding hope that such work will indeed help “to repair the world.” We look for sustained historical work that contributes significantly to historical literacy (defined as “meaningful knowledge about the past, historical context, and ability to think historically and critically”) in American public culture, with an emphasis on history education (broadly construed) beyond the academy.
Heather Cox Richardson receives Baldacci Award
Ken Burns presented the Authors Guild award for literary activism to Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson, author of numerous acclaimed history books—including her latest, Democracy Awakening—and the popular daily newsletter "Letters from an American." BC News
Scholars of the College 2024
Our five Scholars of the College at the awards dinner Monday night: Nick Yustin (advisor: Mike Glass), Shruthi Sriram (advisors: Eddie Bonilla and Nicole Eaton), Anna Davis (advisor: Prasannan Parthasarathi), Annie Liu (advisor: Eddie Bonilla), and Neal Bold (advisor: Oliver Rafferty).
In amazing news, Neal Bold won the McCarthy Prize for his thesis, “The Antiochene Renaissance: New Culture on the Twelfth-Century Latin Frontier.” The McCarthy Prize is given annually to the best thesis in all of the Humanities across Boston College, as judged by a panel of faculty members.
Please help me in congratulating Neal and Prasannan!!
Congratulations!
Mia Michael Wins Donald and Helene White Prize for the Outstanding Dissertation in the Field of Social Sciences.
Congratulations to Dr. Mia Michael Ph.D. on her outstanding dissertation, "Caring for the Commonwealth: Domestic Work and the New Labor Activism in Boston, 1960-2015." Dr. Mia Michael's dissertation was advised by Prof. Marilynn Johnson.
The Morrissey College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has selected Dr. Mia Michael's work to receive the Donald and Helene White Prize for the Outstanding Dissertation in the Field of Social Sciences.
Congratulations!
Prof. Antoni Ucerler, S.J. has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contribution to historical scholarship.
The RHS is the UK’s foremost society working for historians and history.
Irish diaspora in the U.S.
Professor of History Marilynn Johnson, co-director of GlobalBoston, a project that tracks the history of immigration in the region, discussed Irish migration and ancestry with the Boston Globe.
Collectors drawn to medieval book of hours
Interest in these richly-illustrated books is on the rise. Professor of History Virginia Reinburg's book French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayers, c. 1400-1600 is noted in a feature on the trend by the New York Times.
Christian Nationalism and Massachusetts
A new survey from Public Religion Research Institute shows a third of Americans sympathize with Christian nationalism. Professor of History Charles Gallagher, S.J., author of Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front, discusses how that message resonates in Massachusetts: WBUR "Radio Boston."
Presidential visit for Boston College historian Prof. Heather Cox Richardson
Democracy Awakening author and Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson was among a small group of eminent scholars hosted by President Joe Biden this month for an Oval Office discussion of ongoing threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad. (L-R: ; Eddie Glaude Jr. and Sean Wilentz of Princeton, Richardson, President Biden, Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard, Beverly Gage of Yale, Jon Meacham of Vanderbilt.)
Presidential visit for Boston College historian Prof. Robert Savage
Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain
In December in Dublin, Professor of the Practice of History Robert Savage was invited to present a copy of his latest book, Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain, to President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin, the president's official residence.
"Star Trek" and the reunification of Ireland
"Star Trek" and the reunification of IrelandWhen, in 1990, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" android character Data referenced the "Irish unification of 2024" as an example of violence successfully achieving a political aim, the episode was not broadcast by the BBC or Irish public broadcaster RTÉ. History Professor of the Practice Robert Savage comments: BBC.com.
A National Endowment for the Humanities grant supports historian Conevery Bolton Valencius' research on the impact of human-caused earthquakes.
BC News: Shaky ground
by Sean Smith | University Communications | November 2023
A National Endowment for the Humanities grant supports historian Conevery Bolton Valencius' research on the impact of human-caused earthquakes
Rachel Brody Wins Pingree Award
History PhD student Rachel Brody has been selected as the Morrissey College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Engelhard Pingree Research Fellow for 2023-2024. The award recognizes the high quality and innovative nature of Brody's research combining humanities and STEM approaches to archeology.
Brody designed and co-directs Castles and Communities Field School, which provides excellent training to new generations of archeologists in such things as excavation and lab techniques as well as Irish history and culture. In addition, Brody's article "The Material Cultures of Ectoparasites" was recently published in the prestigious Archeological Review from Cambridge. Congratulations!
Prof. Marilynn Johnson - Global Eats - The Heights
Through Global Eats, Marilynn Johnson Documents Boston’s Historical Immigrant-Owned Restaurants
By Juliana ParisiNovember 5, 2023 Updated November 6, 2023 at 4:41 pm
Clayton Trutor (PhD '18) Publishes New Book
Clayton Trutor's (PhD '18) new book, Boston Ball: Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, Gary Williams and the Forgotten Cradle of Basketball Coaches, has been published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Clayton Trutor (PhD '18) Wins Bell Award
Clayton Trutor (PhD '18) has been awarded the 2023 Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book on Georgia history for Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports (University of Nebraska Press). In November 2023, his new book, Boston Ball: Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, Gary Williams and the Forgotten Cradle of Basketball Coaches, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Prof. Marilynn Johnson - A Taste of History - Global Eats
BC News A taste of history
by Alix Hackett | University Communications | September 2023
A new digital project, created by BC History Professor Marilynn Johnson and her students, tells the story of immigrant-owned restaurants in early 20th century Boston.
The Samurai & the Cross
Christian Encounters with Japan (1549–1945)
Hist 4010/Theo 5010 – Spring 2024
Wednesdays 10:00–12:30 p.m. @ The Ricci Institute 2125 Commonwealth Ave. (Brighton Campus)
This course is an introduction to the history of Christianity in Japan, from its foundation in the sixteenth century to the early decades of the Meiji period. We will conclude with the atomic bomb’s destruction of Nagasaki in 1945. Francis Xavier, the first Christian missionary in Japan, arrived in 1549; and his successors continued to found Christian communities throughout Japan for decades thereafter.
They also helped to establish the international trading port of Nagasaki. The complex intercultural encounters and clashes between the Japanese and their European interlocutors took place during the early modern period—an age of great social and political upheaval dominated by the samurai warrior class. A long period of systematic persecution broke out in 1614 under the newly established Edo shogunate. Japanese Christians were forced into hiding and survived for two hundred and sixty years without clergy, creating their own secret rituals. They would only re-emerge in 1865, after the arrival of the French. A new wave of persecution followed during the early years of the Meiji Restoration, until it finally ceased in 1873 on account of foreign diplomatic pressure from Europe and the United States. In 1889 the newly promulgated Meiji Constitution enshrined the principle of religious freedom for all citizens.
Students will make use of the unique textual, material, and visual culture of the period (rare books, manuscripts, maps, paintings, engravings, sculptures, ceramics, and other artifacts) in the collections of the Ricci Institute and the Burns Library to explore how and why Japan first embraced and then rejected this new faith, its culture, and its adherents— before accepting it anew. Lectures will be complemented by individual student research projects and presentations.
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J.
Director, Ricci Institute, Boston College
Books by Dr. Libby Bischof
Click on the link below to read the University of Southern Maine article featuring Dr. Libby Bischof, B.A. and Ph.D., Boston College. USM: A Message to Our Community
"Dr. Libby Bischof's first book, Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, describes how Maine’s landscape and coastline was imagined by high modernist painters and photographers such as Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand. Her second book, Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015 is a history of the intersections between the modern medium of photography and the state’s history, and in particular shows the way the art form imagined Maine’s natural beauty."
German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad
In German Blood, Slavic Soil, Associate Professor Nicole Eaton reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, Königsberg became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes.
The book presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.
Cronin's Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of Liberal Order
In a new book, BC Research Professor in History James E. Cronin demonstrates how the history of liberal order and democratic politics since the 1930s explains ongoing threats to democracy and international order. Beginning with the German and Japanese efforts in the 1930s to establish a system based on empire, race, economic protectionism, and militant nationalism, Cronin argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories and setbacks.
Questions about the History major?
For any questions about the major please get in touch with Prof. Oh (ohac@bc.edu) or Prof. Ismay (ismay@bc.edu) by email.
If you would like to meet to discuss your questions, link in directly to Prof. Ismay's office hours via zoom Wednesday 2-4 pm. Sign up for a slot here; or schedule an appointment (ismay@bc.edu). Or schedule a zoom call with Prof. Oh on Calendly.
Heather Cox Richardson in BC Magazine
In "History's First Draft," Boston College Magazine editor John Wolfson sits down with History Department Professor Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter Letters from an American has made her one of the country’s leading public intellectuals.
