Professors Kristin Stapleton and Roger Des Forges (both University of Buffalo) and Ramya Sreenivasan (University of Pennsylvania) will serve as co-directors of an NEH Summer Institute for thirty K-12 teachers entitled: China and India: Comparisons and Connections.  The three-week institute will compare historical and cultural developments in India and China and will take place on the UB campus.

For more information about the Institute and how to apply, please visit UB's Asian Studies Program website.

Each year the NEH’s Division of Education Programs offers teachers opportunities to study a variety of humanities topics in NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes in order to expand and deepen their understanding of the humanities through reading, discussion, writing, and reflection.

Applications are due March 4, 2013 and the Institute will run from from July 1-19, 2013.

Prof. Carole Emberton is the recipient of the Richards Prize for the best article published in the 2012 edition of the Journal of the Civil War Era, the official journal of the Society of Civil War Historians.

In presenting the award the selection committee praised Emberton’s piece as “powerful, beautiful, mind-expanding, almost philosophical…a model not merely of Civil War scholarship but of what historians can do when they are working at the top of their game.”  The winning essay, “Only Murder Makes Men: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” is a detailed and gripping exploration of how and why Civil War military service reconfigured black masculinity from that of slave to that of a free man.

Interested in learning more about what's new with the UB History Department?  The Fall 2012 edition of our newsletter is now available here.

Contents include:

• A profile of new Assistant Professor, Adam Malka
• A book review by Carole Emberton
• Faculty News
• Graduate Student News
• Alumni News
• And More.

Prof. David Herzeberg joined renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh on their radio show Back Story with the American History Guys to discuss the history of drug use and criminalization in the United States. 

Follow the link to listen to the show (Prof. Herzberg's portion begins about 21:50 and goes to 31:30!), as well as find links for further reading.

Profs. Carole Emberton and David Gerber of the History Department were joined by Dr Gregory Cherr, UB Medical School, for a roundtable discussion of medicine in the Civil War on October 17th from 6-8 pm at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society (25 Nottingham Court, Buffalo).  Topics included technological advances made during the war, the health care of veterans after the war, and field surgical practices then and now.

A reception for alumni and faculty followed the event.

Jeremy Popkin, the T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author, most recently of You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2010) gave a talk at UB on October 4 entitled "A Revolutionary Supplement: Adding the Haitian Revolution to ‘The Age of the Democratic Revolutions'."

Prof. Popkin received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and holds an A.M. degree from Harvard University. His scholarly interests include the history of the French and Haitian revolutions and the topic of autobiographical literature. Popkin has held fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Newberry Library, and has been a visiting professor at Brown University and at the College de France.

You Are All Freewas the winner of the 2010 David Pinkney Prize fromThe Society for French Historical Studies and the 2011 J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association.

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

"Victoria Wolcott's well-written and deeply researched new book adds another crucial layer to the civil rights narrative. She goes beyond the familiar marches and leaders to focus on movie theaters, skating rinks, dance halls, city parks, amusement parks, and swimming pools as places of struggle. In doing so, she brings in a new cast of characters—children, teenagers, mothers—and shows how the battles over access to urban leisure predate Brown and extend well past the March on Washington. No one has identified and chronicled the conflicts in these places with the care and precision that Wolcott has."—Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

"In this powerful story, Victoria Wolcott demonstrates why recreation is central to understanding the history of the civil rights movement in America. Her book also asks us to push the existing frontiers of our historical memory—why violence against African Americans in order to sustain segregation has been forgotten, while violence that sometimes accompanied integration is remembered. With Race, Riots, and Rollercoasters, we reexamine more closely both the ideals and nightmares of America in the twentieth century."—Alison Isenberg, Princeton University

Liana Vardi has since 2010 been the editor of an exciting new project, Film and Fiction for French Historians, which is being housed under the H-France umbrella.  The mission statement of the electronic bulletin, the first issue of which appeared in December 2010, explains,  "From time to time, individuals write to H-France asking for suggestions about possible fictional materials to assign in a French history course. A flurry of emails follows with recommendations of movies or novels. Sometimes, as in the case of Sofia Coppola’s film Marie-Antoinette (2006), a lively debate ensues. Such exchanges suggest the usefulness of 'a cultural bulletin' that informs list-members of new novels or films related to the history of France, especially with an eye to their use in the classroom. Reviews written by paid critics for such venues as The New York Times or The New Republic rarely assess the compatibility of fictional representations of the past and historians’ knowledge of it. They certainly never consider recent cultural productions from the perspective of pedagogy. That is the purpose of Film and Fiction for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin."