IHS Book Talk: “History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000,” by Sumit Guha, University of Texas at Austin

March 23, 2021

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
(University of Washington Press, 2019)

A book talk and discussion with
SUMIT GUHA
Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/profile.php?eid=sg7967

With discussant:
ANUPAMA RAO
TOW Associate Professor of History,
Barnard College and Columbia University
https://history.barnard.edu/profiles/anupama-rao

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

Dr. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

“Dr. Guha’s expertise in early modern Indian history allows him to explore “social structure and historical narration in western India” in great depth.
– Journal of Asian Studies
“Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions toprovide the rst intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historicalmemory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes todebates beyond the eld of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.”
– New Books in South Asian Studies

Dr. Sumit Guha is holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Cambridge, he has taught at St. Stephen’s College, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, the Delhi School of Economics, and Rutgers University. Among his numerous books and co-edited volumes he is the author most recently of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013), and Health and Population in South Asia (Permanent Black, and C. Hurst and Co., 2001). Read more about Dr. Guha’s publications on his faculty profile page, and on his Academia page, and read more of his work on Not Even Past.

Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

February 1, 2015

by Sumit Guha

It may sound strange to many readers, but when I was growing up as the son of upper middle-class civil servants in India in the 1960s, I was hardly aware of the existence of caste distinctions. We had returned from Italy in 1963 and I went to a private, Anglophone school whose privileged students belonged (I now realize) to various religions and castes. But at that time I was hardly aware of this. I now realize this arose from a conscious effort on the part of many of the Indian middle class of that era to shake off deep-rooted distinctions in order to build a new national community without invidious distinctions. On the other hand, our own class privilege by contrast to the acutely visible poverty of many around us could not escape my attention. When I enrolled in the University in the 1970s, the reduction or elimination of economic inequality was the issue that most agitated thinking people and the sources of class hierarchy was what preoccupied historians. Caste or religious distinctions – in so far as they were examined, were thought to be relics or survivals of a bygone social order or stratagems to divide working people in order to facilitate their exploitation.

This strain of thought dominated Indian intellectual life until the late 1980s and was undermined by three historical developments. One was the evident maintenance of social distinctions such as caste even as modernization broke down older taboos. It was clear that these were more than vanishing relics of a bygone era. Secondly, the collapse of the Soviet bloc alongside the astonishingly rapid and successful adoption of capitalist markets in China – the country that had gone furthest in suppressing markets and private property, demonstrated that the dominant Marxist ideas did not measure up to historical reality. Finally, in the 1990s, Indian politics was dramatically altered by the rise of caste-based political parties that eclipsed class-based organizations in elections, both in the States and the (federal) Center.

A number of scholars and commentators now turned to the West to understand these phenomena and found two related sets of ideas at hand. One was that caste was based on a religious ideology descended from ancient times (many added a racial dimension to it.) The other was that communities that lived distinct from the Hindu caste order were surviving aboriginal peoples, analogous to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. I found both these ideas unsatisfactory if measured against historical evidence. I began by studying “tribal” or “aboriginal” peoples, the results of which I published in 1999 as Environment and Ethnicity in India c.1200-1999. This book showed how tribal communities were in fact shaped by ecological settings and political networks (something that researchers were establishing for the native peoples of the Americas too.)

That book led me to explore the work Fredrik Barth, a famous expert on the Afghan borderlands who did path-breaking work across Southwest Asia starting in the 1950s. A little-read but brilliant essay of his showed how a caste system – marked by occupational segregation and social exclusion — functioned for century in the Swat valley of what is today northern Pakistan even though the population was 99% Muslim. He showed how this served the interests of the dominant landowning class even though it had no religious sanction. I also went back to a book published by the Cambridge anthropologist Susan Bayly in 1989 where she showed how Christian communities in South India – converted centuries ago — still maintained caste exclusions into the twentieth century. I also found studies showing caste practices among Indian Muslims.

A little research uncovered the fact that the very word “caste” was not found in any Indian language. It was spread world-wide by the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the sixteenth century. They applied the concept of “caste” to various ranked ethnic groups in Spanish Mexico and to various communities the Portuguese encountered in India. Thus the viceroy in India wrote to the King of Spain in 1630 that he had met the Mughal officer Daulat Khan (a Muslim name) who was of the “casta Abexim” or Abyssinian caste. But the Iberian peoples had a racial or genetic idea of caste while Indian society thought more in terms of behavior and purity. Racial caste can never be gained or lost: but Indian society admitted temporary exclusion and readmission as well as permanent expulsion. But branco or mestic̨o were permanent categories like white or black in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, a number of sociologists pointed to aspects of U.S. society that could be analyzed in terms of a caste structure.