Prof. Charles Gallagher, S.J., in conversation with Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow interviewed BC history professor Charles Gallagher, S.J., on her MSNBC podcast Ultra. The episode, "The Brooklyn Boys," is summarized as follows: "The most prominent media figure in America calls for the creation of a militia, armed Americans willing to use violence to get their way. What they want is to overthrow the U.S. government and to end democracy in this country – by force. Their plot raised alarming indications that the federal government is not up to the task of dealing with that kind of homegrown threat."
New book on Jesuits in Japan by M. Antoni Ucerler, S.J.
A new book by Associate Professor M. Antoni J. Ucerler explores the encounter of Christianity and premodern Japan in the wider context of global and intellectual history. In The Samurai and the Cross: The Jesuit Enterprise in Early Modern Japan, Ucerler examines how the Jesuit missionaries sought new ways to communicate their faith in an unfamiliar linguistic, cultural, and religious environment--and how they sought to "re-invent" Christianity in the context of samurai Japan. Based on little-known primary sources in various languages, the book explores the moral and political debates over religion, law, and "reason of state" that took place on both the European and the Japanese side.
Savage publishes new book on censorship in Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain, Professor Robert J. Savage offers a study of how the Northern Ireland conflict was presented to an increasingly global audience during the premiership of Britain's "Iron Lady," Margaret Thatcher. Savage addresses the tensions that characterized the relationship between the broadcast media and the Thatcher Government throughout the 1980s, and explores how that tension worked its way into decisions made by managers, editors, and reporters addressing a conflict that seemed insoluble.
Seth Jacobs on NATO and a "new world order"
As part of Boston College Magazine's Summer 2022 "New World Order?" special issue, Professor Seth Jabobs wrote an article on the decline of NATO. "NATO has become obsolete," Jacob wrote. "Indeed, Washington’s whole Europe-first orientation is anachronistic, a wasteful, expensive holdover from the cold war that ought to have been abandoned years ago." Click here to read the full article.
Prof. Cronin on the World after Ukraine
For three-quarters of a century, the international order has persevered. Now it suddenly finds itself threatened. Boston College Magazine interviewed History Professor James E. Cronin about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which has shocked the world. Read the full article, "A New World Order? On the World After Ukraine".
Prof. Guy Beiner on memory and meaning
The new Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies spoke to Boston College Magazine's Alix Hackett about how we remember our past, and why it matters Click here for the full article.
James O'Toole's new history of Boston College
Clough Millennium Professor Emeritus of History James O’Toole spoke to Boston College Magazine about his new book about the history of Boston College. Click here to read the full article.
Michael Franczak's book Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s
In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities―in particular oil―that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II.
Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends―neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights―that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.
Cornell University Press, June 15, 2022
About the Author
Michael Franczak is a PhD graduate from the Boston College History Department and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Order at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House.
Review
"Michael Franczak's extremely insightful and readable account of the US confrontation with the global South gives agency to leaders of developing nations without exaggerating their leverage in an unequal world. A sparkling book."
-- Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College, author of Globalists
"Franczak's book is the fullest, most thorough account of US policy on North-South issues from the Nixon through Reagan administrations. A considerable?and impressive?accomplishment."
-- Daniel Sargent, UC Berkeley, author of A Superpower Transformed
"Franczak's book is a deep archival dive into the evolving response of US administrations to the global South in the 1970s, amid the demands for?and fear of?a New International Economic Order. No one has done this better."
-- Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft
"A kaleidoscopic view of America's response to the movement for a New International Economic Order. Franczak vividly reconstructs the internal debates surrounding Third World demands across four presidencies, demonstrating how the North-South struggle changed the course of US foreign policy."
-- Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University, author of Revolution in Development
"Franczak's timely book is the first to openly address global inequality as a key US foreign policy issue of the 1970s, one that has shaped the nature of globalization today."
-- Giuliano Garavini, Roma Tre University, author of The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century
"Scholars often overlook how political reactions to the NIEO helped to set the scene for the era of neoliberal globalization. Franczak's detailed analysis of US policy toward the initiative reminds us of the importance of this episode in international economic relations."
-- Eric Helleiner, University of Waterloo, author of The Neomercantilists
Review
"Scholars often overlook how political reactions to the NIEO helped to set the scene for the era of neoliberal globalization. Franczak's detailed analysis of US policy toward the initiative reminds us of the importance of this episode in international economic relations."
-- Eric Helleiner, University of Waterloo, author of The Neomercantilists
Ingu Huang's book Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea
Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, this book offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea's democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s. It shows how local pro-democracy activists pragmatically engaged with global advocacy groups, especially Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, to maximize their socioeconomic and political struggles against the backdrop of South Korea's authoritarian industrialization and U.S. hegemony in East Asia.
Ingu Hwang details how local prodemocracy protesters were able to translate their sufferings and causes into international human rights claims that highlighted how U.S. Cold War geopolitics impeded democratization in South Korea. In tracing the increasing coalitional ties between local pro-democracy protests and transnational human rights activism, the book also calls attention to the parallel development of counteraction human rights policies by the South Korean regime and US administrations. These counteractions were designed to safeguard the regime's legitimacy and to ensure the US Cold War security consensus. Thus, Hwang argues that local disputes over democratization in South Korea became transnational contestations on human rights through the development of trans-Pacific human rights politics.
Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea critically engages with studies on global human rights, contemporary Korea, and U.S. Cold War policy. By presenting a bottom-up approach to the shaping of global human rights activism, it contributes to a growing body of literature that challenges European/U.S. centric accounts of human rights advocacy and moves beyond the national and minjung (people's) framework traditionally used to detail Korea's democratic transition.
University of Pennsylvania Press, March 22, 2022
About the Author
Ingu Hwang is Assistant Professor of the Practice in International
Studies Program and a faculty board member of the Asian Studies Program
at Boston College.
History Department Opens New Podcasting Studio
Click here to read the Heights article by Thomas Coder. Published on April 10, 2022.
Grad Student Voices: A Graduate Student History Conference
April 30, 2022 9:00am-6:00pm
Stokes Hall South 3rd Floor Seminar Room
Sponsor: Graduate History Alliance
Contact: GHA Conference Planning Committee at bcghaconference@gmail.com
Click here to complete the registration form for this event.
The Graduate History Alliance is pleased to invite you to Boston College's first annual graduate student history conference. This year's theme, Grad Student Voices, seeks to provide a space for graduate students from all backgrounds to share their unique research interests within the discipline of history. Rather than privilege a particular area or subdiscipline of history, this conference emphasizes graduate students who make compelling claims through their research. This conference serves as a platform for graduate students to showcase non-traditional research topics within a welcoming environment such that students are able to highlight why they think their research matters through meaningful and inclusive discussions. Join us Saturday, April 30th for a full day of presentations by graduate students from universities across the Northeast that will conclude with a keynote roundtable featuring a panel of BC's very own history graduate students. A reception to celebrate the inaugural conference will follow the keynote.
Fall 2022 HIST4264 Ireland Between the Orange and the Green - Prof. Guy Beiner
Click here for the Fall 2022 History Department Course List
This course offers a critical survey of Irish history over the long nineteenth century, from the late-eighteenth century Age of Atlantic Revolutions through to the eve of the Irish Revolution in the early twentieth century. Episodes and themes include revolutionary republicanism, loyalism and unionism, nationalism, Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, emigration, religious devotion, constitutional reform, agrarian protest, cultural revival, and commemoration.
Digital Humanities Capstone Presentations 2022
Come listen to a series of lightning presentations for the inaugural presentations of graduate Digital Humanities classes from History and English. Each student will provide a 15 minute talk on topics ranging from environmental history to art manifestos.
In person and on zoom.
https://bccte.zoom.us/j/94430865587
Wednesday, May 4 at 4:30pm to 6:30pm
245 Beacon, 107 auditorium
Presentations include the following:
Love Cults, Masquerading Gals, and Subway Sammies: A Digital Visualization of Boston’s Queer Subcultures from 1940 to 1966 by Sam Hurwitz
A Digital History of Columbia Point by Emily Coello
Trying to Stay Put: Reproductive and Housing Justice During the 2008 Financial Crisis by Meghan McCoy
Modern War and the Combatant Experience: the Battle of the Somme, 1916 by Ariel Donnelly
Late Antique Egyptian Textiles at Boston College: A Digital Catalog of the Tellalian Collection at the McMullen Museum of Art by Alexander D’Alisera
Laundress, Seamstress, Laborer, Secretary: The Many Forms of Black Women’s Work in 1920 Boston by Bailey Lemoine
Travel and Description: Looking Towards the Americas by Elizabeth Bloor
A River in Time: Human and Environmental Histories on the Neponset by Laura Clerx (with Project Team Members: Dr. Conevery Valencius and Asa Ackerly)
Mapping Modernist Artistic Manifestos by Catherine Enwright
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson talks with President Joe Biden
Watch the interview here.
At the invitation of the White House, Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter "Letters from an American," sat down with President Joe Biden in the China Room of the White House to "talk about American democracy and the struggles we face."
