Starbucks is everywhere. It is on busy street corners and intersections. It is in the mall, the airport, and supermarket. It is St. Louis and St. Cloud, Paris and Singapore. At one point, there was even a Starbucks in the Forbidden City in China. In the early 2000s, historian and writer Bryant Simon visited more … Continued
Comics are serious stuff. Non-fiction graphic novels are suddenly everywhere, and many deal with the events, experiences, and ramifications of the past. They offer readers access to issues of memory, power, biography, and inter-generational trauma. They also provide unique opportunities for students to encounter and construct meaningful and usable histories. Too often, however, we teach … Continued
Birthright citizenship has a history that extends across nearly the whole of the nineteenth century. It entered legal debates during the antebellum era through the constitutional puzzle that free African Americans posed. In the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, birthright took on new significance as questions about the incorporation of former slaves into … Continued
Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States. 20 million Americans trace their roots to Asia, and the Asian American population grew 72% from 2000 to 2015, the fastest growth rate of any racial or ethnic group. But most Americans know little about this diverse community and their long history, and our … Continued
Do you find yourself wondering how U.S.-China relations got to the current point? Or thinking that you need a crash course on China’s ambitions initiatives on the world stage? This online seminar, led by Professor Xing Hang of Brandeis University, will help to orient you to how China’s relationships and priorities have evolved over the … Continued
On Nov. 18, 1978, 912 people died in a mass murder-mass suicide in rural Guyana. Even though the Jonestown massacre remains a mystery it does have eerie parallels to the murder-suicides, mass shootings and terrorism that wrack our society today. This webinar will explore Professor Chappell’s 2018 article in the Washington Post in which he … Continued
In 1962, Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected on the importance of Jackie Robinson, writing, “He was a pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” King believed that when Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier fifteen years … Continued
Far too often, the Middle East appears as doubly alien: out of place and out of time. A century of popular culture caricatures, at least two centuries of Orientalist representations, and decades of American military interventions, have all fed into the notion of the Middle East as turmoil-laden, sectarian and tribal pre-modern world. In this … Continued
We live in a time of staggering economic equality. It shapes our politics, our culture, and our social relations. Yet it was not always this way. How did we get here? What historical issues drive the politics of inequality? How do questions of gender, race, immigration, and cultural values play a role? In this webinar, … Continued
When Europeans first arrived in the new world, their horses were coming home. Horses had evolved on the American Great Plains, but as they migrated into Siberia and spread across much of the old world, they became extinct in their American cradle until, ten thousand years later, the Spanish returned them to their birthplace. Now, … Continued