Finally, I found historical studies of the practice of caste in Sri Lanka, a mainly Buddhist country. Quite amazingly, the Dutch who ruled much of the island before the British captured it from them in 1796 regulated and enforced the caste system there. This was not because the Dutch Reformed Church prescribed it: rather, it was because they exacted taxes and forced labor from their subjects on the basis of their caste occupations such as cinnamon peeler, rice farmer, carpenter etc. None of these obviously could be thought of as the results of a religious ideology like Hinduism.

800px-Seventy-two_Specimens_of_Castes_in_India_(66) — A page from the manuscript “Seventy-two Specimens of Castes in India,” an album compiled by the Indian writing master at an English school established by American missionaries in Madura, and given to the Reverend William Twining. Each illustrated portrait is captioned in English and in Tamil, and the title page of the work includes English, Tamil, and Telugu. (Via Wikimedia)

It became clear that modern states and social and political interests played a major part in the reproduction of caste structures. In India, caste identity worked to mobilize voters. But this modern form of identity broke free from older taboos such as touching or eating beef. A graphic example came to mind: some time in the early 1980s, some shrewd if unscrupulous merchants began marketing an exceptionally cheap margarine (hydrogenated vegetable oil) in North India. Millions bought cans of this useful cooking fat. Then it came to light that the vendors had bought low-cost beef tallow on the world market, imported it under the pretext of soap-making and then sold it to millions of unsuspecting Hindus as a pure vegetarian product. There was a media furor for a few months, warehouses were sealed, the firm prosecuted and then everyone forgot about the fact that untold millions had ingested the fat of a sacred animal. Millions did not rush to seek penances and purifications. In 1857, the mere rumor that Indian soldiers were to be issued ammunition greased with pork and cow fat had driven tens of thousands of them into a desperate rebellion where vast numbers perished. In the 1980s, there was barely a ripple. Yet this was supposed to be a society (if the “religious” theories of caste discrimination were true) that held religious purity as its highest value and organized its economic and social life accordingly. Even if food taboos had fallen however, social discrimination and resentment persisted. Caste-based or ethnic political parties have won large votes in the elections year after year. No mainstream political party can now ignore the caste, religious, or linguistic affiliation of the voters in the constituencies where it is running.

So how then can we understand the long life of “caste”? I suggest that we stop looking at the many different classifications in human society and instead focus on what is common to tribes, ethnic groups, racial groups and castes: they are “bounded communities” and they all distinguish their members from those of other communities or ethnic groups.. Understanding begins by looking at how membership is decided: who gets in the club? Who is kicked out? Clubs admit members on many different criteria – what is important is that they all have ‘boundaries’ determined by rules of membership. Let me end with a provocative quote from Fredrik Barth: we should study “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”

Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

Climate in Context Conference Report

July 6, 2021

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Conference Report

By Raymond Hyser

The Climate in Context Conference took place on April 22 & 23, 2021. To view recordings of sessions, visit our virtual conference page.

Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

The first panel of the conference was a roundtable composed of five graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin’s History Department. Although temporally and geographically diverse in their areas of focus, each panelist engaged with environmental issues in their research. For each of their presentations, they were tasked with discussing how climate change intersects with their own work.

In his presentation, “An Upwelling of Stone: Climate Change and Infrastructure Agendas in Early Modern India,” Jonathan Seefeldt discussed Rajsamand, a large-scale precolonial dam in the present-day western Indian state of Rajasthan built between 1662 to 1676 AD. Using Rajsamand, Seefeldt problematized the broadly-conceived notion that these massive infrastructure projects were projections of kingly power by highlighting that the dam’s construction was less a prestige project than a response to failed monsoons, unusual regional aridity, and mounting social strain.

Diana Heredia-López’s presentation, “Cultivating Parasitism: Early Modern Insect Crops and the Limits of Commodification,” advocated for the need to investigate the different manifestations of parasitism throughout the Plantationocene and the non-linear trajectories of plantation agriculture by exploring the seventeenth-century project to scale-up the production of cochineal in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Jesse Ritner’s paper, “Skiing in Variable Conditions: Climate Adaptation, Profitability, and Repercussions,” examined how modern ski resorts used highly profitable snow-making technologies to adapt to variable climatic conditions that caused inconsistent or insufficient snowfall for ski resorts. Through the creation of consistent snowfall, these technologies were supposed to make skiing more accessible, but the reliance on artificial snow production ultimately exacerbated disparities within the ski industry.

In “Drafting Blueprints: Critiquing the Past to Fight Climate Injustice Today,” Micaela Valadez’s presentation explored the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, to critique the historiography of the organization as being unbalanced and not contending with the organization’s decision to not use the rhetoric of race or class when agitating for change. In doing so, she argued that if historians are to help in the current climate justice movement, they need to divert their attention to understanding how communities of color fight against environmental and climate injustice.

Brooks Winfree’s talk, “African Americans, Slavery, and the Long History of Environmental Degradation in the Cotton South,” advocated for historians to consider slavery and enslaved people’s interest in forging alternative understandings of the land by considering how the cotton-based plantation zone of the nineteenth-century Gulf South became a contested site of competing ideas of environmental use.

