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Upcoming Events
Annual Cascadia Environmental History Collaborative Retreat
Thursday, September 22, 2016 - Sunday, September 25, 2016
UW Pack Forest Research Station
Professors Linda Nash (University of Washington) and Marsha Weisiger (University of Oregon) co-founded the Cascadia Environmental History Collaborative (CEHC) in 2014. The group consists of graduate students and faculty from across the Pacific Northwest, including Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The CEHC retreat offers the opportunity to workshop papers and presentations, develop collaborations, and make connections with like-minded scholars in a relaxed, informal atmosphere.
Last year, in addition to paper workshops, the program included a screening of the film, "DamNation," a discussion of books useful in teaching environmental history, an "Anthropocene Slam: Cabinet of Curiosities" roundtable, and a soggy but relaxing hike in Mount Rainier National Park.
For more background on the CEHC retreat and retreating more generally see, "Practicing in Place: The Environmental History Retreat" by Hayley Brazier, a PhD student at the University of Oregon and member of CEHC.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest.
Recent Events
Thursday, May 5, 2016
3:30 p.m. in Communications Room 226
Anne Hyde is the author of the prizewinning book Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860, which garnered the 2011 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book retells the story of the American West in the decades before the Civil War by focusing on the Native empires, trappers, traders, bankers, and politicians who built a global fur trade. Professor Hyde also edits the Western History Association's Western Historical Quarterly, which moved to the University of Oklahoma in January of 2016.
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and UW History Department.
Monday, April 4, 2016
4:00 PM, CMU 226
Professor Edward D. Melillo will talk about his new book, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (Yale University Press, 2015). This groundbreaking history explores the many unrecognized, enduring linkages between the state of California and the country of CHile. The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet's diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history.
Edward D. Melillo is Associate Professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College. He teaches courses on globla environmental history, the history of the Pacific World, and commodities in world historical perspective.
Lecture Series: "Excavating Seattle's histories: Peoples, politics, and place"
The 2016 History Lecture Series with John M. Findlay, Quintard Taylor, Linda Nash, and James N. Gregory.
The series begins on January 13 and continues on Wednesday evenings through February 3. All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m. and will be held in Kane Hall, room 130.
Seattle's remarkable past encompasses the stories of Native Americans and pioneers, labor agitators and civil rights activists, loggers and environmentalists, aircraft riverters and software moguls. In this signature series of lectures, four UW scholars chart the social worlds, environments, and political conflicts that shaped the city's past and its present. Presented by the University of Washington Department of History and the UW Alumni Association, with introductory remarks by four former Seattle mayors.
For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit:
https://www.washington.edu/alumni/history/
Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture: "Encounters In Avalanche Country: A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820-1920" by Diana Di Stefano
Tuesday, October 29
Petersen Room, Allen Library
Diana Di Stefano presents a lecture on her new book, Encounters in Avalanche Country: A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820-1920, which tells the story of mountain communities' responses to disaster over a century of social change and rapid industrialization. As mining and railway companies triggered new kinds of disasters, ideas about environmental risk and responsibility were increasingly negotiated by mountain laborers, at elite levels among corporations, and in socially charged civil suits. Disasters became a dangerous crossroads where social spaces and ecological realities collided, illustrating how individuals, groups, communities, and corporate entities were tangled in this web of connections between people and their environment. Kathryn Morse, author of The Nature of Gold, calls Di Stefano’s book “an intelligent, sophisticated, well-written, intensely researched, thoughtfully structured, deeply felt, and clearly hard-won piece of historical scholarship.”
Diana Di Stefano is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Empires of Capital: Race Across the Atlantic and the Pacific
May 17 and 18, 2013
University of Washington, Seattle
The two-day symposium seeks to theorize and historicize racial capitalism in the modern world. Building on Cedric Robinson’s insight that capitalist development has been pursued and organized fundamentally around race, speakers will strive to uncover the multiple layers of capitalist expansion—ideological, cultural, economic, and social—to reveal and comprehend the tensions and contradictions of racial capitalism in the past and in the present and across the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Plenary Roundtable
Lisa Lowe (Tufts University), "Sugar, Tea, Opium, Coolies: The Intimacies of Four Continents"Jennifer Morgan (New York University), "Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery"
Michael Witgen (University of Michigan), "Seeing Red: The Politics of Crime and Punishment on the Northern Borderlands of the Early American Republic"
Shelley Streeby (University of California, San Diego), "Hubert H. Harrison's Scrapbooks, Racial Capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition"
Manu Vimalassery (Texas Tech University), "Native and Black Visions of Self-Determination"Peter James Hudson (Vanderbilt University), "Black Sovereignty and Racial Capitalism: The National City Bank in Haiti and Liberia, 1910-1935"
Jodi Kim (University of California, Riverside), "Debt Imperialism, Settler Modernity, and the Necropolitics of the Promise"
Andrew Friedman (Haverford College), "Meridians and Parallels: Racial Formations on the Global Grid"
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, the University of Washington Libraries, the Department of History, the Department of English, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Lecture: “A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek”
Ari Kelman
Wednesday, May 8th
12:00-1:30
Communications 202
The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre stands as one of the most infamous and brutal examples of white violence against Indian peoples in American history. And for nearly a century and a half, this event has been at the center of multiple struggles over history and memory in the American West; whether in the government investigations launched in the massacre’s aftermath, in the controversial work of nineteenth-century Indian reformers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, or in popular histories like Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In this talk, Professor Kelman examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, and to shape public memory of the event--most recently with the 2007 opening of the National Park Service’s Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.
