New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Academia

Henry Hudson, New Netherland, and Atlantic History

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Dr. L.H. Roper, Professor of History at SUNY New Paltz and a scholar of international reputation in the field of Atlantic History has announced a symposium, ‘Henry Hudson, New Netherland, and Atlantic History‘, at SUNY New Paltz the weekend of 25-26 September, 2009. This host two-day international symposium on “The Worlds of Henry Hudson” is expected to be the premier intellectual event held in conjunction with the celebration of the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River. Leading historians from the Netherlands, France, and Germany, as well as the United States will present papers on a series of topics related to Hudson and his times.

The program will include panel discussions, teaching workshops, and two luncheon addresses over two days to be held on the campus of SUNY New Paltz., as set forth below. At each session, two-to-three presenters will give talks on topics closely related to the character of the European exploration and colonization of the Hudson Valley, which arose from Hudson’s voyage, and the historical significance of the issues generated by these phenomena.

The emergence of the transatlantic perspective during the last two decades is a major development in the study of the history of Europe, Africa and the Americas during the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The scholars invited to this conference are among the major figures in advancing this perspective. The conference program is designed to provide an opportunity for the further integration of their work, and its advancement through publication of the papers it generates and by providing a means for secondary and elementary school teachers to incorporate this scholarship into their own classrooms.

A second goal, equally important, is to further the integration of the African, American Indian, and European contexts (“the transatlantic perspective” or “Atlantic history”) into teaching and learning about exploration and “colonial America” in our schools. The conference structure provides for interaction in each session among leading scholars of early modern Africa and Europe and of American Indian societies and current and future elementary and secondary school teachers.

The cost of registering for this conference will be $20/day and $15 per luncheon session. Teachers who wish to attend, with the exception of those in Ulster, Dutchess, and Orange Counties, should register through the Center for Regional Research, Education, and Outreach at SUNY New Paltz. The costs for attending the symposium will be payable directly to CRREO.

Teachers in Ulster, Dutchess, and Orange Counties who wish to attend one or both days should register via MyLearningPlan. Teachers in other counties should register through the Center for Regional Research, Education, and Outreach at SUNY New Paltz. Professional development hours are available for approval. The first fifty teachers who sign up and who have been participants in the Ulster BOCES Teaching American History Summer Institute for at least one week will have their registration fee paid by the TAH grant. Ulster BOCES will notify those registrants that their fee has been paid.

For further information, please contact Lou Roper of the Department of History at roperl@newpaltz.edu.

CFP: Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850

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The Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 (CRE) is a venue for the presentation of original reserach on not only the revolutionary history of Europe, but also the Atlantic World and beyond. We welcome proposals from allied disciplines and comparative studies; in short, the conference offers a platform for research into the revolutionary era broadly defined.

The 2010 conference will be held February 25-27 at the College of Charleston and the Francis Marion Hotel, located in the center of Charleston’s historic district. The conference venues are within easy walking distance of Charleston’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban core, its museums, waterfront, and many exceptional restaurants.

The program committee prefers proposals for complete sessions (three papers, plus a chair and a commentator). However, we will accept proposals for incomplete sessions and individual paper proposals. Session proposals should include name of presenter, title of paper, and brief abstract (no more than one page) for each paper; and brief CVs (no more than 2 pages) for each participant. The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2009. We welcome traditional presentations of new research as well as roundtable discussions and pedagogical panels. Proposals from doctoral students are welcome. Electronic submissions should be sent in Word format.

Send proposals to:
Professor Carol Harrison
Department of History
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
ceharris@mailbox.sc.edu

Travel and accommodations:
Reservations should be made at the Francis Marion Hotel, located at 387 King Street, Charleston, SC 29403, which will serve as the conference hotel. To make your reservation and to obtain the group rate discount, call either 843-722-0600 or 1-877-756-2121 and state that you are attending the annual meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era. The deadline for reserving a room is January 26, 2010. The room rate for CRE participants is $169.00 per night, plus tax.

Charleston International Airport is served by AirTran, American Eagle, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United Express, and US Airways.

For more information about visiting Charleston, please see the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (www.charlestoncvb.com).

CFP: 1763 and All That, The Decade After The Seven Years’ War

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1763 and All That: Temptations of Empire in the British World During the Decade After the Seven Years’ War – a call for papers for a conference to be held on February 25th and 26th, 2010, at the University of Texas at Austin, sponsored by the Department of History’s Institute for Historical Studies.

The focus of the conference is the British Empire during its “decade of crisis” between the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the passage of the Tea Act ten years later. Over the course of this decade, Britons drastically transformed the way they viewed themselves and their empire. For the first time, British imperial policy extended to the governance of the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, the Native people of the trans-Appalachian interior of North America, Africans in the new colony of Senegambia, and the twenty million inhabitants of Bengal subject to the authority of the East India Company.