Dr. Mary Mendoza from Pennsylvania State University provided commentary on the five presentations. She commended the historians for considering a wide range of issues in the complex relationships between people and the environment in the context of climate change. She pressed each of the presenters to dig deeper into how diverse peoples adapted to and responded to changing environments and climates. Dr. Mendoza also stressed the importance of looking at how environments mediate relationships between people as they compete for natural resources.

Session II: Historicizing Climate

In the second session of the conference, four scholars examined the historical ways of knowing climate in temporally and geographically different contexts. Dr. Clark L. Alejandrino’s presentation, “Beyond Numbers: Knowing Typhoons in Late Imperial China,” argued against the fetish for numbers that dominates the study of past storms and, to some extent, historical climatology. He argued that historians need to take seriously the diverse, non-numeric ways that people along the southern coast of China recognized, understood, and conceived typhoons in the past.

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s talk, “The Anthropocene and Epistemological Colonialism: The 18^th-Century Spanish American Origins of Humboldt’s Global Histories of the Earth and Climate Change,” critiqued the historiography of Alexander von Humboldt and his role in creating the intellectual genealogies of the Anthropocene. While Humboldt played an important role in spreading environmentalism throughout North America and Europe, he largely erased both the physical and intellectual communities he interacted with in Latin America.

In “Measuring by Proxy,” Dr. Melissa Charenko explored how scientists’ use of climate proxies, preserved physical characteristics of past climates that stand in for direct meteorological measurements, constrained and compelled what they thought about climate’s past and future. She focused on predictions derived from tree rings in the 1920s and the predictive limitations of pollen analysis in the 1980s given the unprecedented future of global climate change.

Dr. Deborah Coen’s presentation, “Degrees of Vulnerability: Why We Need a Feminist History of Climate Science,” discussed the discourse surrounding the diverse concepts of human vulnerability that has developed since the 1970s and hypothesized that this evolving discourse reveals the influence of the global feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. She advocates that a history of the science of climate vulnerability should attend to the presence of this past, the living legacy of two centuries of efforts to separate the knowing human subject from the human object of geophysical influence.

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

In the third session of the conference, the invited scholars analyzed the causes and consequences of the climate crisis with a focus on the intimate connections between fossil fuels, race, colonialism, and capitalism. Dr. Christopher Sellers’s talk, entitled “Gathering Clouds over Petropolis: A Prolegomena,” focused on a single historical thread within the anthropogenesis of climate change: the oil industry. Centered on two locales, the eastern coast of Texas around Houston and the southern coast of Veracruz in Mexico, Sellers offered more local and human scales of historical action that explored how corporations, governments, and other institutions created and sustained the material conduits that have provided for the world’s growing petroleum needs over the last century.

In Dr. Andreas Malm’s presentation, he discussed the book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism that he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. The book is the first study that critically engages with the far right’s role in the current climate crisis and how fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. The racist legacy of fossil fuels has led to the far-right’s defense of the fossil fuel industry and their anti-climate change policies.

Dr. Andrew Curley’s talk, “The Cene Scene: Modernization Myths, Navajo Coal Development, and the Making of Arizona,” Curley scrutinized the “cene” narratives of writing history within larger geological frameworks and stressed the importance of Indigenous understandings of temporality in relation to water resources in the American Southwest. When considering the “cenes,” we must ask what future is enabled for indigenous people when we understand all of time through these broad geological and geopolitical lenses. One of his main points was that the metrics and theorizations of our current geological era must account for the struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, and there must be space for demands for decolonization and abolition in climate debates.

Dr. Victor Seow, in his presentation, “States of Second Nature,” examined the interrelationship between the state and nature. The role of the state, while not ignored in studies of climate, is often pushed to the background. Seow argued that modern states play an active role in engendering environmental change and that we need to extend our inquiries beyond the capitalist systems that are often the points of focus. He ended with a discussion of turning toward a statist solution to the climate crisis, a crisis that modern states were complicit in.

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

In the fourth session of the conference, five scholars presented their ideas on how the historical profession, and academia in general, can be more responsive to the climate crisis. Dr. Andrea Gaynor’s presentation, “We Use the Living Earth to Make Our Histories,” argued that historians often engage in disavowing the problems of climate change and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. She advocated that historians have important roles to play through modifying how we conduct our professional work and acting to modify the institutional and wider social frameworks that we operate within. She followed up with concrete suggestions that included the digitization of archives to reduce research travel and hosting low-carbon conferences through virtual participation and catering choices.

Dr. J. T. Roane’s talk, “Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane,” Roane explored the strong relationship between Black communities and waterscapes in the Tidewater region of Virginia. With the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century, Black people were increasingly excluded from the waterscapes that played such vital roles to Black communities.

