News

Holsinger Portrait Project co-director, Professor John Edwin Mason, discusses pop-up exhibit in Northside Library in this UVa Today article. Check it out!

https://news.virginia.edu/content/pop-exhibit-african-american-portraits...

Professor Chris Gratien recently published a new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press).

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32948&bottom_ref=subject

Description

The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology.

Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.

The book’s interventions are discussed in the reviews below:

"The Unsettled Plain is environmental history at its finest: not just a history of rivers, mountains, and soils or climates and diseases, but all of those and something more. Chris Gratien tells the story of an empire, meticulously researched, exceptionally insightful—all grounded in the lives and lands of Çukurova."

—Sam White, author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

"The Unsettled Plain is a pathbreaking book that takes Ottoman studies to a new level. Chris Gratien's vivid account of how the Çukurova region was settled tackles big questions about the state, capitalism, and environmental factors, without ever losing sight of the individuals who bore the brunt of the consequences."

—Reşat Kasaba, author of A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

"Chris Gratien charts an important new path for critical environmental history with The Unsettled Plain, which reflects scrupulous research in at least eight countries and multiple languages. A must-read for anyone interested in the dizzyingly complex relations between real people and the environment of which they are part."

—Diana Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge

Professor James Loeffler recently published a new piece in the Jewish Quarterly Review. Entitled "The First Genocide: Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin's Thought," Loeffler discusses Raphael Lemkin's confrontation with antisemitism in interwar Poland and how it shaped his origin-story for genocide. 

Please click the link to read: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/849198

Abstract:

When did the first genocide take place in history? In theory, a universal crime transcends time and space. In practice, the moral imagination demands a specific origin story. In this article, I explain how and why Raphael Lemkin chose to locate genocide’s archetypal origins in the early Christian martyrdom at the hands of the ancient Romans. That choice emerged from a dramatic public confrontation with Catholic antisemitism in interwar Poland. Haunted by the charge of Jewish moral parochialism, after the war Lemkin fashioned a cosmopolitan narrative for his discovery of genocide. Today, scholars are consumed by debates about the historical and conceptual relationship between the Holocaust and other genocides. Yet we cannot move forward in that endeavor until we retrieve Lemkin’s Polish Jewish past.

Congratulations to Professor J.E. Lendon on the publication of his new book: That Tyrant Persuasion:  How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2022). 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691221007/that-tyrant-pe...

The assassins of Julius Caesar cried out that they had killed a tyrant, and days later their colleagues in the Senate proposed rewards for this act of tyrannicide. The killers and their supporters spoke as if they were following a well-known script. They were. Their education was chiefly in rhetoric and as boys they would all have heard and given speeches on a ubiquitous set of themes—including one asserting that “he who kills a tyrant shall receive a reward from the city.” In That Tyrant, Persuasion, J. E. Lendon explores how rhetorical education in the Roman world influenced not only the words of literature but also momentous deeds: the killing of Julius Caesar, what civic buildings and monuments were built, what laws were made, and, ultimately, how the empire itself should be run.

Presenting a new account of Roman rhetorical education and its surprising practical consequences, That Tyrant, Persuasion shows how rhetoric created a grandiose imaginary world for the Roman ruling elite—and how they struggled to force the real world to conform to it. Without rhetorical education, the Roman world would have been unimaginably different.

“This is an original and significant book with a seemingly effortless combination of knowledge and readability. Arguing that the rhetorical education of the ancient Roman elite had a pervasive influence on their actions, That Tyrant, Persuasion treats readers to thought-provoking accounts of Roman monuments, Roman law, and even the murder of Julius Caesar.”―Henriette van der Blom, University of Birmingham

“Lendon guides us once again into the deepest recesses of the Roman elite mind, revealing a set of springs and gears that caused the real world to tick; but this was a movement that had been flawlessly regulated by the professor of rhetoric. No wonder, then, that a flesh-and-blood dictator, Julius Caesar, was handled just like all the fantastical tyrants whom Brutus and his companions had spent their school days dutifully and heroically eliminating. This book is a must-read for all who want to understand why a Roman aristocrat thought, said, and, ultimately, did what he did.”―Michael Peachin, New York University

History Ph.D Candidate Olivia Paschal  wrote a column for The Washington Post's "Made by History" blog about the more effective track record historically of Black newspapers in the coverage of racist massacres and other racial violence: The Black press provides a model for how mainstream news can better cover racism.

Click the link to read the column: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/17/black-press-provides-model-how-mainstream-news-can-better-cover-racism/

In Professor Karen Parshall's newest book, The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950, she discusses the development of American mathematics in the 30 years following World War I. 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691197555/the-new-era-in...

Professor Caroline Janney's award-winning book, "Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox," has been recognized as a "work that enhances the general public's understanding of the Civil War Era," and thus awarded the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. 

https://news.virginia.edu/content/new-book-explores-chaotic-finish-civil-war-and-origins-lost-cause?

Professor Philip Zelikow was featured in a New York Times article discussing a bipartisan push to create a Congressional-appointed, high-level independent commission with broad powers to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/politics/covid-commission.html

Professor John Mason, who also serves as the co-director of the Holsinger Portrait Project, has been awarded a Jefferson Trust grant. The grant of $73,000 was awarded for the Project's proposal "Centering African American Life in Central Virginia: Community Engagement & The Holsinger Portrait Project." The grant will support the The Holsinger Portrait Project’s upcoming exhibitions at the Small Special Collections Library and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, as well as community engagement programming, publications, and a website. The UVA exhibition opens in September 2022 and the JSAAHC exhibition will open in early 2023.