The 2012 Summer—2014 Spring Schedule of Classes is HERE!

(To view, click on "Courses" in the right-hand column.)

New Courses for Spring Term 2012

War and Society in Early America (HIST 6.1) @ 2A hr. Beginning with the military practices of indigenous peoples before 1492 and continuing through the imperial contests for control of the continent until the Mexican-American War, warfare is examined as a human experience profoundly influencing societies and identities. The traditional emphasis on battles and leaders in military history will not be ignored, but the primary goal of this course is to appreciate how war shaped the intimate as welsl as geopolitical aspects of early American history. (Joseph Cullon)

Women and Gender in the African Diaspora (HIST 6.3) @ 10 hr.  This course focuses on the lived experiences of—and structural limitations placed upon—women of African descent from the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through the early twentieth century. We will examine a number of critical themes, including power, labor, geography and migration, racism, sexuality, spirituality, and a host of other dynamics impacting women. Importantly, however, we will also focus on the many ways in which these women "talked back" to the larger world. (Rashauna Chenault)

Science and Technology in the Making of Modern Korea (HIST 6.4/AMES 21) @ 2A hr. (Soyoung Suh)  Highlighting the significance of a comparative perspective, this course examines the role of science and technology in the making of modern Korea. Topics include the rise of the scientific gaze and the order of things in East Asia, socio-cultural origins of listening techniques, a series of novel experiences introduced by train, electricity, and highway, colonial sciences under Japanese empire, gender and reproductive technologies, as well as the role of ideologies in establishing science communities.  (Soyoung Suh)

RESTORED EDISON RECORDS REVIVE GIANTS OF 19TH-CENTURY GERMANY (reported to be the only known recording of Bismarck's voice)

By RON COWEN

New York Times, January 30, 2012

Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison's laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.

The wax cylinder containing Otto Von Bismarck's voice.

EUROPEAN JOURNEY Thomas Edison, seated center, sent Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, standing behind him, to France in 1889. From there Wangemann traveled to Germany to record recitations and performances.

Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann used a phonograph to record the voice of Otto von Bismarck.

The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck... Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe's "Faust" into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.)...

"This is sensational," said Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation's archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Dr. Lappenküper and his colleagues assumed it had been lost forever.

The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files....

In June 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World's Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists and often visiting the homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine....

In October 1889 Wangemann and his wife visited the 74-year-old Bismarck, then chancellor of the German empire, at his castle in Friedrichsruh. Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife's urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem.

"Bismarck was a very, very witty man" and reciting the Marseillaise "would tickle him," said Jonathan Steinberg, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new biography "Bismarck: A Life."

Bismarck ends the recording with some advice, apparently for his son Herbert, who heard the recording a few weeks later in Budapest, to live life in moderation. "Bismarck was a gigantic man with gigantic appetites and a gigantic temper," Dr. Steinberg said. "He never did anything in moderation, and Herbert was just as immoderate."

Mr. Puille, the sound historian in Berlin, said it was not easy to identify Bismarck's voice. But after he deciphered a reference to Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's estate, in the announcement of one of the cylinders, "I immediately knew that I was on the right track," he continued in an e-mail message.

"Bismarck's name is not mentioned in the recording, but I had collected all available information about his cylinder in the contemporary press, and the content of the cylinder matched perfectly."

Recent Faculty Publications:

Robert Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
 
Colin Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (University of New England Press, 2010)
 
Pamela Crossley, The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, An Interpretive History (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers 2010)
 
Douglas Haynes, Toward a History of Consumption in South Asia. Co-edited with Haruka Yanagisawa, Tirthankar Roy and Abigail McGown. Oxford University Press, 2010.
 
Richard Kremer, Johannes Kepler, from Tübingen to Zagan (Studia Copernicana, 42). Co-edited with Jaroslaw Wlodarczyk (Polish Academy of Sciences, 2009)
 
Walter Simons, The Cambridge History of Christianity Volume IV: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100-c. 1500. Co-edited with Miri Rubin. (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
 
George R. Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Lectures

EMPIRE and NATION IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA: Reconsidering the Monroe Doctrine

Thursday • 26 January 2012 • 4 PM • L02 Carson Hall

Jay Sexton (University Lecturer in American HIstory, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University). Author of Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era (2005); The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (2011); and The Global Lincoln, with Richard Carwardine (2011).

Dr. Sexton's research focuses on nineteenth-century US foreign relations and Americans' paradoxical relationship with empire. As Americans struggled to free themselves from their colonial past, they constructed their own empire, engaged in their own conquests, and exercised effective control over other peoples. Yet there was nothing pre-ordained about the consolidation of the American Union, nor the establishment of the American empire. He is interested in why the group of former British colonies bound together and how their fragile union survived fundamental ideological and political disputes such as those unleashed by the entrenchment of slavery in the Southern states.

Sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding and the History Department.

"LIBERTY IS A SLOW FRUIT": Reconsidering the Emancipation Proclamation

Wednesday • 8 February 2012 • 4 PM • B03 Moore Hall

Louis Masur (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College), will present a lecture based his forthcoming book, "Lincoln's Hundred Days."

Sponsored by the History Department.

GROWTH IS BETTER THAN AUSTERITY: The Origins of Bretton Woods

Tuesday • 1 May 2012 • 4 PM • (venue TBA)

Eric Rauchway (Professor of History, University of California at Davis), is currently working on a history of the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, and their antecedents and consequences. Not only does the conference of 1944 mark the beginning of a period of international consultation on monetary and financial matters that continues today, it is an important phase in Anglo-American and US-Soviet relations, as well as relations between the developed and developing world. In addition, the politics surrounding adoption of the Bretton Woods system within the US began a modern era of influencing public opinion for the purposes of shaping international arrangements.

Sponsored by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center and the Departments of Economics, Government and History.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, The Silent President-Elect

Wednesday • 2 May 2012 • 7 PM • Filene Auditorium • Moore Hall

Harold Holzer, one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era.

Our 16th President, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest orators ever to occupy the White House, actually did and said next to nothing during the entire 1860 presidential campaign—and the dangerous interregnum that followed until his March 1861 inauguration.  Known as the "Great Secession Winter," the crisis of disunion elicited a remarkable response from the onetime debater and stump speaker: protracted, studied, and meaningful silence.  On the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's inauguration, Holzer examines this little-known part of his legacy and examines the role it played in the sectional crisis and the Civil War.

Sponsored by the History Department and the Vermont Humanities Council.