News
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?
The University of Virginia Lifetime Learning Program’s most recent podcast featured Professor Justene Hill Edwards, who discussed her book Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina.
https://m.soundcloud.com/user-648419957/the-economic-lives-of-enslaved-people
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 Sarah Milov was a guest on the podcast, "This Day in Esoteric Political History." The episode focused on the 35th anniversary of General Services Administration regulations limiting where federal employees could smoke at work.
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.
Graduate Student Allison Mitchell's article, "For Jobs and Freedom: How Histories of the Civil Rights Movement Resurrected Black Folks' Economic Demands," was published in Medium as part of the New Ideas in American History project.
https://medium.com/new-american-history/for-jobs-and-freedom-edee5c9b4631
Graduate Student Ian Iverson and UVA alum Joshua Morrison highlight the history of slavery at UVA in the new Pavilion X exhibit.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/pavilion-x-exhibit-highlights-slavery-history-its-former-residents
Graduate student Meghan Herwig's op-ed in the Washington Post's "Made by History" series, discusses whether the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics will push China on human rights.
Professor Sarah Milov was interviewed by the BBC radio program, The Long View, about parallels between tobacco whistleblowing and social media whistleblowing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013zp2
The history department congratulates Professor Thomas Klubock on the publication of his new book, Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile. Below, is the description for his book:
The first major history of Chile’s most significant peasant rebellion and the violent repression that followed
"In 1934, peasants turned to revolution to overturn Chile’s oligarchic political order and the profound social inequalities in the Chilean countryside. The brutal military counterinsurgency that followed was one of the worst acts of state terror in Chile until the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Using untapped archival sources, award-winning scholar Thomas Miller Klubock exposes Chile’s long history of political violence and authoritarianism and chronicles peasants’ movements to build a more just and freer society. Klubock further explores how an amnesty law that erased both the rebellion and the military atrocities lay the foundation for the political stability that characterized Chile’s multi-party democracy. This historical amnesia or olvido, Klubock argues, was a precondition of national reconciliation and democratic rule, which endured until 1973, when conflict in the countryside ended once again with violent repression during the Pinochet dictatorship."
Published as an Op Ed in The Washington Post, Justin McBrien speaks about how disaster films such as 'Don't Look Up' will not spur action in regard to climate change.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/26/disaster-flicks-like-d...
Professor Neeti Nair spoke on the latest incident of Anti-Muslim hate speech in India, and the lack of response from political leadership on NPR's All Things Considered.
India’s Supreme Court steps in after Hindu leaders call for violence against Muslims.
In a recent article in the Indian Express, Professor Neeti Nair writes, "The recent assembly of so-called sadhus at Haridwar in Uttarakhand has called for the mass murder of Muslims. The videos of the vitriolic, hate speeches have now been in circulation for a few days, and have been analysed by the media in some measure. Yet, with Covid surging and election news dominating headlines, this latest avalanche of hate speech has already begun to drop off the front pages of newspapers. We neglect this new low at our peril." For more, click the link below:
The history department congratulates Professor Brian Owensby on the publication of his new book, New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy. Here’s a description of Professor Owensby's new book:
“In the centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, social and material relations among the indigenous Guaraní people of present-day Paraguay were based on reciprocal gift-giving. But the Spanish and Portuguese newcomers who arrived in the sixteenth century seemed interested in the Guaraní only to advance their own interests, either through material exchange or by getting the Guaraní to serve them. This book tells the story of how Europeans felt empowered to pursue individual gain in the New World, and how the Guaraní people confronted this challenge to their very way of being. Although neither Guaraní nor Europeans were positioned to grasp the larger meaning of the moment, their meeting was part of a global sea change in human relations and the nature of economic exchange.
Brian P. Owensby uses the centuries-long encounter between Europeans and the indigenous people of South America to reframe the notion of economic gain as a historical development rather than a matter of human nature. Owensby argues that gain—the pursuit of individual, material self-interest—must be understood as a global development that transformed the lives of Europeans and non-Europeans, wherever these two encountered each other in the great European expansion spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.”
Professor William Hitchcock takes readers inside his HIST 2214: The Cold War class in a new blog post through the Office of Engagement.
Take a closer look at the course here: https://engagement.virginia.edu/learn/thoughts-from-the-lawn/Teaching_th...
The Chinese translation of Brad Reed’s Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty, is out. The book is now in its fourth printing with total sales around 30,000.
Professors Xiaoyuan Liu and Joseph Seeley were interviewed by UVA Today for a recent article on the legacies of the Pearl Harbor attack for US involvement in East Asia. To read the article, click here:
https://news.virginia.edu/content/pearl-harbor-drew-us-not-just-war-all-asia
The November 2021 special issue of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO), “The Persianate Bazaar,” features key contributions from Professor Fahad Bishara. The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to writing the introduction with Nandini Chatterjee, Fahad contributed an article, “The Diver’s New Papers: Wealth, People, and Property in a Persian Gulf Bazaar.”
https://brill.com/view/journals/jesh/64/5-6/jesh.64.issue-5-6.xml?language=en
Grace Hale’s “Cool Town,” which explores the birth of such bands as R.E.M. and the B-52s, was just named this year’s top book on Georgia history by the Georgia Historical Society.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/faculty-spotlight-historian-revisits-a...
Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 was mentioned in an article in The New York Times Magazine detailing long-standing debates about how we tell our national story and what that has to teach us about our current divisions: The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History.