In “Louisiana: Race, Justice, and the Ecological Legacies of the Plantation Economy,” Dr. Justin Hosbey illustrated how the humanitarian crisis triggered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed the racial violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader American South. He analyzed how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans has been transformed by post-Katrina redevelopment policies and that these reconstruction projects can be read as anti-Black spatial tactics.

Dr. Paul N. Edwards’ presentation, “Writing History into the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report,” discussed his work as one of the few social scientists working on the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report and the challenges of integrating historical research into the IPCC Assessment Report.

Dr. Dolly Jørgensen’s talk, “Isn’t all Environmental Humanities ‘Environmental Humanities in Practice’?,” followed Edwards’ and chronicled how after she and Dr. Franklin Ginn took over as co-editors of the Environmental Humanities journal in January 2020 they worked to make the journal more inclusive of environmental humanities practices. As part of this effort, they introduced a new category of journal article, “Environmental Humanities in Practice,” and examined the tension in this decision to develop a separate category of scholarship geared toward outreach.

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

In the conference’s fifth session, five scholars considered the public-facing aspects of their work and how work about climate history, climate change, and environmental humanities gets translated to the public. Dr. D. O. McCullough’s talk, “Specific Constraints for a Universal Challenge: Navigating Resources and Space to Create a History of Climate Science Exhibition,” illustrated the challenges and possibilities of using museum exhibits to communicate the history of climate science and offered several suggestions for so effectively. He advocated for curators of history of climate science exhibitions to draw their narratives from the objects available for display, to treat their own institutions as artifacts to model critical reflection about past practices in meteorology and climate, and to foreground museum space and audience in the design process.

Dr. Bethany Wiggin’s presentation, “When Will It Be Over? Water, Flood, Toxics, and the Duration of Colonial Legacies in Philadelphia,” explored climate impacts as ongoing colonial relations and explored the coloniality of climate change through a series of interrelated public humanities projects developed in Philadelphia amidst flash floods, refinery explosions, and school children’s hopes and dreams for Philadelphia in 2100.

In Dr. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s talk, “Indian Ocean Current,” he discussed the “Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives,” an exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art that he co-curated with Salim Currimjee. The exhibit integrated material on climate change, ocean science, and the crisis of fisheries with perspectives from six contemporary artists from around the western Indian Ocean World.

Dr. Tom Chandler and Dr. Adam Clulow’s presentation, “Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space,” spoke about how the Virtual Angkor Project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor, the largest settlement complex of the preindustrial world, at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence in Southeast Asia. They highlighted the long development of the project, the challenges involved in modelling the historical environment, and the question of climate variability and the decline of Angkor.

Raymond Hyser is a third-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. His research interests include the intertwining histories of science, agriculture, and the environment in trans-imperial spaces, particularly within the British Empire, during the nineteenth century. He also has a growing interest in world history and digital humanities. His current research traces the agricultural knowledge networks of coffee cultivation between the West Indies and South Asia during the long nineteenth century.

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Virtual Conference

May 26, 2021

April 22-23, 2021
Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

As the culmination of a year-long series of events, this conference brought together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants addressed precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate change across a wide range of eras and areas around the world. Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?

To consult specific conference sessions, use the links below:

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

Opening Remarks

Daina Ramey Berry
Chairperson of the History Department & Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Bodian
Director of the Institute for Historical Studies & Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Land Acknowledgement

Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (Mapuche)
Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Conference Theme Introduction

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Session I. Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Mary E. Mendoza (Commentator), Pennsylvania State University

“An Upwelling of Stone: Climate Change and Infrastructure Agendas in Early Modern India”
Jonathan Seefeldt, University of Texas at Austin

Large-scale precolonial dams in South Asia have been persistently interpreted as prestige projects primarily concerned with royal legitimation. I am interested in thinking through the merits of this characterization and the histories it perhaps forecloses. To do so, I consider the case of Rajsamand in the semi-arid hills of the present-day western Indian state of Rajasthan. Built from 1662 to 1676 AD, Rajsamand remains one of the largest still-active precolonial embankment complexes in South Asia. The reservoir was the first major infrastructure project of Raj Singh I, a particularly enterprising regional monarch and a frequent thorn in the side of the Mughal empire. I consider what specific factors were projects such as Rajsamand—completed at tremendous expense with significant contributions from lower-level landholders—responding to other than a broadly-conceived, millennia-spanning, subcontinental-wide desire to project kingly power? To begin to answer this, I focus briefly on an unusual, understudied meteorological catalogue from the same period. This text, in alignment with the emerging consensus from proxy data, suggests the years surrounding Rajsamand’s construction were a time of failed monsoons, unusual aridity, and mounting social strain. I argue the vernacular texts on hand combine with the remarkable built footprint of Rajsamand and its sibling projects to present a picture of a precolonial state deeply involved in day-to-day efforts to stabilize the whims of the monsoon and sustain food production.

