Department of History

Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:

Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia

Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego, CA.   For those of you who couldn’t make it…

Spring 2010 Calendar

Stony Brook Faculty Workshop

Benedict Robinson (Thursday February 11, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of English)

“DISGUST, C. 1610, FARINGDON WARD WITHOUT.”

New Research in Historical Social Sciences

Pablo Piccato (Tuesday March 9, 12:50-2:10)

(Columbia University, History Department. Director of ILAS – Institute of Latin American Studies)

“MURDER AND POLITICS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MEXICO”

New Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza (Wednesday April 14, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology)

“HUMAN HISTORY AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR – RICH NEW LESSONS FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY”

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….

Overview

Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port Jefferson/Upton area

Nassau County: Farmingdale area, Hicksville area

This course will explore the history of work and environment during the modern era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  We will start with readings from “classic” texts and authors that have  set older and newer agendas for the fields of labor history (Marx, Fink, D. Montgomery) and environmental history (Marx, Worster, Cronon), centered, in contrasting ways, around the notion of “capitalist production.” For these as well as the newer works in both fields that comprise the bulk of our reading list, we will consider what authors may (or may not) have to say to one another about the sphere of production and its history.    Key areas of discussion will also include: the historical implications of recent debates over nature of “modern” and “postmodern” capitalism; comparison of the work and environmental history of “developed” versus “developing” worlds; and the transnational and/or global dimensions of workplace and environmental change. Focus will fall in particular on the new ways that historians are figuring space and geography into labor and business history, and work into environmental history.  While the reading list for much of the semester will be set in advance, readings and geographic coverage in many of the later sessions will hinge upon student preferences and needs.

Readings:

There are four books that everyone in the course will be required to read:

David Montgomery, Workers Control in America

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Linda Nash, Inescapable Inequalities; A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge

Laura Raynolds, et al., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas

In addition, everyone will be required to read one out of each of these two pairs of books:

(1) John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun or

Beverley Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870

(2) Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power and Injustice or

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities

While we will bring many other readings to the table, most will be selected and presented by individuals within the class.

Click on the title of this entry to find links to those extra documents I promised for your suburban town histories.

Chris

Land Use Map, 1968

Land Use Map Key to Different Uses

Racial Composition and Total Population, 1960 and 1970

Check out the following coverage of a joint effort by Stony Brook faculty and leaders and residents of the small suburban town of Port Jefferson, NY, to “Green Port Jefferson.” Page 12 details an effort to study Port Jefferson’s carbon footprint, led by Chris Sellers of the History Department, and Jessica Gurevitch, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution.

Please click here for this fall’s schedule of papers and speakers in this initiative. The series is a collaborative effort of the History and Sociology Departments at Stony Brook.

Please feel free to visit the website for the conference I recently convened at Stony Brook, along with University of Exeter’s Joseph Melling, December 13-15, 2008, on “Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World.”

Among the results of the conference are a planned edited volume, as well as a proposal for a Code of Sustainable Practice for Multinational Corporations, which appeared in the July 2008 International Journal for Occupational and Environmental Health.