Ari Kelman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the politics of memory, environmental history, Native American history, World War II, and America in the 1960s.
He is the author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), and A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New
Orleans (UC Press, 2003).
Lecture: “The Pacific Northwest: A Personal History”
John M. Findlay, University of Washington
Monday, April 8, 2013
4:00 pm
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall
Reception to follow.
Please respond to cspn@uw.edu or 206-543-8656 if you will attend.
The Department of History will mark the inauguration of the John Calhoun Smith Endowed Professorship with a talk by John Findlay.
John M. Findlay joined the Department of History in 1987. His teaching and research focus on U.S. history, the North American West, and the Pacific Northwest. He has served as Managing Editor of Pacific Northwest Quarterlyfor more than 15 years, and was founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. His publications on the region have included studies of Seattle and the UW, histories of Northwest literature and identity, and a book on Hanford and the Tri-Cities (with co-author Bruce Hevly).
Lecture: “The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea”
Lissa K. Wadewitz, Linfield College
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
4:00 pm
Petersen Room, Allen Library, University of Washington
Free and open to the public.
Reception to follow.
Lissa K. Wadewitz will present a lecture based upon her recently published book, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, in association with University of Washington Press, 2012). Richard White (Stanford University) describes it as "the first book anyone interested in Pacific Salmon should read," and Joseph E. Taylor III considers it "an excellent and timely examination of how humans have organized ecological and social space across time."
Wadewitz is an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Linfield College, in McMinnville, Oregon. Her book and lecture are the latest in the Emil and Kathleen Sick Series in Western History and Biography.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press, and University of Washington Libraries.
Lecture: “The Strange Career of the Filipino Nation: Race, Citizenship, and the Dilemmas of U.S. Empire”
Rick Baldoz, Oberlin College
Thursday, October 18, 2012
4:00 pm
Gowen 201
Free and open to the public.
Baldoz will examine the complex relationship between Filipinos and the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His talk will focus on what Filipino immigration to the United States reveals about the racialized economic and political foundations of American society.
Talk sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, the Southest Asia Center of the Jackson School of International Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of American Ethnic Studies.
Lecture Series - From the Civil War to the Pacific Century: Sesquicentennial Reflections on State Power and the American West
With the passage of the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Morrill Act in 1862, the U.S. federal government drew a new blueprint for colonizing and developing the American West. Featuring a range of prominent historians, this lecture series will explore how state power shaped the West and how the West reshaped state power over the past 150 years.
“Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America”
Richard White
Stanford University
Thursday, April 5, 2012; 7:00 pm
Room 210, Kane Hall
Reception to follow in Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall
Free and open to the public, but tickets required.
Please contact the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest: cspn@uw.edu; 206-543-8656.
“Rethinking the West in the Civil War Era”
Elliott West
University of Arkansas
Tuesday, April 17, 2012;
4:00 pm
Petersen Room, Allen Library
“The Speculative State: The U.S. West in the 1920s”
Sarah Deutsch
Duke University
Thursday, May 3, 2012;
4:00 pm
Room 226, Communications
“Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol”
Kelly Lytle Hernández
UCLA
Thursday, May 17, 2012;
4:00 pm
Petersen Room, Allen Library
“State Power, Race Power and the Rise of California”
Daniel Martinez HoSang
University of Oregon
Tuesday, May 24, 2012;
4:00 pm
Petersen Room, Allen Library
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the University of Washington Libraries.
Lecture: “Triangulating Difference: Japanese Immigrant Negotiations of Race, Caste, and Borders in the North American West”
Andrea Geiger
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
4:00 pm
Communications 226
Like all migrants, Meiji-era Japanese migrants viewed conditions in the North American West through the lens of social and
cultural attitudes developed in their home countries. Culturally distinct ways of understanding difference rooted in the
Tokugawa-era status system provided an interpretive framework for the race-based hostility Japanese immigrants encountered on both
sides of the U.S.-Canada border, informing their strategic responses to white racism and mediating their responses to both
constraints and opportunities in North America. Historical status biases also shaped the discursive strategies of Meiji officials
who endeavored to counter the racist claims of anti-Japanese exclusionists.