“Cultivating Parasitism: Early Modern Insect Crops and the Limits of Commodification”
Diana Heredia-López, University of Texas at Austin

This paper explores the implications of using the Plantationocene as a framework to explore the early environmental transformations in the Americas. It focuses on a seventeenth-century project to scale up the production of cochineal in the Yucatan peninsula. Cochineal, a red dyestuff endemic to southern Mexico, constituted one of the largest revenues for the Spanish empire. For more than three hundred years this dye’s production remained in the hands of indigenous households who knew how to maintain the parasitic relationship between the prickly pear cacti (Opuntia spp.) and the dye-bearing insect, Dactylopius coccus. The parasitic nature of cochineal cultivation contrasts with the inadvertent fostering of parasites and pests in modern day plantations. This paper thus highlights the need to investigate the different manifestations of parasitism throughout the Plantationocene as well as the non-linear trajectories of plantation agriculture.

“Technological Ambivalence: Skiers and the History of Climate Solutions”
Jesse Ritner, University of Texas at Austin

Ski resorts sell images of skiers in waist-deep snow. But the vision is a mirage. Most people ski on groomed beginner and intermediate runs. And most of these slopes are not covered with real snow. Rather, they are covered with artificial snow. This paper argues that the U.S. ski industry used snowmaking to adapt to variable climates that provide insufficient snow for modern ski resorts. The technology proved highly profitable. Yet, snowmaking, and the development that came from it, had both latent and manifest repercussions that influenced class and racial relations. The paper concludes by discussing how studying this highly specific climate adapting technology can help us think through the implementation and ramifications of new technologies that will likely be used as the planet continues to warm.

“Racial Capitalism and Climate Justice: Historical Perspectives on Environmental Racism in Texas”
Micaela Valadez, University of Texas at Austin

This short paper will briefly cover the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, a mostly ethnic Mexican organization founded in 1974. I critique the historiography of the organization as unbalanced in the favor of COPS earliest victories without contending with the legacies of their work into the 2000s and their decision to not use the rhetoric of race or class when confronting people in power. Overall, I argue that if historians can be of any use to the current climate justice movement we have to divert our attention to understanding how communities of color fight against environmental and climate injustice. We have to consider the ways that the state responds to organizations like COPS that include giving in to their demands and allocating funds to prevent environmental disasters and hazards. Finally, we have to understand how these kinds of relationships between organizations and the state divert attention away from the systemic and structural sources of the very problems that COPS and groups like them were meant to confront.

“African Americans, Slavery, and the Long History of Environmental Degradation on the Gulf Coast”
Brooks Winfree, University of Texas at Austin

This think piece considers how the cotton-based plantation zone of the nineteenth-century Gulf South became a site of contestation over competing ideas of environmental use. White enslavers envisioned a vast and extremely profitable belt of cotton cultivation stretching from Alabama to eastern Texas, cultivated with the labor of enslaved African Americans on land appropriated from Native people. Even before their arrival in the region, enslaved people knew of the horrific laboring conditions of the “Cotton Kingdom,” where enslavers would compel them to labor long hours in one of the harshest physical environments in the continental United States. Yet the “Cotton Kingdom’s” economic success depended on enslaved people’s intimate familiarity with the land and their knowledge of agricultural techniques. Ultimately, the enslaved forged alternative understandings of the environment around them by incorporating the physical world in religious practices, interpreting the new landscape in ways that privileged African, rather than Euro-American, land uses, and using the features of the terrain to secure their freedom. This piece concludes by calling on scholars to more seriously consider slavery and enslaved people’s interest in forging alternative understandings of the land as key themes for environmental histories.

Opening Keynote Address: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

“The Reindeer and the End of the World: Apocalypse, Climate, and Soviet Dreams”

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Bathsheba Demuth

Session II. Historicizing Climate

Megan Raby (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Beyond Numbers: Knowing Typhoons in Late Imperial China”
Clark L. Alejandrino, Trinity College Hartford

Numbers dominate the study of past storms in particular, and to some extent historical climatology in general. We need to count the number of storms and we need to measure how strong they were on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Historical climatologists have subjected documentary evidence for storms, such as those from China, to the “tyranny of numbers” with some refusing to recognize records that have no barometric readings or wind speed measurements. I argue in this paper that we need to go beyond this fetish for numbers from modern meteorology and take seriously the very different ways that people along the South China coast recognized, understood, and conceived of typhoons in the past. One need not have measurable typhoons or a precise count of their number to write a history of typhoons.

