News
History PhD candidate Ian Iverson has accepted a job as Editorial Specialist for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition! Congratulations Ian!
PhD Candidate Nicholas Scott recently wrote a column for The Washington Post's "Made by History." Scott discusses how Chile's current constitutional convention has resumed the unfinished business of the Chilean Revolution.
Read article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/26/chile-is-writing-new-c...
Congratulations to Professor Justene Hill Edwards on becoming a 2022 Carnegie Fellow!
Read more here: https://www.carnegie.org/awards/honoree/justene-hill-edwards/
Professor Claudrena Harold will be the keynote speaker for the May 21st graduation ceremony for the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences!
Read more here: https://news.virginia.edu/content/finals-weekend-speakers-ralph-sampson-...
Congratulations to Professor Olivier Zunz on the publication of his new book, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173979/the-man-who-un...) Olivier’s book was also recently reviewed in the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/165923/olivier-zunz-tocqueville-book-rev...
Olivier’s book was also recently reviewed in the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/165923
Ph.D. Candidate Nicholas Scott has been awarded the Frank Finger Graduate Fellowship for Teaching. This award is among the highest honors that a graduate student can earn in recognition of their dedication to teaching at the University of Virginia.
Professor Philip Zelikow co-authored an essay entitled,"How Ukraine Can Build Back Better" for Foreign Affairs Magazine. This article discusses the role political-economy strategy may play in the next stage of the war in Ukraine.
Link to article here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-19/how-ukraine-c...
On April 7th, 2022, Professor Justene Hill Edwards joined speakers Adom Getachew, Peter Hudson, Daniel Immerwahr for a discussion of the political economy of race and resistance from the vantage points of the Caribbean, US and Africa. The talk was part of the Schomburg Center's Conversations in Black Freedom Studies series organized by historians Jeanne Theoharis and Robyn C. Spencer.
A recording of the event can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVqc5jMbKrs
Professor Kyrill Kunakhovich provides historical context to the war in Ukraine on UVA Speaks podcast
On this UVA Speaks podcast, Professor Kyrill Kunakhovich provides a historical context of the war in Ukraine and the interconnected histories between Ukraine and Russia. Kunakhovich explores Russian motivations for the invasion, in part, to restore global significance and provide a territorial buffer zone from the West. He also explains that what we see in Ukraine is a violent clash between an authoritarian regime and a democracy, with allies lining up behind the different ideologies.
Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/user-648419957/ukraine-and-russia-a-historical-co...
Professor Sarah Milov was selected as one of the University Center for Human Values's Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows at Princeton University for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Read more here: https://uchv.princeton.edu/news/announcing-our-incoming-laurance-s-rocke...
On April 5, 2022, the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosted a conversation on gospel music with scholars Claudrena Harold and Alon Confino. They discussed Harold’s book: "When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras."
Read about and view Dean Risa Goluboff’s testimony at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/202203/goluboff-testifies-supreme-court-nomination-hearings
Congratulations to UVA History PhD Clayton Butler on his newly published book, True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction!
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/true-blue/
Book Description:
“During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents of the Deep South—individuals who passed the highest bar of Unionism by enlisting in the United States Army to fight with the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry.”
Congratulations to UVA History PhD Brian Neumann on his newly published book, Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis!
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/bloody-flag-of-anarchy/
Book Description:
“Generations of scholars have debated why the Union collapsed and descended into civil war in the spring of 1861. Turning this question on its head, Brian C. Neumann’s Bloody Flag of Anarchy asks how the fragile Union held together for so long. This fascinating study grapples with this dilemma by reexamining the nullification crisis, one of the greatest political debates of the antebellum era, when the country came perilously close to armed conflict in the winter of 1832–33 after South Carolina declared two tariffs null and void. Enraged by rising taxes and the specter of emancipation, 25,000 South Carolinians volunteered to defend the state against the perceived tyranny of the federal government. Although these radical Nullifiers claimed to speak for all Carolinians, the impasse left the Palmetto State bitterly divided. Forty percent of the state’s voters opposed nullification, and roughly 9,000 men volunteered to fight against their fellow South Carolinians to hold the Union together.”
Professor James Loeffler has recently published three articles about the history and memory of the concept of genocide:
“The First Genocide: Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112:1 (Winter 2022), 139-63 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/849198; (see previous shared post for more detail)
“The Problems of Lemkin [Heb.],” Hazman Hazeh (Feb. 2022), https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/genocide/;
“The One and the Many: On Comparing the Holocaust,” Sources (Spring 2022), https://www.sourcesjournal.org/.
UVaToday featured Professor Karen Parshall in its “Faculty Spotlight” series as she discussed her new book, and the unique combination of her fields in history and mathematics.
Article here: https://news.virginia.edu/content/faculty-spotlight-professor-makes-math-less-maddening-using-history-relate
Professor Alan Taylor appeared on The Washington Times' "History As It Happens" podcast to discuss the role of this country's founding generation — and its compromises over slavery as written in the U.S. Constitution — in determining the United States' anguished history of race and racism
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/21/history-it-happens-slav...
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...
PhD Candidate Crystal Luo recently wrote a column for The Washington Post's "Made by History." Lou tells the history behind one of the loudest pro-police voices in the convo on anti-Asian violence, Carl Chan and the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.
The article can be found here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/16/anti-asian-violence-is...
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