Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Historical Society conference, June 5-7 in Baltimore

The Historical Society's 2008 conference is coming up June 5-7 in Baltimore, Maryland. The theme this year is Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History. Many conference papers are available at the links below, with more in the full program. The next meeting is in 2010.

Highlights include:

THE CHRISTOPHER LASCH LECTURE
Richard Salvucci, Trinity University
“Pricing Peace, Property, and Friendship: Mexico, the United States, and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 1848”

NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON THE POST-CIVIL WAR ERA
Moderator: Peter Coclanis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Michael W. Fitzgerald, St. Olaf College, “Reconstruction Revisited: African-American Politics in Modern Context”
Susan O’Donovan, Harvard University, “Women, Work, and Reconstruction: Questions of Gender in a Free-Labor System”
Michael A. Ross, Loyola University, New Orleans, “The Supreme Court and the Retreat from Reconstruction: An Assessment of Twenty Years of Scholarship”

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE ERA OF THE GREAT WAR
Moderator: Melvyn Dubofsky, SUNY Binghamton
Steven Reich, James Madison University, “The Great Migration and Literary Imagination”
Chad Williams, Hamilton College, “African-American Soldiers and the First World War: Class, Citizenship, and the Meanings of Military Service
Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida, “‘Grudgingly, Unwillingly, Almost Insultingly’: Racial Progress in the Era of the Great War
Comment: Melvyn Dubofsky, SUNY Binghamton

THE DILLINGHAM COMMISSION ON U.S. IMMIGRATION
Moderator: Robert Zeidel, University of Wisconsin, Stout
Yael Schacher, Harvard University, “Contrarian Expertise: Isaac Hourwich’s Immigration and Labor (1912)
Melanie Shell-Weiss, Johns Hopkins University, “Workers and Citizens: The Debate over Black Immigrants and the Southern Economy
Katie Benton-Cohen, Georgetown University, “The Ambivalence of Race: The Dillingham Commission and Mexican Immigrants”
John M. Lund, Keene State College, “Vermont Nativism: William Paul Dillingham and U.S. Immigration Legislation

MOVING CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY IN NEW DIRECTIONS
Moderator: Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at Chicago
Risa Lauren Goluboff, University of Virginia School of Law“The Lost Promise of Civil Rights” Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania“Black Power, Civil Rights, and Conservatism: The Strange Origins of Community Economic Development”
Carol E. Anderson, University of Missouri, Columbia“Eyes Off The Prize: The NAACP and Political Liberation Movements in Africa and Asia”

THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY
Moderator: Randall Stephens, The Historical Society
David Chappell, University of Oklahoma“Waking from the Dream: The Battle over Martin Luther King’s Legacy
Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at Chicago“Periodizing and Politics in Civil Rights History: Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement’”
Daniel L. Letwin, Pennsylvania State University“‘A Nettle of Peculiar Sharpness’: The Social Equality Question in Black Political Thought”

THE FRAGMENTATION OF AUTHORITY IN THE ERA OF THE CIVIL WAR
Moderator: Donald Avery, Harford Community College
H. Robert Baker, Georgia State University, “Federalism and the Fugitive Slave Act: The Making and Unmaking of Constitutional Nationalism
Owen Williams, Yale University, “The Fall of Slavery and the Rise of the Supreme Court
Daniel W. Hamilton, Chicago Kent College of Law, “Human Property and the Constitution: Litigating Slavery After Emancipation