Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA)
2024-2025 Seminar Schedule
Fall Semester 2024
"Childhood in Americas"
October 11, 2024
Rachel Devlin, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This course explores two aspects of U.S. history that have long been ignored: first, the family has been the most basic form of social organization in the western world during the modern period; second, that children and child rearing have come to play an increasingly central role in American culture, society and politics over the last 150 years. Topics include transformations in ideologies of motherhood; coming of age under the system of racial slavery in the south; the relationship of men and masculinity to boyhood, fatherhood and family life; changing customs in youthful, heterosexual romance; the “divorce revolution” of the twentieth century and its effect on children; the sentimentalization and eroticization of childhood; the emerging cultural power of teenagers and their place in American society; the rise of right wing family politics in the late twentieth century; international adoption; and the commercialization of childhood over the course of the twentieth century.
"Jane Austen and her World"
November 1, 2024
Lynn Festa, Associate Professor, Department of English, Rutgers University
Why are there so many soldiers stationed in the seemingly sleepy provincial towns where the novels of Jane Austen are so often set? Jane Austen may conjure up images of a circumscribed world of country towns, flowing dresses and decorous manners, but she lived at a moment of immense historical turmoil, marked by famine, political repression, civic tumult at home, and slavery, revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars abroad. Focusing on Pride and Prejudice, this session will address both Austen's formal contributions to the novel—above all, her development of free indirect discourse-- and the historical and cultural contexts out of which her writings emerged. We will draw on a broad range of materials, including vindications of the rights of man (and woman!), debates on the slave trade, reports on the Revolutions in France and Haiti, and satiric prints as well as images of a seemingly tranquil British countryside by Gainsborough and depictions of the devastation of war by Goya. Together we will paint a picture of the world Jane Austen inhabited and of the relationships her novels establish to the greater world beyond her immediate grasp. What is at stake in the decision to represent— or to block out— historical events happening elsewhere in the world?
"The Crusades in Context"
November 15, 2024
Anthony Di Battista, Lecturer, Department of History, Rutgers University
The Crusades are considered by many historians to be the great culminating act of the medieval drama. The quest to recapture Jerusalem became for many European Christians an act of both penance and pilgrimage. As the crusades progressed (and continued to fail) many other elements of medieval culture came into relief against a backdrop of war. This seminar will examine the background causes of the crusades and discuss what they reveal about the European class system, the balance of power, and the economic implications of establishing crusader states in the Levant.
"The Mongol Empire in World History"
December 6, 2024
Kenneth Linden, PHD, Rutgers University
In this seminar, we will explore the cultural, political, artistic, literary, religious, gender, and environmental history of the Mongol Empire. The Mongol Empire, founded by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, was the largest empire in history, and transformed Eurasia and the world, the impacts of which continue to be felt today. We will look at primary sources written by Mongols, Persians, Chinese, and Europeans to explore the impact of their rule and how Mongols were seen by themselves and by others. Using these sources, we will discuss how the environment and nomadic animal husbandry shaped Mongolian life and was in turn shaped by Mongolians. Then we will explore how the Empire set the template and boundaries for future empires and nations, including today’s China, Russia, and Iran. Lastly, we will discuss how the Mongol Empire plays a central role in modern Mongolian identity and problematize the stereotypes of Mongols as violent barbarian boogeyman to many people across the world.
*Public Art and Public Memory: Critical & Collaborative Engagement with Histories of School Segregation
December 13, 2024 8:30-12:00pm at North Brunswick Township High School
This seminar is FREE and you can RSVP Here! For more information click HERE!
The “Public Art and Public Memory” workshop will focus on tools, resources, and approaches for teaching histories of school segregation, integration, and debates about local control in New Jersey, in the second half of the twentieth century. We will explore how histories of segregation and integration that involved Black, Puerto Rican and white New Jerseyans, can be made relevant to AAPIDA and Latinx students who arrived more recently in the state, and how the past connects to and shapes the present. Lastly, the workshop will examine how oral history, public history, public art, and community engagement around histories of segregation, integration, and local control, can be incorporated into teaching and extracurricular programming.
This workshop will take place at North Brunswick Township High School and focus on a newly completed mural now on display at the school. The mural was created as part of the New Brunswick/North Brunswick High Schools Public Memory Project, a collaboration between community stakeholders, scholars, students, and artists. In September 1974, North Brunswick Township commemorated the official opening of its new high school – the building in which the mural is now installed. This new beginning also marked an end. For the first time in decades, middle and high school students from North Brunswick would no longer travel to the city of New Brunswick for their education, severing the longstanding arrangement. Produced on the 50th anniversary of North Brunswick Township High School’s opening, the mural explores the two communities shared history, and how this split – rooted in concerns and anxieties that white parents had about racial integration and tension at New Brunswick High School – can inspire conversations about race and educational equity in New Jersey today. (A partner mural is being installed in New Brunswick, as part of this project as well.)