Book by BC Alum PhD '18 Clayton Trutor
Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports - February 1, 2022
In July 1975 the editors of the Atlanta Constitution ran a two-part series entitled “Loserville, U.S.A.” The provocatively titled series detailed the futility of Atlanta’s four professional sports teams in the decade following the 1966 arrival of its first two major league franchises, Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves and the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons. Two years later, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association became the city’s third major professional sports franchise. In 1972 the National Hockey League granted the Flames expansion franchise to the city, making Atlanta the first southern city with teams in all four of the big leagues.
The excitement surrounding the arrival of four professional franchises in Atlanta in a six-year period soon gave way to widespread frustration and, eventually, widespread apathy toward its home teams. All four of Atlanta’s franchises struggled in the standings and struggled to draw fans to their games. Atlantans’ indifference to their new teams took place amid the social and political fracturing that had resulted from a new Black majority in Atlanta and a predominately white suburban exodus. Sports could never quite bridge the divergence between the two.
Loserville examines the pursuit, arrival, and response to professional sports in
Atlanta during its first decade as a major league city (1966–75). It scrutinizes the origins of what remains the primary model for acquiring professional sports franchises: offers of municipal financing for new stadiums. Other Sunbelt cities like San Diego, Phoenix, and Tampa that aspired to big league stature adopted Atlanta’s approach. Like the teams in Atlanta, the franchises in these cities have had mixed results—both in terms of on-field success and financial stability.
Publisher's Weekly described the book as "a brilliant look at the intricate ways sports and politics are intertwined."
Clayton is an instructor at Norwich University in Northfield, VT
Michael Franczak - Alum in the news! Here’s how to repay developing nations for colonialism – and fight the climate crisis -- by Michael Franczak and Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò
The Guardian - Fri 14 Jan 2022 06.19 EST Read article
The IMF allots voting rights and emergency funds according to an outdated and unfair quota system established in 1944, before most colonies were free. Let’s change it
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/14/heres-how-to-repay-developing-nations-for-colonialism-and-fight-the-climate-crisis
Oracle: The History Journal of Boston College - Vol 2 No 1 (2021)
Click here for the latest edition of Oracle!
BC has its very own undergraduate history journal, Oracle is a journal dedicated to publishing work by undergraduates.
"Oracle first started during the Spring semester of 2019 and our
first edition was printed that Fall. Under the advisory of the Boston
College History Department, Oracle has been built around an
editorial team of History majors and minors dedicated to showcasing
fellow scholars' work. The articles in each edition of Oracle
meet our staff's highest expectations for quality publications that add
meaningful conversations to historical research. It is our hope and
desire that Oracle thrives under such leadership each year and provides a voice to those interested in the ever-changing subject of history.
Click here for previous issues of the Oracle.
Click here to make a submission.
Robin Fleming's Lectures - Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People
The James Ford Lectures in British History
Lectures published online by Professor Robin Fleming (Professor of Early Medieval History, Boston College). Watch Prof. Fleming's lectures here.
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
These lectures explore the social, cultural, and ritual histories of Roman-Britain’s people through an investigation of their entanglements with dogs. In the highly anthrozootic world of Roman Britain, dogs and humans together shaped mutual ecologies and life-ways. Dogs also served as metaphorical and ritual agents, and they were central in the production of both social difference and lived religion under Rome. By following the trail left by dogs, we can recover something of the lifeways and experience of the people with whom they shared the world, and we can identify and characterize some of the mechanisms through which a Roman provincial society was created.
Sajdi Receives Two Grants, Plans for Podcasting Studio
BC Heights Article
By Sofia Laboy
December 12, 2021
Yajun Mo's book
Touring China
A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949
In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country.
The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.
Cornell University Press, Dec 15, 2021
About the Author
Yajun Mo is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.
Praise
"Touring China persuasively de-Westernizes the history of tourism in China. A fascinating and important book, it draws on an extensive range of sources with great skill."
- John M. Carroll, University of Hong Kong, author of A Concise History of Hong Kong.
"Yajun Mo impressively combines entertaining stories with clear arguments. Her topic is rich and Touring China does not disappoint. Indeed, it exposes a fundamental feature of modernity: to be a modern nation is to be a nation of tourists."
- James Carter, Saint Joseph's University, author of Champions Day.
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson is awarded the Massachusetts Governor's Award in the Humanities - October 24th, 2021
"The Massachusetts Governor's Awards in the Humanities recognize individuals for their public actions, grounded in an appreciation of the humanities, to enhance civic life in the Commonwealth. Each year the Mass Humanities Board of Directors selects nominees who are confirmed by the Governor of Massachusetts. Established in 2014, the awards are presented at an annual event."
To view the virtual celebration livestreamed on Sunday, October 24 please click here:
https://masshumanities.org/events/governors-awards-in-the-humanities-dinner/
"Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College and the author of six acclaimed books about American politics, most recently How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. Her books, West from Appomattox and To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party were Editor's Choice selections of the New York Times Book Review.
Richardson is a national commentator on American political history and the Republican Party. She is a leading #Twitterstorian, and the author of Letters from an American, a chronicle of modern political history that appears on Facebook and in newsletter format. With Professor Joanne Freeman, she is the co-host of the podcast Now & Then. Read more in the interview "What Was at Stake in Our History."
-wbur 2021 Governor's Awards Media Partner
Boston College Chronicle
Discernment at the Doctoral Level
ILA internship program supports career exploration for Ph.D. students
History Ph.D. students Kelly Lyons and Alexander D'Alisera
BY SEAN SMITH CHRONICLE EDITOR
Boston College Chronicle - October 14, 2021 VOL.29, NO.4
Franziska Seraphim - Japanese Constitutional Revisionism and Civic Activism
Since the adoption of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, the document has become a contested symbol of contrasting visions of Japan. Japanese Constitutional Revisionism and Civic Activism is a volume which examines the history of Japan's constitutional debates, key legal decisions and interpretations, the history and variety of activism, and activists' ties to party politics and to fellow activists overseas.
Edited by Helen Hardacre; Timothy S. George; Keigo Komamura and Franziska Seraphim
Contributions by Weitseng Chen; Erik Esselstrom; Timothy S. George; Helen Hardacre; Saburo Horikawa; Sung Ho Kim; Keigo Komamura; Rintaro Kuramochi; Levi McLaughlin; Mari Miura; Koichi Nakano; Franziska Seraphim; Yoshihide Soeya; Makiko Ueda; Christian Winkler and Tatsuhiko Yamamoto
Japanese Constitutional Revisionism and Civic Activism
About the Authors:
Helen Hardacre is Reischauer Institute professor of Japanese religions and society at Harvard University.
Timothy S. George is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island.
Keigo Komamura is vice president and professor of law at Keio University.
Franziska Seraphim is associate professor at Boston College.
Reviews
This rich collection of essays puts flesh on the tired bones of Japanese debates about whether to protect or revise the 1947 Constitution. Highlighting civic activism across the postwar period, the authors show the contention to be much more complicated-and politically and socially dynamic- than an either/or proposition. Comparisons with Taiwan and South Korea and attention not only to Article 9 but to human rights and environmental questions give the book an expansive character. This intelligent and informative study is a pleasure to read.
-Carol Gluck, Columbia University
This volume offers a truly comprehensive analysis of civic activism surrounding constitutional revision in Japan, drawing on the diverse expertise of an international team of scholars of law, history, politics, religion, and society. While past research has focused on the goals of established elites, the authors delve into the motivations and strategies of underexamined grassroots actors, including academics, youths, religious organizations, and ideological movements. Importantly, the studied topics extend beyond the lightning rod of Article 9 to encompass debates over human rights, gender equality, and environmentalism, painting a fuller picture of constitutional debates in Japan. By giving equal weight to historical context and contemporary movements, this volume is relevant to any scholar or observer of postwar Japan.
-Kenneth Mori McElwain, University of Tokyo
Because of its globally recognized 'no war' clause, debate over Japan's constitution is often seen only through the lens of its implications for its foreign policy. But the dynamics within Japan surrounding this unique document are far more important. In a timely and revelatory new volume focused on the civic activism surrounding Japan's postwar governing document, the benefactors of this document-Japan's citizens- are given the starring role. This exciting new volume reflects the best of scholarship in both Japan and the United States on this ongoing tension between citizens and state that is at the heart of postwar Japanese democratic practice.
-Sheila A. Smith, Council on Foreign Relations
Robin Fleming's book The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE
Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval.
The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.
About the Author
Robin Fleming is Professor of History at Boston College, a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries, and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant. She is author of Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise of the Middle Ages, 400-1070, among other works.
Review
"Robin Fleming uses evidence from archaeology to reassess the transition from the Roman to early medieval period in England. Critiquing previous approaches that have relied too heavily on written texts of later date, Fleming places emphasis instead on the changes in material conditions that impacted on the lives of ordinary people. This is an original and refreshing approach that has not previously been attempted on this scale. The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE is an extremely important and well-written book, and one that deserves a very broad readership."â Martin Millett, University of Cambridge
Robin Fleming's book The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE
Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval.
