2008 Conferences
Spring 2008
"Reconstructing Social History in a Post-Structural World"
Saturday, May 17, 2008. Convener: Lonnie Robbins (CHS Fellow)
9:30-9:45 Introduction
9:45–11:15 Keynote address by Keith Wrightson (Yale University)--whose numerous publications include Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (co-authored with David Levine 1979), English Society, 1580-1680 (1982) and Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000)--on “Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England”
11:15-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-1:00 Workshop 1
- Crystal Sanders (NU) - "From the Field to the Classroom: The Child Development Group of Mississippi and Opposition to the War on Poverty, 1965-1967"
- Katie Turk (University of Chicago) – "‘A Fair Chance To Do My Part of Work': Black Women, War Work and Fairness at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant, 1941-1945"
- Commentator: Brodwyn Fischer (NU), author of A Poverty of Rights: Ciizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (2008)
2:30–5:00 Workshop 2
- Lonnie Robbins (NU) – "The Path of the Poor Scholar: Poverty in Tudor and Stuart Oxbridge"
- Andy Wehrman (NU) – "‘A Sore Distemper is Crept in': Public Health in Revolutionary Marblehead, Massachusetts"
- Commentator: Suzanne Desan (University of Wisconsin, Madison), author of Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (1990) and The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2004)
"Environmental History"
Saturday, April 5, 2008. Convener: Strother Roberts (CHS Fellow)
10:45 a.m. Opening Comments by T.H. Breen (Director of CHS)
11:00 a.m. Keynote Address by Richard White (Stanford University), whose books include The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995) and The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991)
1:00 p.m. Panel
Introductions by David Schoenbrun (NU), author of A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (1998)
15-minute presentations:
- WILL Cavert (Northwestern University)--"'No Smoke or Annoyance at All': Projects for Clean Air through Technology in Seventeenth-Century London"
- Angela Gugliotta (University of Chicago)--"Pittsburgh: 'Child of Nature and Necessity'"
- Alphonse Otieno (Northwestern University)--"Alienating Landscapes: Forestry Policy in Western Kenya 1940-1963"
- Strother Roberts (Northwestern University)--"The New England Forest and the Origins of Conservation in Early America"
- Mikael Wolfe (University of Chicago)--"The Rational Folly of Rehabilitation: The Laguna's 'Second Agrarian Reform,' Mexico, 1950-1975"
Comments by James McCann (Boston University), author of Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (2005)
Questions from the audience
3:30 p.m. Closing Comments by T.H. Breen
Richard White giving his keynote address
James McCann and the panelists