This workshop is being co-sponsored by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis High School Teachers Institute, coLAB Arts, the Rutgers Global Asias Initiative, the Rutgers New Brunswick Department of American Studies, and North Brunswick Township High School.
Spring Semester 2025
"Histories of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change and Climate Extremes in European History, c.1300-1850"
January 24, 2025
Alastair Bellany, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This seminar will explore the environmental, social, political, and cultural impact of a centuries-long phase of fluctuating climatic cooling usually known as the Little Ice Age, c.1300-1850. We will explore arguments about the role of non-human nature as an agent of historical experience and change; learn about the ways that historians are collaborating with paleoclimatologists to reconstruct the history of past climatic fluctuations using evidence from both “the archives of society” and “the archives of nature”; and look at recent scholarship debating the role that climatic extremes may have played in subsistence crises (dearth and famine in the 1590s and 1690s) and political conflict (the general crisis of the seventeenth century). We will end with a detailed case study of how volcanic eruptions may have disrupted global climate and thus put heightened stress on societies, cultures and polities; here we will focus, in particular, on the climatic and historical impact of the 1783 eruption of the Icelandic volcanic fissure at Laki.
"Lincoln and the Civil War"
February 7, 2025
Louis Masur, Board of Governors Professor & Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History, Rutgers University
Lincoln once proclaimed that "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." In this workshop we shall examine Lincoln's ideas about nation, secession, slavery, emancipation, democracy and peace. His beliefs never remained static, and he changed his mind in response to changing conditions. We will pay particular attention to his ideas for how to reconstruct the nation once the war was over, ideas he did not live to see come to fruition.
"Mapping History"
March 7, 2025
Jack Bouchard, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
We all love maps, and many of us love working with maps in our research and teaching. Some people just love staring at them for hours online or in our living rooms. The Internet loves maps as well, and we live in a golden age of detailed, creative, and free maps. They are informative, fun to look at, and can tell us all manner of wild things about our world, past and present. Alas! Maps are also liars and persuaders, tools of oppression and liberation, agents of empire and state-formation and capitalist extraction. Maps are windows into lost worlds and onto worlds that never existed. They are tools to navigate the world around us, or gross over-simplifications of that world which are unsuitable to help us find our way. They are ways to mark what divides and unites us, to show how we are connected through roads and bisected by waterways, or to show who owns what and how much it is worth. Maps have existed for as long as humans have, yet most were never meant to be preserved.
Maps have a history, and maps are essential to history. This workshop revolves around the exploration of two problems: the history of maps, and history with maps. We will start by studying how humans have made, used, and interpreted maps over time. We will learn the ways that cartography has changed in the past several thousand years, how this has shaped human behavior and changed how we see the world. This includes, importantly, the history of navigation and space without maps. One of the things we’ll soon learn is that maps are only one of, and often the least important, the many tools humans use to make sense of space, place and navigation. In the second part, we will study how historians have used, and continue to use, maps as tools to understand the past. In part this means how they have researched, interpreted and deployed historical maps as evidence. But we will also explore how historians have made and used maps which contain information about history – the maps in your textbooks, infographics, data-maps, etc.
"How do Working People Sustain Global Cities?"
March 28, 2025
Tatiana Seijas, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The term “essential workers” entered our popular lexicon during the 2020 pandemic, when we all recognized the people who provide goods and services that sustain our everyday lives. Our seminar will consider the role of food vendors, transporters, and healers in Mexico City to understand the long legacy of workers who make urban life possible. Mexico City during the seventeenth century was a global city, with residents from around the world who maintained commercial and cultural ties to Asia, Europe, and Africa. Essential workers made those global connections possible and contributed to the local economy by feeding, transporting, and caring for their neighbors. We will examine historical maps, review primary sources, and discuss urban history more generally to consider historical parallels and what they reveal about the current state and future of cities such as New York and Los Angeles.
"Epidemics in the United States"
April 4, 2025 (NEW DATE)
Elaine Lafay, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In this seminar we will analyze how epidemic diseases have impacted society and culture from seventeenth century smallpox outbreaks through recent and ongoing experiences with COVID-19. Through a study of selected outbreaks, this seminar examines how people in different eras have responded in times of medical and ecological crisis. Major themes include infectious disease and its impact on society; changing theories of disease causation; the development of public health measures; the persistent tensions between individual liberties and public interest; ecological understandings of disease and place; patient activism; social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; and contemporary policy and responses to health threats.
