Professor Mario Del Pero, Professor of International History, Institut d’études politiques at Sciences Po, Paris, speaks about his paper 'In the Shadow of the Vatican' with PhD student Christopher Schaefer. The pair discuss the missionary efforts of a small group of evangelical Christians, members of the 'Church of Christ', who moved from Lubbock, Texas to Castelli Romani, Italy, in 1948. They explore the history of Pentecostalism and the Waldensian movement in Italy, concerns about the pressures of the Vatican on the Italian state, and the constant spectre of communism that loomed over debates regarding religious practice and the growing American presence in Europe in the years following the Second World War. They also discuss the promises and perils of microhistory for historians of modern Europe. As mentioned during the introduction, after this week all seminars until the end of term have been cancelled on account of scheduled industrial action. That means that unless something...
Back to our normal format this week. Emma Teitelman, Mellon Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge, talks to Lewis Defrates about her paper ‘Class and State in America’s Greater Reconstruction’ Dr Teitelman’s paper discusses the efforts of groups of north-eastern capitalists in the years following the Civil War to work with the federal government to engender new forms of social organization based around free labour capitalism in the ‘peripheries’, i.e. the American south and west. The project looks at the developing relationship between the state and private capital in transforming the United States in the decades following the rupture of the Civil War Here, Dr Teitelman talks largely about the work of two public-private groups, the Southern Famine Relief Commission and the Board of Indian Commissioners, in the years between 1865-1874. We also discuss the broader project, what these new ‘social relations’ looked like, and perhaps the most anticipa...
This is a special episode of the CAHS podcast, as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions Heather Ann Thompson delivers her inaugural lecture on 'American Prison Uprisings and Why They Matter Today', with introductory comments from Professor Gary Gerstle. Apologies for the quasi-'field recording' style of the audio here. Video of the lecture will be uploaded to the Cambridge History YouTube channel in the coming days. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, get in touch via @camericanist on Twitter or ltd27@cam.ac.uk. Spread the word, and thanks for listening!
We're back after a long winter break. The dust has been blown off, our legs have been stretched, and the Cambridge American History Seminar is up and running again! This week Peter Mancall, Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford for the academic year 2019-2020 and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, talks to Lewis Defrates about his paper ‘The Origins of the American Economy’. The pair discuss about the four case studies used in the paper and the themes he explores to demonstrate the existing economies in North America, both indigenous and those generated through imperial encounters, prior to the foundation of Jamestown by English settlers in 1607. Professor Mancall also discusses the need to think about economic behaviour and structures outside that which is easily quantifiable, the historic importance of cumulative experience in the production of a...
Robert A. Schneider, a historian of early modern France at Indiana University Bloomington, and the former long-standing editor of the American Historical Review, talks to Lewis Defrates about his paper 'The Rise and Fall of the “Resentment Paradigm” (ca 1935-1975). The paper discusses the work of postwar intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipsett and Talcott Parsons, reframing their shared interest in the 'resentment' in the subjects they studied. Rob discusses the tenets this school of thought was built on (modernization theory, psychoanalysis, and consensus liberalism), the way this was articulated through their intellectual work, the repudiation of this work from the 1970s onwards, and the resurgence of an interest in resentment in the past half-decade. The paper encourages to rethink both the history of emotion and the production of knowledge regarding the history of emotions, demonstrating what these intellectuals missed in their pursuit of ...
After a week away, we're back with another episode and another exciting and thought-provoking seminar paper! Katherine Paugh, an Associate Professor in North American Women’s History at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, talks to Lewis Defrates about her paper '‘Race and Venereal Disease in the Atlantic World'. The paper explores racialized understandings of venereal diseases (particularly 'Yaws' and 'The Great Pox') in the long eighteenth century in Europe and the Caribbean. Professor Paugh explains the shift in approach towards inoculation in the Caribbean both before and after the abolition of slavery, the drive on the part of white plantation managers to keep Afro-Caribbean in the labour force, and particularly the connection between these themes and her previous book, "The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition”. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, get in touch via @camericanist on Twitter or ltd27@cam....
We have a special edition of the podcast and seminar this week as we celebrate the release of our esteemed colleague Dr Sarah M.S. Pearsall’s new book, ‘Polygamy: An Early American History’. Dr Pearsall is University Senior Lecturer in the History of Early America and the Atlantic World here at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Robinson College. Here, she talks about her new book, the themes and historical episodes it explores and its relationship with her prior work, with second year PhD student Evelyn Strope. They touch on the importance of understanding polygamy as a constant presence in Early America, the consequences this has for our assumptions about the primacy of heterosexual monogamy in American life, and writing history that complements or challenges that of your own dissertation supervisor! Polygamy: An Early American History is published by Yale University Press and is available to order here https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300226843/polygamy If you have...
It's that time of the week! Here's another top-notch interview discussing some new work with one of the most important and highly-acclaimed historians working today. On the podcast today we are joined by Heather Ann Thompson, a Professor History and of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan AND this year's Pitt Professor of American History of Institutions here at the University of Cambridge. Professor Thompson talks to PhD student Richard Saich about her paper 'Lore and Logics: The Liberal State, the Carceral State, and the Limits of Justice and Inequality in Postwar America', its primary points, its potential consequences and relationship with her earlier work, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft prize winning book 'Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy'. The two also discuss, among other things. the relationship between academic scholarship and activism, the particularly prominent role of women in developing this scholarship...
Back again after a long break, it's the podcast with the catchiest title and the freshest insights into some of the most exciting work in the field of American history. The Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast has returned for the 2019-20 academic year! In our first seminar of the year, Dr Noam Maggor (Queen Mary, University of London) and Professor Stefan Link (Dartmouth College) talk to Cambridge PhD student R.M Bates about their paper 'The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History'. They discuss the existing literature on the America's economic development in the second half and first half of the twentieth century, the importance of explaining the atypicality of this story without falling into exceptionalist potholes, and the usefulness of an existing literature on East Asian developmental states in reconfiguring our understanding of this period in American history. Of particular interest to the two is the emergence of the automo...
Final seminar and final podcast of the year! We might have some more content for you over the summer, but for now, what a way to close out the academic year! Brooke Blower, Associate Professor of History at Boston University and founding co-editor of the journal Modern American History, talks to Lewis Defrates about her paper 'Gibraltars of the Pacific', which explores the activities of one American export salesman (and former Olympian!), Frank Cuhel, in southeast Asia in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War 2. We discuss trans-colonial mobility, colony-metropole correspondence and how this paper fits into Professor Blower's ongoing work on the experiences of a small group of American overseas and their experiences prior to and during the war. This was a really enjoyable conversation, although the questions I asked her turned out to be miles away from the discussion that took part in the actual seminar, so apologies if the conversation is guided somewhat by my own research...