The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.
About the Author
Robin Fleming is Professor of History at Boston College, a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries, and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant. She is author of Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise of the Middle Ages, 400-1070, among other works.
Review
"Robin Fleming uses evidence from archaeology to reassess the transition from the Roman to early medieval period in England. Critiquing previous approaches that have relied too heavily on written texts of later date, Fleming places emphasis instead on the changes in material conditions that impacted on the lives of ordinary people. This is an original and refreshing approach that has not previously been attempted on this scale. The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300-525 CE is an extremely important and well-written book, and one that deserves a very broad readership."â Martin Millett, University of Cambridge
BBC/Queen's University series - Prof. Rob Savage - Broadcasting and the Border: How partition influenced broadcasting on the island of Ireland.
Date: 09/27/2021 This talk will address how partition influenced the development of the broadcast media in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
It will explore the evolution of broadcasting on both sides of the border and consider how the broadcast media challenged and ultimately undermined powerful institutions in each state.
Broadcasting and the Border: How partition influenced broadcasting on the island of Ireland.
Date: 09/27/2021 Talk 23
The Partition of Ireland talks programme in partnership with BBC
About Professor Rob Savage
Professor Robert Savage directs the Boston College Irish Studies Program and is a member of the university's History Department.
He is the author of four books that explore contemporary Irish and
British history including The BBCâ s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015) and A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972, (2010) winner of the 2011 James S. Donnelly Sr. Book Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Savage has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College, Dublin; at the University of Edinburgh, where he held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, at Queenâ s University, Belfast and at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His new book The Oxygen of Publicity? Northern Ireland and the Politics of Censorship in Thatcherâ s Britain, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.
Further Reading
Robert Savage: The BBC's Irish Troubles, Television, Conflict and Northern IrelandRobert Savage: A Loss of Innocence? television and Irish Society 1960-1972 John Horgan: Broadcasting and Public Life, RTÃ News and Current Affairs 1926-1997Roy Foster: Luck and the Irish, A Brief History of Change from 1970 Edward Brennan: A Post-Nationalist History of Television in IrelandRichard pine: 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio
Charles Gallagher's book Nazis of Copley Square The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front
The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler.
The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler.
On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover's charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a "temporary dictatorship" in order to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front's ringleader was unbowed: "All I can say is - long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!"
In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless Communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The frontâ s anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs.
Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the front's activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square is a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and a warning for those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.
About the Author
Charles R. Gallagher is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. His book Vatican Secret Diplomacy won the John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association.
Reviews
"Takes a searing look at the Christian Front, an American extremist group that weaponized Catholicism" ... With historical complexity and suspenseful intrigue, Nazis of Copley Square reveals one of America' s secret and most disturbing domestic enemies." - Foreword Reviews
"An eye-opening look at the Christian Front, a far-right political movement founded in 1939... Gallagher also explains how the Christian Front's 'interlac[ing] of Christianity and patriotism' influenced today's religious right, and analyzes how political extremists exploit free speech protections. This vigorously researched chronicle uncovers a dark chapter in American history." -Publishers Weekly
"The rare book by a scholar that is such a page-turner it is hard to put down, Gallagher's Nazis of Copley Square is a potent brew of spy story, detective story, and frank, fearless account of how a significant wing of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States spawned a movement aimed at defending Hitler and sabotaging America's war effort." - David I. Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini
"Writing about American Nazi sympathizers who rooted their rage in mainstream Catholic theology poses a remarkable challenge. Pluralist society already has a hard enough time confronting violent hatred underwritten by sincere religious faith; historians writing about such subjects face the second challenge of achieving empathy with their subjects without sacrificing moral opprobrium. Charles R. Gallagher meets both challenges with aplomb - and throws in some thrilling World War II spy stories to boot. Highly recommended." - Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland
"When historians speak of Americans who supported Hitler's Third Reich, they generally refer to Father Charles Coughlin or the German American Bund. In his excellently researched and rivetingly written book, Gallagher reminds us the danger was more widespread. A movement of far-right American Catholics not only fostered sympathy with Nazism but spread virulent anti-Semitism. The Nazis of Copley Square laid the groundwork for today's Christian nationalism. When we hear those ideas expressed today, we are shocked. Gallagher demonstrates they have roots reaching back many decades. The danger was real then. And it is real today." - Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Antisemitism: Here and Now
"A virtuoso piece of historical detective work that dramatically enhances our understanding of right-wing (and Catholic) anti-Semitism and radicalism during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s." - John T. McGreevy, author of American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global
Oracle
Undergraduate BC History Journal - 2021
BC has its very own undergraduate history journal, Oracle is a journal dedicated to publishing work by undergraduates.
Click here for the online Oracle.
Click here for previous issues of the Oracle.
Click here to make a submission.
"Oracle first started during the Spring semester of 2019 and our first edition was printed that Fall. Under the advisory of the Boston College History Department, Oracle has been built around an editorial team of History majors and minors dedicated to showcasing fellow scholars' work. The articles in each edition of Oracle meet our staff's highest expectations for quality publications that add meaningful conversations to historical research. It is our hope and desire that Oracle thrives under such leadership each year and provides a voice to those interested in the ever-changing subject of history.
This year, our editorial team decided to publish Oracle online and we are happy to announce the final website publication for this semester! After a lot of hard work and dedication from the editors, we want to share all of the amazing scholarly work of our fellow students. We are grateful to Professor Ismay, Professor Oh, and History Librarian Bee Lehman for all of their advice and encouragement in producing our website. We also want to thank Professor Summers for taking the time to do an interview with us and provide meaningful responses to important questions about racial justice on campus. Finally, a huge thanks to our editors and authors for all the work they put into Oracle and we hope you enjoy the website as much as we do!"
-Molly Bankert and Sadie
Senior Awards, Sophomore Scholars & Dean’s Scholars 2021
Congratulations to all of our 2021 award winners!
Senior Award Winners here
Sophomore and Dean's Scholars here
Huge, huge congratulations to our Sophomore Scholars and Dean’s Scholars.
These are competitive, MCAS-wide awards. Each department nominates outstanding sophomores and juniors, and the Dean’s Office makes the final selections.
The Sophomore Scholar award recognizes students in the top 4-5% in their class who have been nominated by their departments. As the Dean’s Office says, the award “recognizes their current distinction and their promise for the future.”
Farewell to the Class of 2021
Congratulations to all of you!!
So You Want To Be A History Major…
Want to declare a MAJOR in History? Find the requirements, along with our helpful info packet and history requirements worksheet, here.
Important Contacts for Undergraduates
Want to declare the major or minor in history? Questions about the Core or study abroad? Thinking about writing a Senior Thesis or Scholar of the College project? Then contact us
Our Fall 2021 course listings are up!
Click here to view the Fall 2021 course listings.
And take a closer look at some of our courses here.
Minoring in History
Want to declare a MINOR in History? Find the requirements here, along with the History Minor Declaration Form.
Prof. Martin Summers awarded the Cheiron Book Prize for his book, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions
We are very pleased to announce that Prof. Martin Summers's book, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions, has been awarded this year’s Cheiron Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in the history of the social/behavioral/human sciences.
The formal presentation of the book award will take place at the upcoming annual meeting of Cheiron, 15-17 June 2021.
Medieval Academy of America 2021 Governance Election Results
We are very pleased to announce that Robin Fleming (Professor of History, Boston College) will become President of the Medieval Academy of America in 2023 and has been elected 2nd Vice-President of the Medieval Academy of America for 2021.
For more details on the 2021 election please visit the The Medieval Academy Blog
http://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/2021-governance-election-results/
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson in the New York Times - December 27, 2020
"Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.
She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history."
by Ben Smith
For the full New York Times article please click here
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html?referringSource=articleShare
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 28, 2020, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Historian Triumphs Over the Daily Maelstrom.
Call for Oracle Submissions - by January 31, 2021
How Can You Submit Work to Oracle?
Visit our site for more info:
https://sites.google.com/bc.edu/oracle
Issue III of Oracle is now underway! If you want to be featured, please email us your historical research paper by January 31, 2021. We are looking for research papers between 10-30 double-spaced pages that highlight the original work of fellow students. Our guidelines for submission are:
Original historical research with primary and secondary sources
Double-spaced, Times New Roman 12 pt. font, one-inch margins
Submitted in .doc or .docx format with "Last name, First name"
Between 10-30 pages
Include footnotes or a bibliography, preferably in Chicago Manual of Style Format
Email work to: bchistoryjournal@gmail.com
The Oracle editorial team has decided to compile a COVID-19 Archive to highlight the experiences of students over these past tumultous months. We are looking for diary entries, photos, poems, or any other expression/work. Please email us at: bchistoryjournal@gmail.com.
Volunteer Tutors
We're so pleased to announce that some of our amazing majors are offering their services as volunteer tutors! Click here for more information.