"The Caribbean in the making of the West"
May 2, 2025
Marisa Fuentes, Associate Professor, Department of History and Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University
From a U.S. vantage point, the Caribbean stays in the background of our news cycle unless a hurricane or earthquake devastates a small island nation. Even then, only if that weather pattern is headed for U.S. shores. To recenter the Caribbean in world history, this seminar will explore the profound significance of early Caribbean history to the making of the “West” from the first interactions between Europeans and Indigenous, to early forms of capitalism, racial slavery, racial hierarchy, and exploitative labor systems (plantations) that destroyed natural environments. We will read a mix of primary and secondary sources, maps, and images to understand the early developments and trajectories of economic and racial systems that began in the Caribbean and are still with us today. We will also explore Indigenous and African responses to these systems in armed conflict and cultural traditions.
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2023-2024 Seminar Schedule
Fall Semester 2023
“Antebellum Black Political and Intellectual Thought”
September 22, 2023
Leslie Alexander, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The early nineteenth century was a time of tremendous turmoil, as the newly independent United States struggled to forge a new nation. Political leaders, seeking to chart a new path forward, found themselves embroiled in endless ideological conflict. At the heart of much of this political strife was the explosive topic of slavery; particularly as the North abandoned their attachment to the international trade in humans and embraced an industrial economy, while the South became even more firmly committed to the expanding system of slavery. In this session, we’ll explore how newly emancipated Black northerners articulated their own political agenda—often also becoming deeply divided over political strategy as they fought for abolition, citizenship, and equality in a country that remained profoundly hostile to their presence. We discuss, in particular, how various Black activists imagined freedom, articulated the need for abolition, pleaded for citizenship, and even considered abandoning the United States entirely.
“Muslims, Christians, and Jews: Interactions Past and Present”
October 6, 2023
Paola Tartakoff, Chair and Professor, Department of History and Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
This seminar will explore the intertwined histories of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, with a focus on links between the past and the present. We will consider the earliest encounters between Muslims, Christians, and Jews; key developments during the medieval and early modern periods; and the modern legacies of this history. Examining dynamics ranging from peaceful coexistence and cultural cross-influence to persecution, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, we will grapple with a complex subject that is of urgent importance today.
“Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialisms”
November 17, 2023
Chie Ikeya, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University
Gender and sexuality were imperative for colonial governance. European, American, and Japanese colonial regimes all deployed gender and sexuality in creating and sustaining the kind of political and social orders that yielded the labor and resources on which they depended. Across different colonial empires across the globe, gender and sexuality, together with religion, race, and other intersecting categories of difference, served to rationalize and legitimize oppression and exploitation. These scholarly insights will guide our exploration of both shared and divergent historical experiences of colonialism. Focusing on select case studies, we will seek to understand the various and specific ways that gender and sexuality shaped the goals, strategies, and achievements of modern colonial powers and the marks they left on their respective colonies.
“The World of Henry VIII: Understanding the Tudors”
December 8, 2023
Anthony di Battista, Lecturer, Department of History, Rutgers University
The history of Henry VIII’s search for an heir continues to fascinate students, artists, and writers nearly 400 years after his death. This seminar will focus on understanding the larger Tudor world and the forces that shaped Henry and his children’s actions as they sought to remake the English Church and the English State. The seminar will also focus on the clash between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell and the ways in which that clash has been portrayed in literature and film.
Spring Semester 2024
“Freedom Summer”
January 26, 2024
Nicole Burrowes, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In 1964, civil rights organizations, citizens of Mississippi, and student volunteers from across the country came together to challenge segregation in one of the nation’s most racially oppressive states. In the face of extraordinary violence and economic deprivation, Black Mississippians waged one of the most powerful movements in civil rights history, widely known as “Freedom Summer.” During this campaign, organizers registered African American voters who had been denied the right to vote, organized Freedom Votes, and established Freedom Schools. They created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative political party dedicated to unseating the whites-only Mississippi delegation for the Democratic National Convention of 1964. It was a strategic experiment rocked the nation and fundamentally challenged white supremacy in the South. This workshop will draw on film, music and primary sources to examine the history of Freedom Summer, its impact, contradictions, and legacy. We will also situate Freedom Summer in the larger context of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States, the Cold War, independence, and human rights struggles.
“Did the Cold War End? The United States and Russia since the 1980s”
February 9, 2024
David Foglesong, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This seminar will examine whether, and if so how, the American-Soviet Cold War ended. We will begin by critically analyzing interpretations that concentrate on the roles of “great men,” particularly Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, in the termination of superpower conflict. Then we will consider arguments about how “citizen diplomats” helped to overcome hostility between the two countries by challenging negative stereotypes, altering popular attitudes, and influencing media depictions. Finally, we will discuss the impact of different ideas about how the Cold War ended – particularly the notions that the United States won the Cold War and that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 – on American-Russian relations from the “new cold war” to the war in Ukraine.