In Britain itself, the governance of this vastly extended empire engendered an enormous amount of bitter debate and anxious discussion in the halls of power as well as in the popular press. Among historians of each of the different parts of the British World, this decade has long been seen as one of crucial importance.

However, while invaluable work has been done to examine British and indigenous relations and exchanges in specific colonial contexts, as well to examine connections between the metropolis and specific colonial regions, there has been as yet few attempts to interrogate the links across and between the colonial regions and to set developments in particular regions into the context of the transformation of the British Empire as a whole. The organizers aim to address this need by bringing scholars working on various aspects of the British World into dialogue and debate over the causes and character of the imperial transformation of the 1760s and early 1770s.

Submissions are invited for individual papers on these themes. Note that the conference will be organized around the discussion of pre-circulated papers. Accepted papers must be submitted for circulation to participants no later than February 1, 2010. Each proposal should include a brief précis of the paper topic and a clear indication of how the paper will undertake to connect the specific research subject to larger events and processes taking place across the British Empire. The deadline for receiving proposals is September 1, 2009.

Paper proposals (as well a brief C.V.) should be submitted via e-mail to the conference organizers, Robert Olwell and James Vaughn, at: historyinstitute@austin.utexas.edu. Send all queries to the same address.

New Pre-1830s America Fellowship

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The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the John Carter Brown Library are pleased to announce a new research and writing fellowship that may be of interest to members of the list. The Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship supports work by academics, independent scholars and writers working on significant
projects relating to the literature, history, culture, or art of the Americas before 1830. The fellowship is also open to filmmakers, novelists, creative and performing artists, and others working on projects that draw on this period of history.

The fellowship award supports two months of research (conducted at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I.) and two months of writing (at Washington College in Chestertown, Md). Housing and university privileges will be provided. The fellowship includes a stipend of $5,000 per month for a total of $20,000.

Deadline for applications for the 2010 fellowship year is *July 15, 2009*. For more information and application instructions, visit the Starr Center’s website at http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

CFP: 11th Annual Researching New York Conference

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Founded by history graduate students, Researching New York, an annual conference on New York State History, is one of the major endeavors of the History Graduate Student Organization and the History Department. This is a great opportunity for graduate students to present a paper on ANY aspect of New York State history.

Even if your primary work does not focus on New York State history, often it is possible to work from a seminar paper or a small section of your work that has connections to a New York issue or theme. You can contact us at resrchny@albany.edu if you have any questions about the presenting your work at the conference. The program Committee will review the proposals in July and you will be notified whether your
paper or panel is accepted shortly thereafter. You can see previous programs at the Conference Web site, http://nystatehistory.org/researchny.

The organizers of the 11th Annual Researching New York Conference invite proposals for panels, papers, workshops, roundtables, exhibits, documentary, and media or multimedia presentations on any facet of New York State history–in any time period and from any perspective. The conference will be held at the University at Albany on November 19th and 20th, 2009.

To mark the upcoming Hudson-Champlain Quadricentennial, for Researching New York 2009, we encourage submissions that speak to the conference theme, 400
years of Exploration: the Hudson-Champlain Corridor and Beyond. We especially invite proposals that explore and interpret not only the exploits of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain, but the many kinds of exploration that have taken place in the ensuing 400 years of New York State’s rich and diverse history-including consideration of how we remember, celebrate, interpret, and commemorate historical events.

Researching New York brings together historians, researchers,archivists, museum curators, librarians, graduate students, teachers, Web and multimedia producers, and documentarians to share their work on New York State history. Presentations that highlight the vast resources available to researchers, as well as scholarship drawn from those resources, are encouraged.

Proposals are due by June 28, 2009. Full panel proposals, workshops, roundtables, exhibits, film screenings and media presentations are welcome. Partial panels and individual submissions will be considered. For panels and full proposals, please submit a one-page abstract of the complete session, a one-page abstract for each paper or presentation, and a one-page curriculum vita for each participant. Individual submissions should include a one-page abstract and one-page curriculum vita. Submissions must include name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address. Please submit electronically to resrchny@albany.edu. All proposals must note any anticipated audio visual needs.

SUNY Stony Brook: The Worlds of Lion Gardiner

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The State University of New York at Stony Brook, in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, will hold a conference at Stony Brook on The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries on March 20-21, 2009. Military man and engineer, chronicler and diplomat, lord of a New English manor married to a Dutch woman, Gardiner led a life replete with crossings: of the English Channel to engage in Continental wars, of the Atlantic, of the lesser waters of Long Island Sound, of national, imperial, and colonial borders, of racial divides, and of the very bounds of colonial law. The many crossings in which he and his contemporaries were involved did much to create boundaries between things previously less clearly separated.

Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds, Staking Claims

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A one-day interdisciplinary conference and exhibit at the Center for Archaeology, Columbia University, New York City will be held Saturday May 23rd, 2009; abstracts are due Sunday March 22nd, 2009.

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself. This conference aims to bring a wide variety of critical perspectives to bear on this topic; including anthropological, historical and art historical, literary, architectural and museological. Papers dealing with actual formal collections such as those found in galleries or museums, as well as those interested in less tangible collections – such as collections of facts, observations or ideas – are equally welcome. There are no restrictions with regard to time period, and papers are sought relating to the contemporary world, as well as the recent and ancient pasts.

Papers are solicited on the following and related themes:

The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices

Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited

Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people

Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time

Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations

Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

This conference is run by graduate students affiliated with the Center for Archaeology and is organized in conjunction with an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia.

Please send a 200 word abstract along with contact information (including name, email, institution affiliation) to Matt Sanger at mcs2178@columbia.edu
Any questions can also be sent to this address.

AHA Announces New Fellowship in Digital History

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In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.

This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an innovative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. The fellowship will be conferred on a project that is either in a late stage of development or which has been launched in the past year but is still in need of further improvements. The fellow(s) will be expected to apply awarded funds toward the advancement of the project goals during the fellowship year.

In a 1-2 page narrative, entries should provide a method of access to the project (e.g., web site address, software download), indicate the institutions and individuals involved with the project, and describe the project’s goals, functionality, intended audience, and significance. A short budget statement on how the fellowship funds will be used should be attached. Projects may only be submitted once for the Rosenzweig Fellowship.

The entry should be submitted by e-mail to rosenzweigprize@historians.org. Questions about the prize and application process should be directed to rtownsend@historians.org. The deadline for submission of entries is May 15, 2009. Recipients will be announced at the 2010 AHA Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Early American Economy, Society Fellowships

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The Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia invites applications for its dissertation and short-term fellowship awards to be granted for research during 2009-2010: Dissertation-level fellowship, carrying a stipend of $20,000, is tenable for nine consecutive months of residency from September 1, 2009 to May 31, 2010, or at a stipend of $10,000 for the period Sept. 1, 2009 to January 15, 2010, or January 15, 2010 to May 31, 2010. Four one-month fellowships, for scholars at any level, carrying stipends of $2,000 each, are tenable for a month of continuous research at the Library Company between June 1, 2009 and May 31, 2010.

Deadline for receipt of applications is March 2, 2009. These fellowships are designed to promote scholarship in early American economy and society, broadly defined, from its colonial beginnings to roughly the 1850s. Applicants for dissertation awards may submit proposals based not only on the collections at the Library Company, but also on the printed and manuscript materials of other institutions in the Philadelphia area. Short-term fellows should plan to spend a continuous month of research in the collections of the Library Company.

Applicants shoud first fill out a cover sheet at: www.librarycompany.org/Economics. One-month applicants should submit seven copies each of a brief résumé, a two- to four-page description of the proposed research, and one letter of recommendation. Long-term fellowship applicants should submit seven copies each of a résumé, a research proposal outlining the larger project and the work to be pursued during the fellowship term, a writing sample of about 25 pages, and two letters of recommendation. Dissertation award applicants should state clearly which of the tenable periods they seek, and whether they also wish to be considered for a short-term fellowship. All materials should be sent to:

PEAES Fellowships
The Library Company of Philadelphia
1314 Locust Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Historians Win 2008 National Humanities Medals

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AHA Today has noted that a number of historians were among the recipients of the 2008 National Humanities Medals and National Medals of Arts which were awarded last week. The NEH site devoted to the winners is here.

Gabor S. Boritt, director and founder of the Civil War Institute and professor of history at Gettysburg College received one of the National Humanities Medals. Dr. Boritt, recognized “for his scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era,” is a member of the AHA. Albert Marrin, emeritus professor of history at Yeshiva University, received the award as well, for his work in using children’s books to open “young minds to history and made the lessons of the past come alive with rich detail for a new generation.” Also receiving medals were Richard Brookhiser, popular biographer of the Founding Fathers; Abraham Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer; journalist Myron Magnet, “who…combined literary and cultural history with an understanding of contemporary urban life to imagine new ways of relieving poverty and renewing civic institutions;” Milton J. Rosenberg, radio host and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Chicago; philanthropists Thomas A. Saunders III, Jordan Horner Saunders, and Robert H. Smith; the John Templeton Foundation; and the Norman Rockwell Museum. More information on all the winners can be found on the NEH web site.