Dr. Jurdem’s book, The Rough Rider and The Professor, chronicles the nearly forty-year friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, illuminating the impact that their relationship had on American history, and showing how many of the critical issues facing our nation today, including big corporations, income inequality, immigration, demographic shifts, tariffs, and the future of the Republican Party, dominated headlines during Roosevelt’s presidency and remain at the forefront of American politics and society today, to Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus.
Dr. Laurence Jurdem
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The Jewish Book Council awarded Prof. Magda Teter‘s book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth Libel, the JDC-Herbert Katzki Award. Prof. Teter is the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of History.
Magda Teter
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PhD candidate Glauco Schettini was awarded a Research and Writing Award from the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). The award, which is offered to graduate students and contingent faculty, will fund research and writing time for an article entitled “A Star Is Born: Pius VI and the Invention of Papal Celebrity,” which springs from Glauco’s dissertation, “The Catholic Counterrevolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s-1840s.” Drawing on recent scholarship that traces the birth of modern forms of celebrity and charisma back to the Age of Revolution, the article intends to show how popes, starting with Pius VI (1775-99), refashioned themselves as charismatic leaders and used their newfound popularity as a political tool in their fight against reforming sovereigns and revolutionary regimes that advanced a secularizing agenda. This eighteenth-century “reinvention” of the papacy, which paralleled the consolidation of papal power within the Catholic church, represents a crucial chapter in the emergence of charismatic forms of power at large—and perhaps helps explain why people by the millions interact with Pope Francis’s tweets today!
Glauco Schettini
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Comments Off on Prof. Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, published “What today’s Second Amendment activists forget: The right to not bear arms” in The Washington Post.
Dr. Esther Liberman Cuenca, who earned her Ph.D. in medieval history at Fordham in 2019, has been awarded the 2021 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, which recognizes a first article in the field of medieval studies of outstanding quality. The prize, for her article, “Town clerks and the authorship of custumals in medieval England,” Urban History 46:2 (2019): 180-201, was established by the Medieval Academy of America in 1971 and consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $500. It will be presented at the Academy’s 2021 Annual Meeting, hosted online by Indiana University, Bloomington. She is one of two winners of the award this year. The prize committee submitted the following citation.
In her perceptive and finely-crafted essay Esther Liberman Cuenca examines the expertise and duties of clerks in medieval English towns, and particularly their roles in creating custumals, or collections of written customs. She highlights and traces two fundamental aspects of clerks’ authorship, their legal and administrative expertise, and their roles in transmitting urban laws to posterity. Urban historians of the Middle Ages are familiar with custumals, documents found in almost every medieval towns that regulated the lives of their citizens, from markets and commerce to administration, social mores and hygiene. While historians usually locate and frame analyses of the documents within the history of urban politics and “normalization”, they rarely study who actually drafted them. Cuenca’s innovative article engages the historiography of urban literacy, and of the anonymous professionals who supported literacy within an urban institutional framework. Her careful analysis of their oaths and administrative practices, which often adapted older materials, reveals that town clerks played critical roles in transmitting customary law to future generations of administrators. Clerks were usually left in the shadow of their superior, and the vital contribution of Cuenca’s work is to bring these individuals to light by focusing on the creation, organization, and preservation of urban custumals, and most of all on their authorship. Were these clerks scriptores, compilatores, or commentators? By showing that they fulfilled all of these roles, Cuenca reaffirms their existence in urban memory.
Esther Liberman Cuenca
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Prof. Jill Lepore’s January 11, 2021, article, “What’s Wrong With the Way We Work,” featured Prof. Kirsten Swinth’s work. Lepore writes, “Plenty of people still feel that way about their jobs. But Terkel’s interviews, conducted in the early seventies, captured the end of an era. Key labor-movement achievements—eight hours a day, often with health care and a pension—unravelled. The idea of the family wage began to collapse, as Kirsten Swinth points out in ‘Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family’ (Harvard).”
Kirsten Swinth
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This article tells a legal and intellectual history of oil and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s through the projects of international institutions including the UN Permanent Sovereignty Commission and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the work of anti-colonial lawyers Hasan Zakariya and Nicolas Sarkis. It examines the ideas and infrastructure of decolonization as they related to the question of how international law could be used to win economic sovereignty.
Christopher Dietrich
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This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.
Asif Siddiqi
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