Twentieth Century Politics and Society

Founded
1992
Seminar Number
555

The seminar concerns Europe, the United States, and the non-West. It brings together historians, sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, and other scholars to discuss current research on diverse cultural, social, and political theses, especially those that stimulate comparative perspectives.

Seminar Website

Chair
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
cdietrich2@fordham.edu

Rapporteur
Allison Powers
akp2134@columbia.edu

Meeting dates and locations are subject to change. Please confirm details with the seminar rapporteur.

Welcome

Meetings

09/20/2016	Lehman Center, Columbia University 5:00 PM	The Work of Empire: The U.S. Military and Foreign Labor in the Twentieth Century Justin Jackson, New York University Abstract Abstract How has the U.S. military projected American power beyond North America during the twentieth century, particularly before the post-World War II and Cold War-era creation of a huge permanent defense establishment and the rise of the "military-industrial-academic" complex? The U.S. military has often depended on nominally "civilian" but often highly coerced forms of labor to meet a variety of military and administrative needs, in the process shaping political, socioeconomic, and cultural developments in colonial, post-colonial, and postwar metropolitan environments overseas. Many of the most basic patterns of U.S military-foreign labor relations were forged in America's insular empire of 1898, through U.S. wars in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia and their aftermaths.

10/25/2016	Faculty House, Columbia University 5:00 PM	How the Cold War Really Ended: Beyond the 'Great Man' Interpretations David Foglesong, Rutgers University Abstract Abstract In most stories of the ending of the Cold War, the cast of characters has been almost entirely male. Historians have differed over whether Reagan won the Cold War or Gorbachev’s bold initiatives ended the superpower rivalry, but almost all accounts have focused on the top leaders and their policies. As a result, even the most sophisticated of these studies have been incomplete. This presentation will propose a more inclusive view of the ending of the Cold War. It will carefully consider the roles of women who established new organizations to oppose the nuclear arms race and promote citizen diplomacy. It will approach “the Cold War” not merely as a geopolitical chess match and ideological competition but also as a cultural construction and a lived emotional experience. From that vantage it will show how not only politicians but also filmmakers, peace activists, housewives, scientists, journalists, doctors, and many other citizens took steps that moved the Soviet Union and the United States away from Armageddon and toward accommodation in the course of the 1980s.

11/15/2016	Faculty House, Columbia University 5:00 PM	Chinese Exclusion and the Making of the Modern American Alien Beth Lew-Williams, Princeton University

02/07/2017	Faculty House, Columbia University 5:00 PM	Revisiting the Causes of the Iranian Revolution Ervand Abrahamian, Baruch College, CUNY Abstract Abstract Social scientists have had a field day theorizing about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In the last three decades, the downfall of the shah has been subjected to an impressive array of competing explanations with social scientist applying their own favorite approaches to this revolution. These approaches can be categorized as the Structural; the Cultural; the Weberian; the Durkheimian; the Discourse; and the Tillian explanations. The talk will examine the problems with these explanations and offer an alternative one.

03/07/2017	Faculty House, Columbia University 5:00 PM	From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs since the 1960s Joshua Davis, University of Baltimore Abstract Abstract In the 1960s and '70s, activists from a range of social movements established small businesses to advance the goals of political transformation and cultural liberation. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and workplace democracy, activist enterprises such as African American bookstores, feminist businesses, hippie head shops, and environmentalist organic food stores sought alternatives to conventional, profit-driven business models. By the middle of the 1970s, several thousand of these businesses operated across the United States, but only a handful have survived until today. Meanwhile, countless companies today such as Whole Foods Market have adopted activist businesses' language—but rarely their political goals—of liberation and social change as they celebrate social enterprise, mission-driven business, and buying local.

04/25/2017	Faculty House, Columbia University 5:00 PM	One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity and the Revolt Against the New Deal Kevin Kruse, Princeton University Abstract Abstract In the traditional telling, the religious revival of 1950s America — marked by the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, among other changes — was purely a product of the Cold War. According to this standard narrative, as America fell under the thrall of McCarthyism, its leaders sought to emphasize the nation's religious heritage as a means of distinguishing it from the “godless communists” of the Soviet Union. My recent work, however, argues that the postwar religious revival in general, and the mobilization of “under God” in particular, were rooted not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather the domestic struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. During that earlier era, corporate titans enlisted conservative religious leaders to advance a new ideology of “Christian libertarianism.” Together, they mobilized a new language of “freedom under God” that was meant as a contrast, and a challenge, to the state power that its architects feared most: not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but the New Deal administration in Washington.

2nd Floor, Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, MC 2302 New York, NY 10027

Phone: 212.854.2389 | Fax: 212.854.8248 | Email: univ.seminars@columbia.edu

Web Design by The Assembly

Twentieth Century Politics and Society

Meetings

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Additional Resources