In this new series, “What is Global History at Fordham,” we will hear from members of Fordham’s Global History consortium on what global history means to them and how it shapes their work.
Today, we begin with Professor Asif Siddiqi.
“As a historian of science and technology, global history is neither world history nor is there one single version of it. Instead, my research is focused on highlighting the many globally connected histories of science and technology. Instead of looking at (for example), German science or a Japanese nuclear reactor or a Russian satellite, our approach would consider larger concepts such as mobility or waste or infrastructure and reconstruct their global manifestations and changes across time and space. Our teaching will give you the tools to investigate, research and write your own version of a globally connected history.”
You can follow Prof. Asif Siddiqi on Twitter @historyasif
Asif Siddiqi
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In the sixteenth century, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns. Rather than conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the institutions imposed on them, in the process producing a new kind of civil society that merged their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. This hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America against Spanish rulers and native hereditary nobility. Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King examines the community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.
“Elizabeth Penry offers a sharply original account of the Andean Age of Rebellions, placing it in a culture of civic populism whose roots extended to both pre-conquest Peru and medieval Spain. Where previous narratives have gravitated toward charismatic leaders, The People are King breathes a democratic spirit that is both moving and persuasive.”—Jeremy Mumford, Brown University
“This meticulously researched and gracefully narrated look at the transformation over time of the public sphere in indigenous communities of highland Bolivia offers readers a remarkable window into how and why the Great Rebellion of the 1780s unfolded by focusing on communities instead of on the leadership. This is an unusual and exciting second look at the prelude to independence in Spanish America.”—Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University
“Elizabeth Penry’s skillfully crafted study reconstructs the ways colonial Andean comunes or commons became grassroots laboratories where modern ideas of communal self-government and popular sovereignty gradually emerged. Inscribed in the best traditions of Andean history and ethnohistory, The People are King is a much-needed contribution to the intricate ways indigenous community politics helped establish the foundations of the modern world.”— José Carlos de la Puente, author of Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court
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The official website for BBC History Magazine interviewed our colleague, Prof. Nicholas Paul. Read Prof. Paul’s comments below:
Confronted with the message, propagated by both the European and Anglophone extreme right and Islamic jihadist groups, that we live in an age of renewed conflict between Islam and the west, many people may understandably conclude that we have inherited an ancient legacy of holy war. We have – though not in the way that many imagine.
The legacy of the crusades today is not due to the continuity over time of any medieval crusading institution. After all, the crusade indulgence offered by the church – a central element of the architecture of these holy wars – had effectively disappeared by the 17th century. Surviving crusading orders, such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, are now devoted to charitable work. And no modern state, whether in Spain, the Baltic or the eastern Mediterranean, can trace its origins to the ‘crusader states’ established by medieval conquests. Too much historical water – reformation, revolution, global exchange, the rise and fall of empires, the shock of modernity – has passed under the bridge for any modern community to still bear marks of crusading violence.
The legacy of the crusades is, nonetheless, powerful, primarily because of the passions and predilections of 19th- and 20th-century Europeans. They found in the crusades a useful past through which they sought to understand their own world of overseas empires, warring nations and rapid social change. These modern observers constructed a storehouse of popular images and stories – such as the epic encounter of Richard I and Saladin during the Third Crusade – and used them to make claims about morality and collective identity.
Western Europeans took these images and attitudes abroad – for example, in 1898, when Kaiser Wilhelm II re-enacted the conquest of Jerusalem and rebuilt Saladin’s tomb at Damascus, laying a gilt bronze wreath (later taken by TE Lawrence and now displayed in London’s Imperial War Museum). It was in this modern context that a new historical memory of the crusades was constructed – one that stripped away fundamental elements of crusading history and is easily co-opted by those who would make a ‘clash of civilisations’ seem habitual and inevitable.
Here is an excerpt of an article featuring our colleague, Prof. Daniel Soyer.
“In 1938, there were at least eight Berdichev societies in New York, said Daniel Soyer, a professor of history at Fordham University and the author of a book about Jewish immigration societies. Though Soyer said that none of these societies were religious, it was common practice for a landsmanshaft to sponsor the creation of a Torah on behalf of their hometown. That means the scroll could have belonged to a congregation that had no connection to Berdichev, but did have a connection to someone from there. Alternatively, it could have been the property of someone whose name was Berdichev, Soyer said.”
The Fordham History Department, through its O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism, is accepting abstracts for its Graduate Student Workshop. The workshop will take place on Friday, April 3, 2020at the Rose Hill Campus. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a space for graduate students to present, read, and receive valuable feedback from other graduate students and Fordham faculty on projects they are planning on publishing.
Our goal is to foster conversations across a wide variety of topics. Concepts such as power, politics, and society can be interpreted broadly across time periods and geographies. Submissions can include topics on race, gender, class, political and social structures as well as economic, cultural, and religious institutions from antiquity to the modern era. We especially welcome papers exploring the following questions: How are culture and political power intertwined? How did gender, race, or class shape involvement in political institutions? How have class and race intersected with political power? How has the authority of religion affected social relations? How did the power structures of trade and colonialism function? What is the relationship between knowledge and power in social domains such as education, science, and/or medicine? Papers can investigate, but are not limited to, the question of power and:
Deadline & Submissions:
We invite submissions for individual papers from advanced MA and PhD students. Titles and abstracts (250-300 words) should include a working title and a main argument and be sent to fordhamgradworkshop@gmail.com by the deadline of December 13, 2019. All submissions should include a separate document containing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information.
