The Undergraduate Studies Committee has added a section called “Writing Resources” to the Undergraduate page of this website.  The link will bring you to a useful list of errors to avoid and also a directory of helpful websites.  Pay a visit and let us know what you think.

Social History (link opens RTF file)

La República (Lima, Peru)

Amazon.com

Alternet

This Field Seminar introduces some major debates and literatures about Latin American history since 1820. It is designed for MA-level students who intend to go on to a Ph.D. in Latin American History, though advanced students from other geographic concentrations, disciplines, and area universities are more than welcome.

The focus is mainly historiographical or methodological: We critically engage–via intensive readings, weekly discussions, and debate–about ten model monographs in the field. Rather than cover all of the “great books” in this vibrant field, whether of trendy or classic vintage, we’ll concentrate on a broad theme found through much recent historiography: nation-building, nationalisms, nationality, and the construction of national identities in the region. The seminar begins by revisiting Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (a book which has worked its influence everywhere) and by sharpening some perspectives on questions of nationality. Then, with close readings of a dozen or so major new monographs, we’ll examine diverse angles on Latin American “nationalisms”: from the cultural, peasant, regional, and ethnic nation to the revolutionary, gendered, and even trans-national kind. (Sorry: some obvious topics, such as economic or labor nationalism, or citizenship and nation, get overlooked here) We hope to end up with a critical awareness of how well Latin American historians–at least those working in the United States– have deployed such concepts for post-colonial Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

- Requirements/Expectations
- There are a few basic requirements for the seminar. 1) Consistent commitment to readings and to energetic participation in weekly group discussions. 2) A collective writing assignment–of 7-9 pages–during Weeks 6-7, to evaluate how you think and write on paper. 3) Concurrent participation in the New York City Workshop in Latin American History (NYCWLAH), a collaborative project with scholars from Columbia and NYU. The Workshops are scheduled from 12-2 on three Fridays (Sept. 24, Oct. 26th, Nov. 30) at Stony Brook Manhattan (28th and Park Ave). Students report on at least one of these seminars 4) A final paper, due December 11, of 12-15 pages, surveying a national historiography of “nationalism/national identities” for one Latin American country, or a comparative essay on a specific thematic approach to nationality across several historiographic sites. Paper topics should be narrowed by Week 8, in time for the scheduled individual student conferences.
- Readings
- Major Latin-Americanist Monographs:
- Benedict Anderson, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: REFLECTION ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF MODERN NATIONALISM (Verso, 1995, revised version)
- Claudio Lomnitz, DEEP MEXICO, SILENT MEXICO: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF NATIONALISM (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001)
- Mark Thurner, FROM TWO REPUBLICS TO ONE DIVIDED: CONTRADICTIONS OF POST-COLONIAL NATIONMAKING IN ANDEAN PERU (Duke Univ. Press, 1997)
- Ada Ferrer, INSURGENT CUBA: RACE, NATION AND REVOLUTION, 1868-1898
- (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999)
- Greg Grandin, THE BLOOD OF GUATEMALA: A HISTORY OF RACE AND NATION
- (Duke Univ. Press, 2000)
- Nancy Appelbaum, MUDDIED WATERS: RACE, REGION, AND LOCAL HISTORY IN COLOMBIA, 1846-1948 (Duke University Press, 2003)
- Daryle Williams, CULTURE WARS IN BRAZIL: THE FIRST VARGAS REGIME, 1930-45
- (Duke University Press, 2001)
- Eric Zolov, REFRIED ELVIS: THE RISE OF THE MEXICAN COUNTERCULTURE
- (Univ. Of California Press, 1999)

All events will take place at SBS (Social and Behavioral Sciences Building) N-318

FROYLÁN ENCISO
The Author as Bureaucrat: Debates around the Diplomatic Works of Octavio Paz and the Latin American Traveler-Writers
3/4 (W) 12:50 PM

JUAN PABLO ARTINIAN
Politics of Visual Representation in Argentina; State Power and Popular Creativity: Antonio Berni and Ricardo Carpani (1950-1963)
3/25 (W) 1:00pm

ARIE PERLIGER
Understanding the Politics of Counterterrorism – A Comparative Analysis
4/16 (Th) 2:20pm

TOM BALCERSKI & STEPHEN SANFILIPPO
“The Little Spark of Manhood I Have Left:” Ballads, Petitions, and the “Aged, Decrepit, and Worn-out Seamen” of Sailors’ Snug Harbor
4/22 (W) 1:00pm

JEFF HALL
Olympic Village or Prison Town?: Building the Federal Prison at Ray Brook, New York, 1975-1990
4/29 (W) 1:00pm

JANIS MIMURA
Technocratic Modernity: Planning, Empire, and the State in Wartime Japan
5/6 (W) 1:00pm

Time and location are subject to change.

Flyers including abstracts and more detailed info will be handed out one week
prior to each meeting. Please feel free to print, copy, or distribute any of these.

To receive e-mail updates or for further information please contact Sung Yup Kim.

This course will examine the formation of racial, ethnic and national identities in different American contexts in the modern era. We will begin with broad synthetic approaches to the history of racial discourses and their sociopolitical uses in the formation of modern nations, empires, and market economies. In this course, I want to look at the plural Americas as a collection of postcolonial, modernizing societies trying to come to terms with the stark legacies of colonialism and slavery-namely, large (often, unruly) popular cultures of Africans, Indians, and all variety of mestizos and mamelucos. We will see how concepts of race and ethnicity got constructed in particular historical moments of national flux and need, and how racial-cultural discourses infiltrated and shaped specific forms of power, social reform, and domains of knowledge and identity.

Sample Readings:

Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race. Race, History and Culture in Western Society.

Davd Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture. Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning.

Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898.

Mathew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.

Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics. Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America.

Michael George Hanchard, Orpheus and Power. The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988.

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revised Edition.

Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World.

By now, it has become widely accepted that History (with a capital H) was deeply implicated in naturalizing the territorially delimited nation-state as one of the fundamental categories of historical analysis and narration. This recognition of the radical historicity of their own disciplinary knowledge is leading many historians to take the “transnational turn.” Despite the rapid spread of transnational studies, however, the theoretical thrust and the political valences of the concept still remain imprecise.

Furthermore, so many of the works which march under this banner do so with little or no critical analysis of race, gender, and sexuality. This seminar will explore how ideas on gender, race, and class helped structure global flows of peoples, ideas, and goods and legitimize the unequal power relations that they embodied. In this seminar, we will also discuss how the state serves as a “surface of articulation” between the global and the national. In the end, we will all learn that transnational perspective affects historical narratives and the making of alternative possibilities. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to reflect on strengths, the weaknesses, and future directions of the current transnational turn.

The first half of the seminar will be devoted to reading and discussing recent scholarly literature in the field in order to help students define the parameters and guiding questions for their own research (Readings include selections from: Postcolonial Disorders; Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Matthew P. Guterl, American Mediterranean; T. Ballantyne/A. Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact; Étienne Balibar on transnational citizenship; Geoff Eley, “Historicizing the Global”; S. Conrad/D. Sachsenmai (eds.), Competing Visions of World Oder: Global Moments and Movements). Students are expected to submit a research paper (20-25 pages).

This is one of the theme seminars in the Doctoral program of the Department of History.  It is open to all doctoral students and MA students in the History program.  All others, including MAT students, must have the instructor’s permission to enroll.

The readings will include a mixture of thematic, theoretical and geographically focused texts.  Most of our readings will derive from European history and from the Christian experience, modern and early modern, but there will be several readings that focus on East Asia, North America, Latin America, Russia (my area of specialization), Islam and Judaism.  Students from all of the department’s fields of concentration are welcome to enroll.

Each week will have a body of common readings that will form the basis of our discussion.  In addition, each student will select one week’s theme and develop a bibliography of supplementary readings that connect that theme to the student’s area(s) of interest.  That bibliography will form the basis of a historiographic or bibliographic essay (approximately 15-20 pp.) that each of you will write, due on the final class meeting.  You are encouraged to work with your advisor in developing the bibliography.

There will be at least two other-and much shorter-writing assignments, in which you will be asked to apply some of the ideas raised in the readings to brief documents that I will distribute in class.

BOOKS:

Natalie Davis, WOMEN ON THE MARGINS

Marilyn Westerkamp, WOMEN AND RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

Miriam Peskowitz, SPINNING FANTASIES: RABBIS, GENDER, AND HISTORY

Calum G. Brown, THE DEATH OF CHRISTIAN ENGLAND

Irene Silverblatt, MOON, SUN, AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU

Carolyn Bynum, FRAGMENTATION AND REDEMPTION; ESSAYS ON GENDER AND THE HUMAN BODY IN MEDIEVAL RELIGION

This Theme Seminar, intended primarily for aspiring Ph.D. students from any regional concentration or discipline, explores the history of what anthropologist Sidney Mintz calls the “food-drugs”–sugar, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, betel, chocolate, yerba mate, coca and the like.  It examines their creation as commodities and their powerful historical contributions to colonialism, capitalism and modernity.  More broadly, it is an introduction to the “new” commodity history and its expanding global horizons.  The core thematic questions posed are:  How were these food-drug commodities “constructed” out of things and/or from long-standing embedded social relationships?  How did certain local substances become profitable long-distance commodities after the 16^th-century world conquests and become accepted and popular objects of mass consumption?  Why did others become eventually categorized, during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as unworthy, dangerous or illicit goods?  How did this commercial “psycho-active revolution” affect, culturally, politically and economically, the making of the modern world?  Students will take on interdisciplinary literatures (from Anthropology and Sociology) about commodity-formation and a broad series of recent monographs on particular substances, ending on those now deemed illicit.  About half of the literature is based on American-hemisphere substances and their global entanglements.

After a few weeks of introductory (more theoretical) readings, the Seminar revolves around weekly discussions of exemplary recent monographs about various food-drug commodities. There will be a collective mid-term “writing exercise” (around Weeks 7-8) and students will write and present a historiographic paper on the food-drug of their choice (Due Dec. 6). This seminar demands intensive reading and critical discussion and welcomes graduate students with interdisciplinary concerns. Office hours (MW 12-2 SBS N333), are best by appointment. The following seminar books (most worth buying) are available at Stony Brooks (only): W. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: Social History of Spices, Stimulants & Intoxicants Vintage Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge) Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin) Sophie and Michael Coe, The True History of Chocolate (Thames & Hudson) Judith Carney, Black Rice: African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard) Jeremy Pilcher, Que Vivan los Tamales!: Food & the Making of Mexican Identity (New Mexico) David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs & the Making of the Modern World (Harvard) F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon (North Atlantic Books-& varied publishers) Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: Coffee and how it Transformed our World (Basic Bks) Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge) John Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (Perennial)

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, will hold a conference in Stony Brook on March 20-21, 2009, on “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries.” Military man and engineer, chronicler and diplomat, lord of a New English manor married to a Dutch woman, Gardiner led a life replete with crossings: of the English Channel to engage in Continental wars, of the Atlantic, of the lesser waters of Long Island Sound, of national, imperial, and colonial borders, of racial divides, and of the very bounds of colonial law. The many crossings in which he and his contemporaries were involved did much to create boundaries between things previously less clearly separated.

Conference website, schedule, and other info

On-line Registration

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