"Not all Commerce is Capitalism: Trade and Governance in Treaty-Era China" - Prof. Stacie Kent - November 30, 2020
History of Global Capitalism Seminar, Harvard University
November 30, 3:45pm-5:45pm
This is an online event open to the public. More details:
https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/history-global-capitalism-seminar-stacie-kent-tba
Please sign up below to receive the precirculated paper and Zoom link (available about one week in advance.)
See also: History of Global Capitalism Seminar
Not all Commerce is Capitalism:
Trade and Governance in Treaty-Era China
Stacie Kent, Assistant Professor of History, Boston College
Graduate Student Commentator: Ziwei Zhang, PhD Candidate in Urban Planning, Harvard University
Faculty Commentator: Pat Giersch, Professor of History, Wellesley College
This graduate-faculty research seminar is designed to bring together interested faculty and students on a continuing basis to cover topics on global history. It is part of History 2950A/B, History of Global Capitalism, and includes both reading sessions designed for graduate students and research sessions open to the interested public during which students and faculty participants will present current research. Faculty participants will be drawn from a number of schools, and, most especially, from the group of fellows in global history who are spending the academic year 2020-2021 at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Discussions will be moderated by Professors Sven Beckert and Sophus Reinert.
History Majors Can’t Get Jobs
History majors can’t get jobs! History majors can only be history teachers! History majors can maybe go to law school, but political science is a better major for going to law school! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Learn why
Revisions to the History Minor
The History Minor is changing! It will consist of five courses and integrate a more global approach to history. These changes will go into effect in Fall 2020. Learn more
AP Credit
There are only two scenarios in which your AP credits fulfill BC history requirements. Find out what they are
Degree Audit Errors
UIS is a very old and inflexible system and the degree audits of History majors are often full of errors as a result, with courses miscategorized within the major requirements – or not categorized at all. Here are a couple of common situations
History Course Q&A presented by History Club and Student Mentors
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 7pm
Zoom meeting link:
https://bccte.zoom.us/j/98709784915
Ask us about courses, professors, major, minor and more!
Pre-submitted question form:
https://forms.gle/PkaRH4Q6fjS4Fs9W8
Taking History Core Classes Abroad
Can a history class that I take abroad count towards my History Core requirements? The answer is yes. Learn more
Social Theory from the Global South - November 12, 2020
Social Theory from the Global South book roundtable is hosted by Meghna Chaudhuri and Matthew Shutzer in conjunction with Anupama Rao and Borderlines at Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. We'll be discussing Durba Mitra's Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought and Andrew Liu's Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, and how these books contribute to broader conversations around global social theory.
The roundtable is scheduled for 9:00 AM EST on Thursday November 12th.
Registration for the event can be found here: https://bit.ly/33PazOv
Durba and Andy have offered the following discount codes to be used at the publisher's website:
Indian Sex Life: ISL-FG for 30% off and free shipping
Tea War: YAB99 for 25% off
African and African Diaspora Studies Program (AADS) & Irish Studies Program Presents:
Zoom webinar:
Thursday, November 12, 2020 at 6:00pm
HTTPS://BCCTE.ZOOM.US/J/91863366680
Devin O. Pendas's book Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950
Post-war Germany has been seen as a model of 'transitional justice' in action, where the prosecution of Nazis, most prominently in the Nuremberg Trials, helped promote a transition to democracy. However, this view forgets that Nazis were also prosecuted in what became East Germany, and the story in West Germany is more complicated than has been assumed. Revising received understanding of how transitional justice works, Devin O. Pendas examines Nazi trials between 1945 and 1950 to challenge assumptions about the political outcomes of prosecuting mass atrocities. In East Germany, where there were more trials and stricter sentences, and where they grasped a broad German complicity in Nazi crimes, the trials also helped to consolidate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship by legitimating a new police state. Meanwhile, opponents of Nazi prosecutions in West Germany embraced the language of fairness and due process, which helped de-radicalise the West German judiciary and promote democracy.
- Examines the experience of transitional justice in West and East Germany between 1945 and 1950
- Shows how 'bad trials' have promoted democracy in West Germany, while 'good trials' helped legitimate a new dictatorship in East Germany
- Shows that transitional justice trials can lead to both democracy and new dictatorships, challenging conventional wisdom
Reviews
‘A vast literature insists that the transition from authoritarianism to democracy demands that a nation frankly reckon with its past crimes. Pendas’s new book brilliantly challenges this view. In exploring Germany’s half-hearted and vexed efforts to punish and purge former Nazis and ‘fellow travelers’, he demonstrates how the German nation achieved an important political success at the cost of a disturbing moral failure. His is a fine and singular achievement.’ Lawrence Douglas, Amherst College
‘Pendas has spun a powerful cautionary tale about transitional justice, a necessary corrective to the idea that liberal-legal trials in the aftermath of atrocity necessarily lead to democratization. As Pendas shows with his usual erudition, the very different political fates of West and East Germany undermine any such happy teleology. An absolute must-read - and will no doubt be read for years to come.' Kevin Jon Heller, University of Copenhagen
‘This is the definitive account of the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’ … In a tour de force, Pendas takes the reader from Nuremberg to Dachau, Lüneburg, and Waldheim, and to the many places where investigations never made it to trial. Combining a keen eye for detail with analytical rigour, Pendas reasserts historians’ authority on transitional justice’s potential and its limitations. This excellent book shows how unintended consequences and perennially irrational actors defy neat models and precise cost-benefit analyses.’ Kim Christian Priemel, University of Oslo
Author Information
Devin O. Pendas, Boston College, Massachusetts
Devin O. Pendas is Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author of The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965 (2010) and co-editor of Political Trials in Theory and History (2017) and Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (2018) as well numerous articles on the history of Holocaust trials and international law.
Introducing... Prof. Murphy
Fr. Thomas Murphy, S.J. joins the History Department as a Visiting Professor. Despite his 21 years of service at Seattle University, he is no stranger to the Boston area, having grown up in Winthrop. He was ordained in 1999 just down the hill at St. Ignatius Church, Chestnut Hill. Learn more about Prof. Thomas Murphy
OIP info session on 2021 summer course in Seoul, October 22, 5pm
Date: October 22, 2020 at 5 pm
Zoom Link: https://bccte.zoom.us/j/99763029856
• More information: https://bc-oip.terradotta.com/
• For questions, please contact
Prof. Ingu Hwang (ingu.hwang@bc.edu)
INTL | HIST 2856 | 3 Credit Summer Course
• June 27 to July 24, 2021
• Sogang University, Seoul
Contentious History and the Politics of Contemporary Korea: Decolonization, Division, Development, & Democratization
This introductory immersion course surveys the contentious intersection between history and politics in contemporary
Korea. Students will explore the following questions: What were the critical historical experiences and issues that became part of the public discourse and catalyzed political contestations in local and international global communities?
Why did these issues become contentious and for whom? What actions and counteractions did they inspire?
Excursions to:
• DMZ
• Blue House
• National Museum of Korean Contemporary History
• Gyeongbukgung Palace
• Itaewon
• K-pop performance.
And so much more!
Call for Papers
Elements
Boston College’s undergraduate research journal
Deadline October 12th 2020
Every semester, we publish original work completed by students on a wide range of topics across disciplines. We are indexed with the Library of Congress as a print and digital journal and are an open access journal under a Creative Commons license.
We are currently seeking submissions for our issue, and would love to review submissions from your students. Our deadline for submissions this semester is October 12th 2020.
Any original research paper between 1500 to 5000 words in length, whether completed independently, for a class, or for a senior thesis, is eligible for publication.
All submissions should be sent to bcurjelements@gmail.com
Elements
https://www.bc.edu/research/elements
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Irish Studies Mainstay Is New Interim Director
Robert Savage, a co-director of Boston College Irish Studies from 2003–2010, has been named the program’s interim director. An expert on Irish, British, and European history with a bachelor’s and a doctoral degree from Boston College, Savage sees an opportunity for Irish Studies to expand its partnerships and collaborations within the University and beyond.
Robert Savage Named Interim Director of BC Irish Studies - Published on August 25, 2020
Alumni write about immigration history in Cambridge, MA in Global Boston
Global Boston features a brand new page that focuses on immigration history in Cambridge, MA. This will provide a foundation for future work on Cambridge immigrant history going forward.
https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/cambridge/
The historical profile was authored by our veteran historian/writer, Maddy Webster (BC history grad, now in the Ph.D. program in American and New England Studies at BU). It also includes several special features on how Cambridge became a sanctuary city, an oral history with Portuguese immigrants of the 1970s, and a fabulous walking tour of the immigrant quarters and brickyards of North Cambridge, penned by BC history grad Joe Galusha (M.A. 2015). Please enjoy and share widely with friends or colleagues that might be interested:
Martin Summers's book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions
Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions is a history of the federal mental institution, Saint Elizabeths Hospital, and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.