The seminar will be led by David Foglesong, a historian of American-Russian relations. His lectures will draw on his books, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire” (2007) and From Distant Friends to Intimate Enemies (forthcoming), as well as on his current research about citizen activism and the end of the Cold War.
“New Histories of the American Soldier during WWII”
March 1, 2024
Jennifer Mittlestadt, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Perhaps no American war has had more history written about it than WWII. And yet new sources and new approaches to the study of war continue to yield new stories. This seminar will use the recent release of a massive, never-before-available collection of World War II-era Army surveys, The American Solider in WWII, combined with new scholarship on the meaning and impact of the wartime experience, to offer three new lessons about the war. The seminar will touch on new evidence concerning: the ethnic and racial politics and experiences of soldiers; the attitudes of service personnel toward enemies, allies, the goals the war, and the homefront; and the role played by social science expertise in guiding the US war effort. It will offer primary and secondary sources for classroom use.
"The Historical Roots of Islamophobia"
April 12, 2024
Sandy Russell Jones, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of History and Religion, Rutgers University
The term "Islamophobia" is a relatively new one that has only been widely used in the last few decades. The phenomenon it refers to - fear of and hostility toward Islam and/or Muslims - is often assumed to begin with the terrorists attacks of 9/11. While regrettable when directed at innocent Muslims not responsible for the attacks, these negative sentiments are sometimes considered understandable and in extreme cases, perfectly justifiable, as in: "they brought it on themselves." This seminar will explore how not only did Islamophobia not begin with 9/11, but that fear of and hostility toward Islam and Muslims on the part of "the West" has existed as long as Islam itself has existed. What began as a hatred of religious difference that also included anti-Semitism shifted during the Reconquista to the biological concept of blood purity (limpieza de sangre), which became a precursor to the modern concept of race. Scholars of Islamophobia have thus argued that Islamophobia might better be understood as anti-Muslim racism, an argument we will consider and discuss. Additionally, we will examine the ways in which Islamophobia is not only a sort of popular or cultural sentiment, but also a well-financed industry that undergirds US political, military, and economic policies both at home and abroad, helping to ensure the maintenance of global capitalism and the US interest in dominating it
"The Other Italian Renaissance"
April 26, 2024
Samantha Kelly, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Renaissance Italy is famous for many things: humanist philosophy, glorious art, and splendid princely courts; political experimentation, intellectual innovation and a vibrant commercial culture. Most of the Renaissance individuals associated with these achievements were Italian Christian men. Yet behind them lay a much more diverse society, one that included enslaved people, non-Christians, non-Europeans, and of course women. They were an integral part of Renaissance society – as the exploited and marginalized who permitted others to prosper, but also individuals who carved out places of opportunity for themselves, and contributed to Renaissance Italy’s economic, intellectual, and political vitality. In this seminar we’ll consider women in relation to the household and the economy, especially in the occupation of prostitution; the enslaved men and women from eastern Europe, central Asia, the Muslim-controlled Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa, and their prospects if and when emancipated; and the place in Renaissance society of free minority groups, including Jews and African Christians.
“Teaching the American Revolution during the 250th Anniversary of the War and Independence”
May 3, 2024
Paul Clemens, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The purpose of this seminar is to discuss recent work that is fundamentally changing the way scholars understand the American Revolution. It is also to explore whether these new understanding should and can replace older narratives, shared by the public and taught in schools and colleges. The 1976 bicentennial did its part in challenging past interpretations of the Revolution, but when the dust settled, the public celebration of the Revolution had been conducted much along the same lines as could have been expected beforehand; historians, for their part, having enthroned some traditional understandings, largely lost interest in the topic. Whatever happens in 2025-6, it will be different. New scholarship makes a much more dramatic break with earlier work; the state teaching standards have already incorporated some of this work; and the political pushback to recent interpretations, if not in New Jersey, then in other states, will become part of the culture wars. In this context, we will start off with a dialogue about an article by Jane Kamensky asking whether historians have gone too far in replacing traditional understandings without offering in their place something that gives students hope that the past can inform the present in positive ways. We will next move to a collective reading of the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson’s draft) and a discussion of how scholars are now interpreting the document. I will then discuss with you some of the best new work on the Revolution: Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty Exiles (2011) – the loyalist diaspora; Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost (2016) – on the little remembered, outside of Florida, revolution along the Gulf Coast; Marla Miller’s Betsy Ross (2010); my colleague, Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught – on a woman who George Washington had enslaved and who successfully evaded re-enslavement despite Washington’s efforts; and Holger Hoock’s Scars of Independence (2017) – that dramatically dispels any notion that the war itself was anything but brutal, deadly, and bloody. Planning to participate? - I urge you to read Dunbar’s or DuVal’s book this summer.
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