“Degrees of Vulnerability: Why We Need a Feminist History of Climate Science”
Deborah Coen, Yale University

Knowledge for the Anthropocene is necessarily knowledge of our own vulnerability. But what kind of a scientific object is human vulnerability? Diverse concepts of human vulnerability to climate change have developed since the 1970s at a nexus between disciplines that might otherwise never have encountered each other: atmospheric science, critical geography, political ecology, development economics, human rights law, and feminist epistemology. While no consensus has been reached on the concept’s meaning, the efforts to define it have constituted a vital and necessary conversation about the role of values in scientific inquiry. Viewed historically, I hypothesize, this evolving discourse reveals the influence of the global feminist movement of the 1980s and ‘90s. Echoing Indigenous philosophers, feminist practitioners of “vulnerability science” have rejected the fetishization of the autonomy of the scientific researcher, insisting instead that relationships of interdependence are foundational to knowledge-making. They have posited the performative character of knowledge of human-environment interactions and the co-production of science and communities of scientific knowers. Yet the scientific institutions they work within exert constant pressure to deny these relations of interdependence. Taking a deeper historical view, we can recognize this resistance as a historical legacy of the Kantian fiction of the autonomy of the moral and epistemic subject. A history of the science of climate vulnerability should attend to the presence of this past, the living legacy of two centuries of efforts to separate the knowing human subject from the human object of geophysical influence. For our vulnerability to climate is co-extensive with our capacity to know climate, by exposing ourselves to new experiences of the atmosphere and new relations of interdependence with other beings.

“The Anthropocene and Epistemological Colonialism: The 18th-Century Spanish American Origins of Humboldt’s Global Histories of the Earth and Climate Change”
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

“Measuring Climate by Proxy”
Melissa Charenko, Michigan State University & IHS Fellow

Climate proxies are the preserved physical characteristic of past climates that stand in for direct meteorological measurements. These natural recorders of climatic variability are ubiquitous in studies of climate since they are some of the only ways to determine climatic conditions over the vast stretches of Earth’s history where no instrumental measurements or record-keeping exist. This paper examines how scientists’ use of proxies constrained and compelled what they thought about climate’s past and future. It focuses on predictions possible from tree rings in the 1920s as well as pollen analysis’ limited ability to predict in the 1980s given the “unprecedented” future that awaited because of global warming.

FRIDAY, APRIL 23

Opening Remarks

David Mohrig
Associate Dean for Research, Jackson School of Geosciences
University of Texas of Austin

Session III. Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Tracie Matysik (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Skin and Fuel: Some Episodes from the Fossilization of Whiteness”
Andreas Malm, Lund University

What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change? In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, authored by Dr. Malm and the Zetkin Collective (Verso Books, May 2021), presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. No one loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. Now right-wing forces have risen to the surface, some professing to have the solution—closing borders to save the nation as the climate breaks down. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up. For this conference, Dr. Malm has made available for pre-circulation Chapter 9 of White Skin, Black Fuel, entitled “Skin and Fuel.”

“The Cene Scene: Modernization Myths, Navajo Coal Development, and the Making of Arizona”
Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

“States of Second Nature”
Victor Seow, Harvard University

“Gathering Clouds over Petropolis: A Prolegomena”
Christopher Sellers, Stony Brook University & IHS Fellow

Global climate change has spurred notions like the Anthropocene that have further thickened the Western academy’s grasp of worldwide environmental change, but often with limited regard for more local and human scales of historical action, where the climate crisis itself was born. I present here a prolegomena for a book that seeks to reckon with how multi-scalar as well as political the human making of the climate crisis has been. To do so, it carves out a narrower focus, tightening its lenses on the global and the local as well as more intermediate scales to better illuminate their connections, parallels, and interactions. I tease out a single historical thread within the anthropogenesis of climate change, of that one industry responsible for more greenhouse emissions than any other in human history: oil. To coherently render the local faces of this industry’s more over-arching history, my narrative centers on two locales: the eastern coast of Texas, around Houston, and the southern coast of Veracruz, in Mexico. Set in very similar landscapes along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, both became centers for the global oil industry, one in the Global North and the other in the Global South. While ranging upward to state, regional, national, and transnational and global scales, I repeatedly return to these local places. Their transformations offer a concrete window on how corporations, governments, and other institutions created and sustained the material conduits that have slaked the world’s growing thirst for petroleum over the last century. And the tensions and conflicts emerging in or implicating these places, environmental and otherwise, illuminate the politics through which oil’s ascent in these two nations was enabled as well as challenged. Probing these challenges at the local as well as the regional, national, and global levels, I explore where historical precedents for an effective climate politics may lie.

Session IV. Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Erika Bsumek (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“We Use the Living Earth to Make Our Histories”
Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia

Academic historians, among many others, have failed to fully confront the climate and biodiversity crises, often engaging in disavowal of the problems and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. There are, however, several steps we can take to reconfigure our work for equity in a carbon-constrained world, many of which were outlined in a working paper on sustainable history drafted by a group of Australian historians in 2019. Building on the work of these authors and others, here I argue that historians have important roles to play in disrupting disavowal of the climate and biodiversity crises: by daily conducting our professional work as though we know the truth about planetary collapse, by acting to modify the institutional and wider social frameworks within which we operate, and by writing about the past as always a more-than-human unfolding.

“Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane”
J. T. Roane, Arizona State University

“Louisiana: Race, Justice, and the Ecological Legacies of the Plantation Economy”
Justin Hosbey, Emory University

The humanitarian disaster triggered by Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial
violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader U.S. South. In the immediate wake of the storm’s destruction of the U.S. Gulf Coast, the state of Louisiana transformed New Orleans’ public schools into privatized charter schools and commissioned the destruction of the majority of the city’s public housing. Drawing on ethnographic field research between 2013 and 2019, this article explores the social impact of this privatization by analyzing how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans have been transformed by post-Katrina redevelopment policies. Using geographer Clyde Woods’ analysis of New Orleans as a plantation geography, I mobilize critical work in Black geographies, Black studies, and cultural anthropology to argue that these reconstruction projects can be read as anti-Black spatial tactics that continue to unmoor low income and working class Black New Orleanians from their communities into the present.

“Writing History into the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report”
Paul N. Edwards, Stanford University

“Isn’t all Environmental Humanities ‘Environmental Humanities in Practice’?”
Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger

When I and Franklin Ginn (University of Bristol, UK) took over as co-editors of the journal Environmental Humanities in January 2020, we began having discussions about how to make the journal more inclusive of environmental humanities practices, including the many community, outreach, and pedagogy projects that our practitioners are involved in. As part of that effort, we recently launched a category of article called “Environmental Humanities in Practice” targeting scholarship and sharing of experiences about interventionist work. Yet there is a tension in this decision to make a separate category of scholarship about outreach: Isn’t all environmental humanities really “environmental humanities in practice”?

Session V. Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Joan Neuberger (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Specific Constraints for a Universal Challenge: Navigating Resources and Space to Create a History of Climate Science Exhibition”
D. O. McCullough, American Philosophical Society

Communicating the history of climate science holds promise as a way to help build public consensus around the climate crisis that matches the scientific consensus. This paper explores the challenges and possibilities of using museum exhibits to communicate the history of climate science and offers several suggestions for doing so effectively. Curators of history of climate science exhibitions should draw their narratives from the objects available for display, treat their own institutions as artifacts to model critical reflection about past practices in meteorology and climate, and foreground museum space and audience in the design process. These approaches can help exhibit designers maximize the potential of their particular resources to help solve this universal problem.

“When Will It Be Over? Water, Flood, Toxics, and the Duration of Colonial Legacies in Philadelphia”
Bethany Wiggin, University of Pennsylvania

In the absence of a direct hit from a super storm like Hurricane Sandy, Philadelphians are more likely to ask of climate change, “When Will It Begin?” rather than the question this paper poses, “When Will It Be Over?” By asking “When Will It Be Over?” this paper foregrounds climate impacts as ongoing colonial relations and explores the coloniality of climate change through a series of inter-related public humanities projects developed in Philadelphia amidst flash floods, refinery explosions, and school children’s hopes and dreams for Philadelphia at 2100. In raising questions about climate change’s origins and progress, it considers historical responsibility and asks for repair, including forms of research and teaching appropriate for the climate changed. It explores how best, in the words of the organizers of this conference, “we” might “go public.” Asking “When Will It Be Over” reminds us that we are working in the wake of Atlantic slavery, and it suggests the need for publicly engaged, anti-racist historical work that spans critique and action.

“Indian Ocean Current”
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College

“Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives” was an exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art in the spring and fall of 2020. The exhibit integrated material on climate change, ocean science, and the crisis of fisheries with the perspectives of six contemporary artists. This combination reflected the curators’ commitment to inject climate change into diverse conversations. Inspired by this goal, the South African artist Penny Siopis, did two new works for the show, “Warm Waters” and “She Breathes Water.”

“Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space”
Tom Chandler, Monash University & Adam Clulow, University of Texas at Austin

The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. For approximately 500 years from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, the Khmer empire dominated the politics and economy of Southeast Asia. Centered on modern day Cambodia, it extended its influence across a vast swath of territory, encompassing most of present-day Thailand and the southern provinces of Laos and Vietnam. At its peak, the city of Angkor, which had an estimated 750,000 inhabitants dispersed over an interconnected, hydraulic landscape, was “thelargest settlement complex of the preindustrial world.” In the decade since it commenced, the Virtual Angkor project has evolved organically to encompass new technologies and approaches in an effort to present a comprehensive reconstruction of the city and its inhabitants. In this talk we explore the long development of the project, which scaled up from a single elephant to over 20,000 agents moving through a fully realized city, the challenges involved in modelling the environment and the question of climate variability and the decline of Angkor.

