Please join me for a tour around the world in the year 1000. We will travel along known routes and use transport of the time. (Spoiler alert: it will take us much longer than 80 days!) Beginning in China, we'll see Southeast and South Asia on our way to Baghdad, the center of the Islamic … Continued
Rosa Parks is a familiar figure in textbooks. Yet much of what people learn about Mrs. Parks is narrow, distorted, or just plain wrong. She’s trapped in a single moment on a long-ago Montgomery bus, too often cast as meek, tired, quiet and middle class. The boycott is seen as a natural outgrowth of her … Continued
Perhaps no American president is more revered – or more quotable – than Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is regularly cited on such topics as political polarization, leadership, slavery, and race. But Lincoln said so much, so well, that it’s far easier to quote him than to really understand him. In this webinar, we'll examine some key … Continued
Too often, the history of corporate capitalism is told as a story of “great men” who innovated by creating new labor systems and irresistible commodities. The reality is far more interesting. This webinar puts the ordinary people who built the early the cigarette industry, before the dangers of smoking were understood, at the forefront. Hundreds … Continued
In September 1962, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) convened its first convention in Fresno, California, initiating a movement that would result in the creation of United Farm Workers and the first contracts for farm workers in the state of California in 1970. Led by Cesar Chavez, the union contributed a number of innovations to … Continued
What can comics teach us about African history, the Cold War, and African American activism? The 2018 blockbuster movie Black Panther brought Afro-Futurism to the big screen to tell the story of T'challa, the king of Wakanda, a mythical African nation that is the world’s most advanced civilization. The film was based on the Marvel … Continued
All too often, historians use photographs simply to illustrate what they've already learned from other sources. But how can we use photographs as primary sources in and of themselves to understand the past? In this interactive webinar, we'll consider photographs as material objects, thinking about what their physical form can tell us about how they … Continued
Mass vaccine hesitancy, along with outright opposition to immunization, is by no means solely an artifact of the COVID-19 era. Rather, controversies over vaccination in American history go back literally three centuries, to an intense conflict in Puritan Boston that inspired an assassination attempt on Cotton Mather. This seminar will explore this long history, focusing … Continued
The Great Migration was the mass movement of mostly rural Black Southerners to the urban North and Midwest between 1916 and 1970. It was one of the most important moments in American history and reconfigured the nation’s politics, arts, and culture. As millions of people confronted the challenges of a new labor market, housing segregation, … Continued
Few subjects are more fascinating than the supernatural. Popular culture is suffused with images of demons, witches, werewolves, ghosts, and other things that go bump in the night. These figures have long, complicated histories that are deeply intertwined with issues of religion, gender, politics, art, and more. But how do we approach something as elusive … Continued