News

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

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...

 

Friday, April 8, 2022

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 

Friday, April 8, 2022

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...

Friday, April 8, 2022

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...

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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."

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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.”

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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.”

Monday, March 28, 2022

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/.

Monday, March 28, 2022

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

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

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...

 

Thursday, March 17, 2022

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...

 

Thursday, March 17, 2022

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...

 

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

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

 

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

History PhD student Audrius Rickus wrote a column for The Washington Post's "Made by History" blog. Rickus has some valuable insight into President Vladimir Putin’s “de-nazification” claims.  

 

Please click the link to read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/09/baseless-claims-denazification-have-underscored-russian-aggression-since-world-war-ii/?itid=sf_article_list

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

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.

 

Monday, March 7, 2022

The Holsinger Portrait Project (co-directed by Professor John Mason) a partnership between the University of Virginia and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, presents a pop-up exhibition, The New Negro in Charlottesville and Albemarle: Portraits from a Century Ago, at the Northside Library branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library throughout the month of March. The exhibition is free and can be seen during the library's regular opening hours. The pop-up show is a preview of much larger exhibitions that will open at the University of Virginia, in September 2022, and at the Jefferson School, in early 2023. 

Monday, March 7, 2022

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

 

Monday, February 28, 2022

UVA Today spoke with Kyrill Kunakhovich about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  For more on Kyrill’s insightful analysis, click here: 

https://news.virginia.edu/content/russia-invades-ukraine-what-does-it-mean

Thursday, February 24, 2022

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/

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