Reviews
"With St. Elizabeths Hospital's history as a fulcrum, Summers balances psychiatric practices and racial ideologies to give us a nuanced understanding of the racism that structured institutionalized mental health care. This is a masterful and sophisticated historical analysis that explicates the reasons and consequences for the disparities that continue to haunt this nation." Susan M. Reverby, author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
"In each generation, a book appears that changes the ways in which we view the past. Martin Summers has written such a book. His study of African American patients at Saint Elizabeths Hospital offers a probing and searching treatment of mental illness and mental health among black residents of Greater Washington, DC. The result is a powerful reminder of how racism, discrimination, and subjugation produced deleterious effects while depression, mania, and psychosis victimized individuals and their families." Earl Lewis, Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies, and Director of the Center for Social Solutions, University of Michigan
Author Information
Martin Summers is a professor of history at Boston College.
Seth Jacobs's book Rogue Diplomats
The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foreign Policy
Many of America's most significant political, economic, territorial, and geostrategic accomplishments from 1776 to the present day came about because a U.S. diplomat disobeyed orders. The magnificent terms granted to the infant republic by Britain at the close of the American Revolution, the bloodless acquisition of France's massive Louisiana territory in 1803, the procurement of an even vaster expanse of land from Mexico forty years later, the preservation of the Anglo-American 'special relationship' during World War I—these and other milestones in the history of U.S. geopolitics derived in large part from the refusal of ambassadors, ministers, and envoys to heed the instructions given to them by their superiors back home. Historians have neglected this pattern of insubordination—until now. Rogue Diplomats makes a seminal contribution to scholarship on U.S. geopolitics and provides a provocative response to the question that has vexed so many diplomatic historians: is there a distinctively “American” foreign policy?
Reviews
'It turns out that the practice of American diplomats disobeying orders is not new to the Trump era. In this fast paced and stylish account, Seth Jacobs helps us to see that when diplomats went rogue at key moments from the American Revolution to the wars for Vietnam, the United States often emerged more secure than if Washington had fully called the shots.'
Mark Philip Bradley - University of Chicago
'Is there a distinctive American way of diplomacy? In this hugely readable book, Seth Jacobs shows that there most certainly is, but perhaps not as we might assume. Unlike their counterparts from other countries, American diplomats, many of them amateurs, have a long history of disobedient freelancing. Jacobs shows why this is a peculiarly American tradition, and why it matters.'
Andrew Preston - author of American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction
'I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard when reading a work about diplomacy. Rogue Diplomats is one of the most original, entertaining, and relevant books that I have read about American foreign policy. Seth Jacobs uncovers a recurring pattern of unqualified American diplomats disobeying elected leaders - from the American Revolution and the Mexican-American War to the Second World War and America’s quagmire in Vietnam. Jacobs shows that rebellious and insubordinate diplomats reflected larger patterns in American society, and he argues that they frequently improved the nation’s foreign policy, while also examining the failures. Anyone trying to make sense of why American policy is plagued by rogue actors today must read this book.'
Jeremi Suri - author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office
Author Information
Seth Jacobs is a professor of history at Boston College.
Relevant Histories
Here are some History electives on deck for Fall 2020 that might be particularly interesting to those of you who are hoping to make sense of the present by learning more about the past. Upcoming history electives
Department Glossary
Like any institution, BC has its own internal language. For example, you may have noticed we love acronyms! The History Department too has its own terminology, some of which may be confusing. Read more for helpful explanations
Prof. Benjamin Braude - National Catholic Reporter - May 27, 2020
Physical distancing lessons from a monk and a rabbi
Pandemic a time for a quiet contemplative sabbath of the soul.
https://www.ncronline.org/news/coronavirus/physical-distancing-lessons-monk-and-rabbi
Farewell to the Class of 2020
Class of 2020, we are sorry we could not celebrate with you in person, but we want to recognize each of you by name here. Congratulations to all of you from all of us. Tribute to the Class of 2020
Introducing… Professor Glass
A scholar of modern America, Prof. Glass studies political history, urban history, racism, and capitalism. Learn more about Prof. Michael Glass
Highlights from Zoom University
It certainly wasn’t anyone’s first choice to conduct the last third of spring semester online but the History Department faculty did their best to move to emergency remote instruction as smoothly as possible in a minimum amount of time! Some found that the online environment was especially conducive to some pretty creative work by our ever-fabulous students. See some examples
Senior Awards
We want to especially recognize the graduating senior History majors who our faculty have nominated and selected as recipients of our department awards. We’re so sorry that we can’t gather in our customary fashion to laud you at length over lunch and cake but thrilled to be able to at least recognize you here.
Get to Know: Prof. Sellers-García
Sylvia Sellers-García is a historian of colonial Latin America. Her work centers on the Kingdom of Guatemala, a region that spanned southern Mexico to Panama and was part of the Spanish empire. Learn more about Prof. Sylvia Sellers-García
Fall 2020 Courses of Note
The following courses are new, one-time only, under-appreciated, and/or last-minute additions. We’ll be updating this list, so check back! See courses
Sophomore Scholars & Dean’s Scholars 2020
Huge, huge congratulations to our six Sophomore Scholars and eight—that’s right, eight—Dean’s Scholars. Our majors have really hit it out of the park this year! Read more
Heather Richardson's book How the South Won the Civil War
While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion.
To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy.
Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.
Reviews
"A timely and vivid account of America's enduring struggle between democratic ideals and oligarchical demands -- from a stellar historian. The themes are broad and the implications mighty, but this isn't history from on high. Richardson uses a human lens to tell her tale, revealing the passions and power-plays that have sustained this battle for dominance. The end result is something rare and invaluable: a skilled work of history, deeply grounded in the past, that speaks loudly, clearly, and crucially to the present." -- Joanne Freeman, Yale University, author of The Field Of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
"A thought-provoking study of the centuries-spanning battle between oligarchy and equality in America. " -- Kirkus
"Though Richardson underemphasizes the prevalence of racism, sexism, and inequality in other parts of the country during and following the Civil War, she marshals a wealth of evidence to support the book's provocative title. Conservatives will cry foul, but liberal readers will be persuaded by this lucid jeremiad." -- Publishers Weekly
"What the great books do is retell history in a way that creates a deepened and clarified connection between what was and what is. The brilliant historian Heather Cox Richardson has produced magic with this stunning work, which fuses the historian's craft to the storyteller's art. I love this book. For anyone seeking to understand how we got here, and where we're likely bound, this is a must-read." -- Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Price of Loyalty and A Hope in the Unseen
"Good revisionist history jars you, forces you to look at the past in a new way, and thereby transforms your view of the present. Heather Cox Richardson is a master of the genre, to the benefit of us all. Even those who take issue with her will be forced by this powerful book to come to terms with aspects of our past that we often just sweep under the rug of memory. Important and revelatory." -- E.J. Dionne JR., author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country
"In a tour de force, Richardson exposes the philosophical connective tissue that runs from John C. Calhoun, to Barry Goldwater, to Donald Trump. It's not party, it's a complex ideology that has swaddled white supremacy and its political, legal, economic, and physical violence in the language of freedom and rugged individualism, and, in doing so, repeatedly slashed a series of self-inflicted wounds on American democracy." -- Carol Anderson, Emory University, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy
Author Information
Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. Her previous works include West from Appomattox and To Make Men Free.
Owen Stanwood's book The Global Refuge
Huguenot refugees were everywhere in the early modern world. French Protestant exiles fleeing persecution following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they scattered around Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and even remote islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The Global Refuge provides the first truly international history of the Huguenot diaspora. The story begins with dreams of Eden, as beleaguered religious migrants sought suitable retreats to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to build these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, forcing them to navigate the world of empires. The refugees promoted themselves as the chosen people of empire, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that could strengthen the British and Dutch states. As a result, French Protestants settled around the world: they tried to make silk in South Carolina; they planted vineyards in South Africa; and they peopled vulnerable frontiers from New England to Suriname. This embrace of empire led to a gradual abandonment of the Huguenots' earlier utopian ambitions and ability to maintain their languages and churches in preparation for an eventual return to France. For over a century they learned that only by blending in and by mastering foreign institutions could they prosper.
While the Huguenots never managed to find a utopia or to realize their imperial sponsors' visions of profits, The Global Refuge demonstrates how this diasporic community helped shape the first age of globalization and influenced the reception of future refugee populations.
