History Program Events Archive

Please join us on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at 2pm in the History Program Lounge for

David Waldstreicher

on

“Phillis Wheatley’s Ancient and African Worlds and the Politics of Slavery”

David Waldstreicher is a historian of early and 19th century America. His research interests include political history, cultural history, slavery and antislavery, and print culture. His books include In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution(2004); and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009). He is Co-Editor (with Kathleen M. Brown and Daniel K. Richter), of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies’ book series, Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press), serves on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History, and is Co-Editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.

The Ph.D. Program in History

and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning

Invite you to a talk and reception to mark the publication of

THE STRANGE CAREER OF PORGY AND BESS

Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera

by

Ellen Noonan

Historian, American Social History Project

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 4pm / History Lounge (Room 5114)

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34^th Street

Winner, 2012 George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, South Carolina Historical Society

“This captivating read is an important contribution to the scholarship surrounding Heyward’s and Gershwin’s work.”

—Library Journal

“Ellen Noonan digs deep into the production and reception history of what has been called ‘the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western world.’ In this richly detailed book, Porgy and Bess becomes a prism refracting myriad triumphs and tragedies, collusions and fissures, in the American history of race, region, and culture. It is about white fantasy and black jobs, the slippery intersection of cultural and political representation, the problems of canonization, and, ultimately, the distorted feedback loop between the imaginary Catfish Row and the realities of everyday life for African Americans in Charleston. I was on the edge of my seat until the curtain call.”

—Karl Hagstrom Miller, University of Texas

“Noonan’s incisive book explores the social, aesthetic, and cultural dynamics that shaped this significant American opera. Her analysis of this play and its production history provide important insight into the continually evolving politics of race in the United States. The successful 2011 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess makes Noonan’s contribution all the more relevant to our present moment. Engaging and informative, this is a most notable book for scholars and students interested in American cultural history.”

—Harry J. Elam, Jr, Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

For more information: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=3052 

Join us for a discussion with leading public historians about the opportunities, challenges, skills, and training involved in “doing history” outside of the university setting

HISTORY BEYOND THE ACADEMY

Public Historians Discuss Their Work

SARAH HENRY

Museum of the City of New York

MARCI REAVEN

New-York Historical Society

STEVE JAFFE

Independent Scholar

ELLEN NOONAN

American Social History Project

FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 4 PM

History Department Lounge / Room 5114

The Graduate Center / Fifth Avenue & 34^th Street

Sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in History and the American Social History Project/ Center for Media and Learning, the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Join us in the History Program lounge on Monday, April 29^th at 2pm for

Holly Brewer on

Slavery and Sedition:  Rethinking Historical Silences through the mysterious death of Morgan Godwyn

In the spring of 1685, Morgan Godwyn, a minister who had served in Virginia and Barbados for more than 15 years, disappeared after publishing a book condemning the slave trade and the practice of slavery in those colonies. In 1687, he died. This paper attempts both to explain the mystery surrounding his death by providing a context for it, and to explore the limits of our vision as historians by examining how censorship and sedition worked in late seventeenth century England and its empire and how those restraints limit what we can see and hear as historians. I argue that Godwyn probably died for criticizing slavery in a world where the name of the King of England, James II, was synonymous with the slave trade. James II was personally responsible, as director of the Royal African Company which had a legal monopoly on the slave trade, for the importation of literally 100,000 souls from Africa to the new world in the decade of the 1680s alone. That same King believed he was God’s anointed servant, responsible to no-one, ruling by divine right. Godwyn’s public condemnation of the slave trade (at Westminster Abbey, in London, in 1685), a sermon he then had published–called the slave trade a bargain with the Devil; by implication, James II was Faustus, and urged to repent.  This paper uses Godwyn’s extraordinary act — and its consequences — to meditate on how power shaped what could be spoken and published, rendering many people “dumb” or mute, as Godwyn bemoaned, and for whom he tried to speak.  They are especially mute to our ears, which are attuned to the published past, from whence we tell our histories. Consequently we have failed to see how extensively slavery was debated before 1775, partly because we have not been looking in the right places, but mostly because we have not been reading through censorship’s veil.

Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History & Associate Professor at the University of Maryland.  She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994 in American History with specialties in Political Theory and British history, and her A.B. from Harvard College in 1986.  She specializes in Early American /Atlantic world history, cultural and intellectual history, and legal history.   Her first book By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, which was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press in 2005, won three prizes, as did her 1997 article “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia.” Professor Brewer serves as co-editor of the American Society for Legal History’s (ASLH) book series (which publishes with Cambridge University Press) and serves on the ASLH Board of Directors as well as the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

You are invited to an Alumni Event in Honor of Carol Quirke and Marcella Bencivenni on Wednesday March 6, 2013 5:00 p.m.

Marcella Bencivenni

(Ph.D., History, 2003)

Today, Italian Americans are perceived as ultraconservatives interested in food and family—a perception reinforced by the Mafioso stereotype popularized and even glorified by Hollywood movies, television series, and commercials. Drawing from her book, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture (New York University Press, 2011)Bencivenni shows that Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past.

Carol Quirke

(Ph.D., History, 2005)

“A United Nations in One Union Shop” is drawn from: Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class (Oxford University Press, 2012). The talk explores how a mid-century New York City labor union used photography to build a union that fought racism and sexism in and outside the union.

Introduction by Joshua B. Freeman, History, The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY

History Lounge—Room 5114

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York City

RSVP preferred to Marilyn Weber at mweber@gc.cuny.edu or 212.817.8430.