Andrea Geiger is assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Subverting Exclusion:
Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (2011). Her talk, which is based on this
recent publication, examines the complex intersection of two separate cultures of exclusion in the early 20th-century North
American West.
Presented by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest with support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Lecture: “Samurai among Panthers: The Narrative and Interpretive Histories of Richard Aoki”
Diane Fujino
Thursday, February 9, 2012
4:00 pm
Communications 226
Richard Aoki, the most iconic figure of the Asian American Movement, was best known for his work in the Black Panther Party and
Berkeley's Third World Strike. Relying on extensive oral history and archival research, Diane Fujino shows how social structure and
historical contexts profoundly shaped Aoki's life, from his racial awakening in the internment camps of World War II, to his
eagerness to join the army in a display of Cold War masculinity, to his political evolution from the Old Left to Black Power and
Asian American radicalism. Fujino discusses the construction of Aoki's compelling narrative and the analytic interpretations of
her forthcoming book, Samurai among Panthers.
Diane Fujino is associate professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Her other books include Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (2009) and Heartbeat of Struggle: The
Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005).
Presented by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest with support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Sick Book and Lecture Series: John M. Findlay and Bruce Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West
On the banks of the Pacific Northwest's greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square-mile compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future.
It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view distorts its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities.
Book: University of Washington Press, June 2011
Lecture: November 15, 2011, 4pm; Peterson Room, Allen Library, University of Washington
Race, Radicialism, and Repression on the Pacific Coast and Beyond, May 12-14, 2011
Radical movements embracing and demanding racial justice have figured prominently in the history of the “left coast” of the United States. They have also generated violent responses, including state repression, that reverberated across the United States and around the world.
Conference program (PDF)
Sick Book and Lecture Series: Patricia Susan Hart, A Home for Every Child: The Washington Children's Home Society in the Progressive Era
Adoption has been a politically charged subject since the Progressive Era, when it first became an established part of child welfare reform over one hundred years ago. In A Home for Every Child, Patricia Susan Hart looks at how, when, and why modern adoption practices became a part of child welfare policy.
Book: University of Washington Press, November 2010
Lecture: November 9, 2010, 4pm; Peterson Room, Allen Library, University of Washington
Sick Book and Lecture Series: Andrew H. Fisher, Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity
Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Indians - the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization.
Book: University of Washington Press, July 2010
Lecture: October 12, 2010, 4pm; Petersen Room, Allen Library, University of Washington
Public Screening: Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa
October 13, 2010, 5 pm - 7pm, Allen Auditorium, Allen Library, University of Washington
Lecture Series: Crossroads of Empire
This lecture series, organized by the Pacific Borderlands group, showcases scholarship in the growing fields of borderland studies and the Pacific world. Designed to bridge disciplinary and institutional boundaries these talks offer an opportunity to think about the trans-Pacific connections that have shaped the borderlands.
“Can You See Me? Rock, Race, and the Social Geography of the Jimi Hendrix Experience”
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Yale University
Tuesday, February 23, 2010;
4:00 p.m.
Communications 120
“Delusions of Empire: The Imagined America of William McKendree Gwin”
Rachel St. John
Harvard University
Thursday, March 4, 2010;
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
“The Imperial Comanches and the Dark Matter of History”
Pekka Hämäläinen
University of California, Santa Barbara
Thursday, April 22, 2010;
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
“Empire and the Making of Nations: The Panama Canal’s Construction and the History of the
Americas”
Julie Greene
University of Maryland
Tuesday, May 25, 2010;
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
Lecture: “Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: A Conversation between Jack O'Dell and Nikhil Pal Singh”
Nikhil Pal Singh and Jack O'Dell
Friday, February 5, 2010
4:00 pm
Communications 120, reception to follow in Communications 202
Jack O'Dell and Nikhil Pal Singh will discuss their recent collaboration on Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell (University of California Press, 2010) and the course of the black freedom movement in the twentieth century.
Jack O'Dell is a longtime peace and social justice activist. Beginning as a rank-and-file union organizer while in the merchant marines during World War II, he went on to head the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's fundraising and southern voter registration campaign, alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. O'Dell was later in charge of foreign policy for Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity and Rainbow Coalition. He currently lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004).
Sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, Hilen Endowment for American Literature and Culture, and Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW-Bothell.
Lecture: “Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History”
David Roediger
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, January 21, 2010
5:00 p.m.
Communications 120
David Roediger is Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His many books include Our Own Time (1989), The Wages of Whiteness (1991), Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), Colored White (2002), Working Toward Whiteness (2005), and How Race Survived U.S. History (2008).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Pacific Northwest, the Department of History, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities, with thanks to Yoshiko Harden, Director of Multicultural Services and Student Development at Highline Community College.