Reviews
"The story of the forced exile of Protestants from France in the seventeenth century has usually been presented as a tragedy. In this lively and fascinating study, Owen Stanwood does not play down the tribulations faced by the exiles, but also emphasizes the possibilities that opened up for them as they founded new communities on several continents and became key players in the construction of the British and Dutch overseas empires. This first comprehensive study of the Huguenot global diaspora will be of great interest to readers of early modern European and global history." -- David A. Bell, Princeton University
"Driven from their homeland by Louis XIV's ferocious persecution, French Protestants scattered across Europe and around the Atlantic World, seeking their fortunes in the service of the British and Dutch empires. Like no historian before him, Owen Stanwood captures the full sweep of this remarkable diaspora in a compelling, highly readable narrative." -- Allan Greer, author of Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits
"Owen Stanwood's fresh look at refugee Huguenots shows how they leveraged their assets -- eagerness to advance their religion in an age of strong confessional identities, access to authorities in a hierarchical society, willingness to relocate far afield in a time of European expansion -- to carve out places where they could survive and prosper. By establishing their role in developing other people's empires, Stanwood moves displaced Huguenots to the center of early-modern politics and -- by implication -- of future historical studies." -- Carolyn Chappell Lougee, Stanford University
"As refugee crises overwhelm twenty-first century nations, Owen Stanwood's The Global Refuge offers a wholly new global history of early modern Europe's first world-circling refugee crisis, the expulsion of 150,000 Protestants -- Huguenots -- from France in the 1680s. Scattering into Europe's Protestant nations, the New World, and even Africa, Huguenots found themselves welcomed and derided, valued but often resented. The Global Refuge is the first major international history of the Huguenot exile, and its vivid prose and deep, encyclopedic research compel attention amidst our own, often tragic, refugee crises." -- Jon Butler, Yale University.
Author Information
Owen Stanwood is an associate professor of history at Boston College. He is the author of The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution.
Sylvia Sellers-Garcia's book The Woman on the Windowsill
A true story of violence and punishment that illuminates a transformative moment in Guatemalan history
On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.
Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.
Reviews
“The Woman on the Windowsill is that rare history book that will keep you on the edge of your seat. At the book’s core is the paired drama of an unfolding crime with the historian’s measured discovery of a puzzling and at times inscrutable past.” — Kris Lane, Tulane University
“An exquisite book. It is at once scholarly and popular, learned and accessible, challenging and inviting. The beauty is in the understated elegance, the pacing, and the care with which Sellers-Garciá approaches the pleasures and the problems of the archive.”— Raymond Craib, Cornell University
“Every historian dreams about finding a spellbinding old case or an irresistible cache of documents. Sellers-García has found such a case and used it to give us a grand tour of colonial Guatemala City, showing us its cobblestone streets, nearby ravines, hospitals and medical procedures, families from various walks of life, city leaders, victims, and villains.”—Andrés Reséndez, author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Author Information
Sylvia Sellers-García is associate professor of history at Boston College. Her previous books include Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery and When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.
Trais Pearson's book Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam
By the 1890s, Siam (Thailand) was the last holdout against European imperialism in Southeast Asia. But the kingdom's exceptional status came with a substantial caveat: Bangkok, its bustling capital, was a port city that was subject to many of the same legal and fiscal constraints as other colonial treaty ports. Sovereign Necropolis offers new insight into turn-of-the-century Thai history by disinterring the forgotten stories of those who died "unnatural deaths" during this period and the work of the Siamese state to assert their rights in a pluralistic legal arena.
Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead―were they spirits to be placated or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?―as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability.
Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, Sovereign Necropolis demonstrates how the state's response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. A compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, the book is a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"In this eloquent, insightful study of wrongful and unnatural death in Treaty Port Bangkok, Pearson digs deep in the archive and discovers a new pressure point as the Siamese elite struggled to accommodate Western forensic medicine. The book gives voice to the subaltern dead."
(Professor Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University, author of Seditious Histories)
"Sovereign Necropolis is a fascinating study of socio-legal practices related to fatal injuries in Bangkok during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pearson's book provides a new and unusual perspective on the interconnections among technological and economic developments, international political tensions, elite-subaltern relations, forensic medicine, and legal change."
(David M. Engel, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, co-author of Tort, Custom, and Karma)
About the Author
Trais Pearson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. His work has appeared in journals including Modern Asian Studies and Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Courses for Fall 2020
Hey BC: Here are your awesome History course choices for Fall 2020! View list
Call for Papers: Oracle Wants to Publish You
Ever seen your name and words in print? BC now has its very own undergraduate history journal, Oracle â a journal dedicated to publishing work by undergraduates. Learn more about submitting your work
Prof. Penelope Ismay is awarded The Stansky Book Prize
The Stansky Book Prize is awarded annually by the North American Conference on British Studies for the best book published anywhere by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies since 1800.
Penelope Ismay, Trust Among Strangers: Friendly Societies in Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Ismay’s study of friendly societies explores Britain's transition to industrial modernity by problematizing the concept of mutuality. She demonstrates how friendly societies evolved practices of sociability and reciprocity in order to cultivate belonging among working-class people who were, and would remain, unknown to each other. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Ismay explores the problem of trust in a modernizing society from the "ground up," challenging the idea of the independent, economically rational Liberal subject. Ismay’s book provides a rich understanding of theories of responsibility to others and the nature of mutual self-help as it was practiced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguing for friendly societies’ lasting impact on collectivist approaches to welfare well into the twentieth century.
The Stansky Book Prize 2019 - North American Conference on British Studies
BC News, "BC historian wins 'best book' prize", December 17, 2019
Get To Know: Prof. Sajdi
Prof. Dana Sajdi (Ph.D., Columbia University 2002) is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She is the author of The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (2013, Turkish and Arabic translations in 2018); editor of Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (2008, in Turkish 2014) and coeditor of Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays in Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Madga Al-Nowaihi (2008). Learn more about Prof. Sajdi
FAQ: The College Student’s Guide to Writing an Email
The ability to write a clear, concise, courteous—in other words, effective—email is an important but undervalued skill. Guess what? You are probably going to spend the rest of your life communicating via email (yeah, we know, death by email), so you might want to get good at it now. Learn more
Psst… Junior History Majors! Wanna Write a Thesis?
Writing an Honors Thesis is a great way to cap off your experience as a History major. Is there some topic you wish you had studied more in depth during college? Did a professor once mention a phenomenon in passing that blew your mind and that you would love to know more about? Learn more
Introducing… Brittany Lehman (and Office Hours!)
Did you know that the History Department has our very own subject librarian? Well, we do, and their name is Dr. Brittany Lehman. Learn more about Dr. Lehman
FAQ: The Semiotics of the Door (aka Door Etiquette)
As you walk through the halls of the History department, you may notice office doors in various positions. Closed, ever so slightly open, propped at a 45 degree angle, wide open. What does it all mean? How can you read the messages that the professors in those offices are sending with their doors? Learn more
Get To Know: Prof. Matus
Professor Zachary Matus is a historian of medieval Europe whose teaching interests include the history of science, religion, animals, and weird stuff. Learn more about Prof. Matus
Get To Know: Prof. Rafferty, S.J.
Originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland, Prof. Rafferty has studied in such diverse place as London, Dublin, Oxford, and Berkeley, California. He joined the Jesuit order in 1979 and was ordained a priest in 1987. Learn more about Prof. Oliver Rafferty, S.J.
Get To Know: Prof. Summers
Prof. Martin Summers is an associate professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where he regularly teaches courses on gender and sexuality in African American history, medicine and public health in the African diaspora, and the history of masculinity in the U.S. Learn more about Prof. Summers
Get To Know: Prof. Mo
Prof. Mo’s teaching interests include the social and cultural history of modern China and modern East Asia, history of travel and tourism, and women’s and gender history. She is currently at work on two projects—a book manuscript titled Itineraries for a Republic, Travel Culture and Tourism in Modern China, which traces the development of modern Chinese tourism and diverse experiences of travel in modern China; and a study of Zhuang Xueben, one of the first ethnographic photographers in modern China. Learn more about Prof. Yajun Mo
Get To Know: Prof. Kent
Believe it or not, your professors are three-dimensional human beings with lives outside of the classroom. We’re launching #GetToKnow as a way for you to… get to know them. First up, one of our newest faculty, Prof. Kent, who teaches in both History and International Studies. Learn more about Prof. Stacie Kent
A Special Message for Incoming Freshpeople
Welcome to Boston College! As you plan out your courses for the next four years, please make note of two items regarding the History Core and the History Major. Learn more
Introducing… the BC History Club
The Boston College History Club is a student run organization dedicated to the interest and advancement of historical events, news, and activities. Learn more about the BC History Club
FAQ: Senior Colloquium vs Senior Thesis
The History Department requires all seniors to either take a Senior Colloquium or write a Senior Thesis as a way to cap off their experience as majors. But what’s the difference between the two? Find out
Introducing… Professor Picone
We are delighted to announce that a new faculty member will be joining our department this coming fall. Prof. Picone’s research interests span Spatial History, Border Studies, and Nation-making. Learn more about Prof. Picone
Ph.D. alum responds to op-ed in the New York Times
Ph.D. alum James Clifton had a piece published in the Washington Post regarding the op-ed in the New York Times by an anonymous White House official. Clifton examines the relationship between the U.S. and Russia and writes: "Despite the pretense of laboring behind the scenes to maintain a steady state, normalizing Trump’s presidency in this way only abets Russia’s goals of undermining the relationships and institutions that made the West successful during the Cold War."