Chosen participants will be notified by email no later than February 3rd, 2020. The final papers should be full-length drafts, about 20-35 pages in length (c. 5,000-9,000 words, double-spaced) with full citations. Papers should not have been published elsewhere. Presenters should plan to circulate their papers at least two weeks before the meeting. At the workshop, we will ask all contributors to not present their papers but introduce and frame their arguments with a 10-12-minute introduction leaving the bulk of the session to a detailed discussion of the paper among participants.
Financial Support:
Fordham will offer up to $250 per accepted participant to defray travel costs. The day’s schedule will also include a light breakfast, lunch and closing reception.
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Prof. Yuko Miki, the recent recipient of the American Historical Association’s Wesley-Logan Prize for the outstanding book in African diaspora history, discussed Race & Citizenship in Latin America alongside Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernandez. The Maloney Library’s Behind the Book Series organized this event.
Yuko Miki
Prof. Saul Cornell and Dr. Nicole Hemmer discussed the history and politics of impeachment. In case you missed it or want re-watch it, you can re-catch their fascinating exchange here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPy_rDyLfow
You can follow Prof. Saul Cornell on Twitter @SaulCornell
Saul Cornell
Prof. Nana Osei-Opare was interviewed by Starr FM, a Ghanaian based radio station, about his thoughts on the historic Africa-Russia Summit in Sochi.
You can follow Prof. Nana Osei-Opare on Twitter @NanaOseiOpare
Glauco Schettini’s article, “Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church and the French Revolution, c.1775-1800,” published in Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press), reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution and more broadly to the emergence of what we usually term “modernity.”
The article focuses on Nicola Spedalieri’s On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri (1740-95), a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture (representative institutions, the idea of a social contract, the notion of human rights) were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state, recognizing Catholicism as the official state religion. It was not modernity itself, Spedalieri claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries was possible—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri’s ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church’s attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.A free online version of the article is available here.
Glauco Schettini (Ph.D. Student at Fordham University)
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is an exploratory, experimental history of the lives of young black women in northern cities in the early twentieth century. Its author, Saidiya Hartmann, had just won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her innovative scholarship when we sat down to discuss the book earlier this month. I think that it was at this moment that the seven students in History 5410 Race and Gender in Modern America really gelled. The day’s student seminar-leaders guided us through a provocative, wide-ranging discussion about how Hartmann’s method beautifully evoked the inner worlds of women largely invisible in the historical record where they mostly appear as statistics in sociologies of the ghetto, names on police blotters, or case files of detention centers. We considered what Hartmann taught us about these young women’s lives with her method that we might not have understood otherwise and discussed whether or not this was a method that graduate students in history might want to embrace.
Hartmann’s book is
among a set of histories of race and gender in the U.S. since 1877 that the
course includes. We have read about miscegenation, farmworkers and migrants, and
women’s employment and “economic citizenship” and are moving on to
civil rights, conservative politics of the family, and mass incarceration. Katie,
a first-year doctoral student in the department, comments that “I have
never explored race and gender exclusively in a course and the well-selected
readings and discussions have forced me to re-evaluate my preconceived notions
of both of these concepts. This class has challenged me to really understand
how race and gender construct one another in today’s world.” Grace
Campagna, a senior history major, echoes the point, observing that “The
biggest takeaway from the class so far has been seeing the range of ways that
those in power have used race and gender to construct and uphold social,
political, and economic systems.”
The seminar is
based in a student-centered pedagogy. Will Hogue, a second-year doctoral
student, says that “Dr. Swinth’s commitment to experimenting with new and
more democratic pedagogical methods has been very rewarding.” He adds, “The
collaborative syllabus model gives the students not only the chance to tailor
the course to their personal needs and goals, but also the chance to practice
some lesson planning and course construction. In all, it has been helpful for
our development both as scholars and teachers.” In fact, the class just
completed a collaborative process to set the topics for the last four weeks of
the seminar, all chosen by students to reflect their interests and to pursue
questions that have arisen in the first part of the course.
At its most basic, this course investigates the ways that race and gender have shaped what it is like to live in the United States today. It draws upon the field of history and the skills, talents, and creativity of committed graduate students (and an accompanying professor) to explore the key categories and mechanisms that have made race and gender “tick” in American culture and society since Reconstruction. In many it is a traditional graduate readings seminar. Course readings analyze how these key, intersecting categories shaped American politics, economy, culture, state, and criminal justice system. But beyond that, the seminar’s deeper goal is to follow the class’s collective interests. What do class members, as individuals, and the class, as a group, want to understand better and more deeply about the history of race and gender in the U.S.? This course is as an opportunity to figure out why learning about this topic matters to comprehending U.S. history, why it matters to students (personally, professionally, as citizens/contributors), and why it matters to the larger world, future students, and other audiences we have yet to identify.
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We are thrilled to announce that the American Historical Association has awarded Dr. Yuko Miki’s, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018), the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history. Please reach out to Dr. Yuko Miki at ymiki1@fordham.edu to send her your heartfelt congratulations on receiving this wonderful achievement!!!
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In the sixteenth century, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns. Rather than conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the institutions imposed on them, in the process producing a new kind of civil society that merged their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. This hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America against Spanish rulers and native hereditary nobility. Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King examines the community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.