Richardson on the anonymous NYT op-ed
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson appeared as a panelist on WBUR's "On Point" to discuss the resistance inside the Trump administration and whether the country is in the middle of a constitutional crisis.
Richardson compares the GOP today with politics in the 1890s
The host of Slate's podcast "The Gist" interviewed Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, where she compared Trump's presidency and the GOP today to politics in the 1890s when robber barons partnered with the Republican Party.
Savage discusses the Pope's recent trip to Ireland
Ahead of Pope Francis's trip to Ireland, Prof. Robert Savage commented to the Washington Post on the differences in Ireland since the last papal visit in 1979.
Maney on the Manafort and Cohen Court Cases
Prof. Patrick Maney discussed the Manafort and Cohen court cases and they impact they could have on Trump's presidency on WGBH's "All Things Considered"
Richardson in The New Republic
In the article "Republicans Don't Own Patriotism Anymore" in The New Republic, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson argues that Democrats are reclaiming language they ceded to the GOP decades ago, and are putting a liberal spin on it.
Past predictions of Boston's future
In 1900, a reporter from the Boston Globe spoke with experts to predict what changes Boston would encounter over the next 100 years. In a recent Globe article, Prof. Marilynn Johnson helped to analyze those predictions.
Has the Great Experiment failed?
Following Trump's disastrous press conference in Helsinki, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson explores the question of whether the Great Experiment has failed in an op-ed for CNN.com.
Spirit and Legacy of 1968
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 uprising of students and workers in France. Prof. Julian Bourg writes on its significance for Times Higher Education and PublicBooks.org, and comments in Smithsonian Magazine, New Internationalist, Gazeta do Povo (Brazil), La Revista (Ecuador), and Przegląd Dziennikarski (Poland).
Student Podcasts Featured on the Ottoman History Podcast
The Ottoman History Podcast ended their seventh season by featuring the work of our undergraduate students. The podcasts that Matthew Nolan, Amber Volz, Max Bechtold, and Haley Holmes created for their course "Podcasting the Ottomans" with Prof. Sajdi can all be heard in full along with a couple of podcasts created by students from the University of Greenwich.
History major receives Fulbright
Graduating history major Anna Ringheiser received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach English in Indonesia. Her future plans include pursuing a graduate degree to teach history to high school students in low-income communities.
Donald J. White Dissertation Award
Felix Jimenez Botta won the Donald J. White Dissertation Award for the Social Science for his dissertation, "Embracing Human Rights: Grassroots Solidarity Activism and Foreign Policy in Seventies West Germany."
Prof. Franziska Seraphim Won Two Academic Fellowships
Prof. Franziska Seraphim won two grants to write her book Geographies of Justice: Japan, Germany, and the Allied War Crimes Program. She will be a fellow at the Davis Center at Princeton University in the fall and at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the spring.
Hirota Wins Book Award
Congratulations to Hidetaka Hirota, winner of the First Book Award presented by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for his "Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy"
Carper Receives John Higham Research Fellowship
Congratulations to PhD candidate Katie Carper, winner of the John Higham Research Fellowship presented by the Organization of American Historians for her dissertation "The Business of Migration, 1837-75."
Spotlight on Richardson in BC Heights Article
BC's student newspaper ran an article featuring our own Prof. Heather Cox Richardson.
Reich Receives Graduate Student Paper Prize
M.A. alum Robin Reich was awarded the best graduate student paper prize at this year’s Medieval Academy of America conference. Robin is now a Ph.D. student at Columbia.
Rob Savage Short-Listed for Book Prize
Prof. Rob Savage's book The BBC's 'Irish Troubles': television, conflict and Northern Ireland was short-listed for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize.
Sajdi receives Radcliffe Fellowship
Prof. Dana Sajdi has been awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, which she will hold next academic year.
Smith receives MLK scholarship
History major Anthony Smith has just won BC's Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Committee Scholarship. This award recognizes a Boston College junior who excels in academics, extracurricular leadership, community service, and involvement with African American issues both on and off campus.
Arissa Oh on "chain migration"
Prof. Arissa Oh co-authored a piece in the Washington Post on "chain migration."
Lyerly and Jay's work highlighted
The Southern Poverty Law Center highlighted the extraordinary work of BC's own Professor Lynn Lyerly and BC Ph.D. alum Bethany Jay.
Hirota on restrictive immigration policies
Hidetaka Hirota's piece in the Washington Post on how keeping the Irish poor out of America helped shape our restrictive immigration policies
Trump taking apart New Deal
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson's article in The Guardian argues that Trump is taking apart the New Deal's legacy.
Alum receives Stansky Book Prize
PhD alum Mark Doyle co-won the Stansky Book Prize at the North America Conference on British Studies for his book Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). The award is given annually for the best book on post-1800 Britain by a North American scholar.
Kennedy Files Released
Prof. Patrick Maney was widely quoted regarding the declassification last week of thousands of pages of government documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In addition to an interview with the UK's Daily Mail, his comments in stories by AP and Reuters are running internationally; he also was quoted by WCVB-TV and the Washington Examiner.
Jesuit mysticism
In A Companion to Jesuit Mysticism (Brill Publishers, 2017), editor Prof. Robert Maryks presents 13 essays on the Jesuit mystical tradition.
Richardson responds to Trump's UN speech
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson appeared on WBUR's "Morning Edition" and NECN's "The Take" to comment on President Trump's first United Nations speech.
The Radical Hopes of the Russian Revolution
An article in the New Republic by Ph.D. candidate David Sessions.
The Catholic Church and Immigration
Here is a piece of historical analysis in the Washington Post regarding the Catholic Church and its stance on immigration by Boston College alumna, Dr. Grainne McEvoy.
The Pledge of Allegiance and the Perils of Quiet Nativism
Ph.D. student Kelly Lyons won the grad student blog competition for The Website of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society with her piece on the "quiet nativism" of the schoolhouse flag movement and the pledge of allegiance in the late 19th century.
DACA Protest Interview
An interview that Prof. Priya Lal conducted with Reuters at a DACA protest in Harvard Square is now featured in a Washington Post op-ed.
Hillary and the GOP
In an op-ed in The Guardian, Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson provides some historical background on the reactions to Hillary Clinton's new book.
Fr. Beaumier named VP, University Secretary
Casey Beaumier, S.J., who received a Ph.D. from the History Department in 2013, has been named Vice President and University Secretary at Boston College.
"... a nation of immigrants for a nation of emigrants."
This new essay by Professor Kevin Kenny interprets Irish mass migration within the contexts of diaspora and empire.
Impact of fracking
Professor of History Conevery Valencius uses a Radcliffe fellowship to study fracking links to earthquakes.
"Making History Public" course featured in the Boston College Magazine
The summer 2017 edition of Boston College Magazine included an article on Prof. Robin Fleming's course "Making History Public: History Down the Toilet." The public exhibit of the student-curated show that will result from the class will open on the third floor of Stokes Hall on October 3rd.
New Digital Site Explores British Reaction to Call for American Independence
B.C. Alum Marie Pellissier (center), now a graduate students at Loyola University Chicago, has collaborated with two others to create a digital critical edition of Tom Paine's Common Sense.
River of woes
How a flood control policy designed to save an empire helped destroy it. (Essay in Boston College Magazine by Associate Professor Ling Zhang)
"Freak Out and Carry On"
Prof. Heather Cox Richardson co-hosts a new WBUR podcast on politics and history.
Historians honored
History faculty members Sylvia Sellers-Garcia and Yajun Mo receive prestigious awards for research.
Podcasting the Ottomans
Students from the spring 2017 course HIST-2155: Podcasting the Ottomans investigated the stories behind specific objects from the Ottoman Empire and created the website Stories Ottoman Objects Tell.
Best book prize in environmental history
Associate Professor Ling Zhang’s The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 has been selected for the American Society for Environmental History’s 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize as the best book on environmental history.
Righting Historical Wrongs
Students from Prof. Franziska Seraphim's "Making History Public" course designed an exhibition for the department which focuses on righting historical wrongs at the turn of the millennium.
Prof. Robert Savage and the BBC's 'Irish Troubles'
Prof. Robert Savage was interviewed for the Boston College Libraries Faculty Publication Highlights series regarding his recent book The BBC's 'Irish Troubles': Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015).
Interview with Prof. Sarah Ross
Prof. Sarah Ross was interviewed by BC librarian Kimberly Kowal regarding her recent book Everyday Renaissances: The Quest for Cultural Legitimacy in Venice. This is part of the Faculty Publication Highlights series coordinated by the BC Libraries.
Interview of Prof. Patrick Maney regarding his recent book
Boston College's Library conducted an interview of Prof. Patrick Maney regarding his recent book Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President for their Faculty Publication Highlights feature