Concluding Remarks

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Closing Keynote Address: Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Naomi Oreskes

Convened by Dr. Erika M. Bsumek, Associate Professor of History and Dr. Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History. Presented by the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Generously co-sponsored by:

Statements, Resources and Events Responding to the Mass Shootings in Atlanta

March 22, 2021

From the editors: Not Even Past joins the wider University of Texas community in our horror at the recent mass shootings in Atlanta. We express our solidarity with the messages and statements below and have included details of important events and workshops focused on confronting anti-Asian racism. The events in Atlanta cannot be separated from a long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States that has been exacerbated over the past year. This page includes resources and books that shed light on this long history. It is an evolving resource that will be frequently updated.

Messages and Statements

To the Asian American students, staff, faculty of UT and beyond:

You are loved and cared for in this moment of heightened racist and misogynistic violence against our communities. The anguish, sadness, vulnerability, and rage you feel following the massacre in Atlanta demand full recognition. Contained in them is a truth not only about the pandemic era, but about the making of the United States. Asian Americans have long been enlisted as the scapegoats who bring to fruition reactionary nationalism, patriarchy, displaced economic resentment. These goals were achieved by rendering Asians in the United States perpetually “alien” and therefore unworthy of citizenship and entry to the country during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During World War II they took the form of the unconstitutional imprisonment of Japanese Americans. As de-industrialization led to economic and urban decline during the 1980s, these goals were exercised against Asian immigrants who were said to be stealing American jobs. In the post-9/11 period the goal of creating a new and expanded homeland security state was achieved through the vilification of and violent attacks against those of South and Central Asian descent, particularly those who hail from Islamic-majority countries.

That Asian Americans are again being used as scapegoats during another watershed moment should not come as a surprise to anyone. This is especially true when we consider that the former president of the United States, with his proclamations of COVID-19 as the “China Virus,” played a key role in recruiting Asian Americans for this role. Some will try to argue that this was not an act of racism but of free speech or “individual resentment.”Similarly, there are those who will try to convince you that the killings in Atlanta were motivated by something other than white supremacy, racism and sexism— as if a discussion of mental instability should eclipse the discussion of intersectional, structural oppression. These disavowals point to another recurring aspect of the historical injuries inflicted on Asian Americans: our oppression is always doubted, if not outright denied. Our oppression is too often rendered invisible and unimportant. The point of this short message is to assert just the opposite. The Center for Asian American Studies recognizes that the violence we experience is real and unrelenting. As best we can we, and in the most appropriate ways possible, our goal is to provide support for our community, especially for those who feel alone and unrecognized in this moment. Here are some initial steps/resources are listed below.

Sincerely yours,

Center for Asian American Studies
Department of Asian Studies
Center for East Asian Studies
Asian/Asian American Faculty Staff Association
Center for Women’s & Gender Studies
South Asian Institute
LGBTQ Studies
Latina/o Studies Department
Black Studies Department
Native American & Indigenous Studies

This last year has been punctuated with incidents of hate directed against the Asian and Asian American community and ending in the terrible events in Atlanta on March 16, 2021. Our hearts ache today with our Asian and Asian American students, faculty, staff, and friends.

We in the Department of History join the Center for Asian American Studies in calling for recognition of this violence and the deep wounds inflicted by Anti-Asian racism and hate. As a department and as historians, we reaffirm our commitment to teaching the long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States and to exposing the deep roots of prejudice.

We stand today and always with members of the Asian and Asian American community and we express our solidarity with the statements made by the Center for Asian American Studies and the American Historical Association. There is much that can be done and learned from this terrible moment.

Sincerely,

Department of History

Not Even Past will link to additional statements here:

Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

AHA Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans (March 2021)

Statement from the Association for Asian American Studies

Statement from the Association for Asian Studies

Events and Community Resources

Confronting Anti-Asian Racism: A Bystander Intervention Workshop

When: Monday 3/29 @ 1:30PM or Tuesday 3/30 @ 2PM

Registration: https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1B5zaNuhacugGz4

Description: This digital workshop is open to all current UT students, staff and faculty with limited capacity via ZOOM. Confronting Anti-Asian Racism is a 1.5 hour interactive workshop that will lead participants through the history of anti-Asian xenophobia in the US as it relates to the present day Asian American experience. This historical context will provide a foundation for attendees to practice identifying and interrupting anti-Asian bias through the BeVocal bystander intervention model. The workshop requires active participation in small groups and working through real-world scenarios of microaggression and covert/overt anti-Asian racism.

Coordinated by Sahtiya Hammell, UT’s Bystander Intervention Program Coordinator, and Tony Vo, CAAS assistant director.

#StopAsianHate Rally & Vigil

When: April 17 from 4-6pm

Description: Join the rally to #StopAsianHate at Austin City Hall! We stand with Asians across the country in solidarity to condemn anti-Asian racism in all forms. Masks and social distancing required.

Asian Voices @ UT and Community Newsletter
A drop-in group called Asian Voices @ UT meets every Tuesday from 4:45-6:15 p.m. In tangent with the group, there is also a newsletter with mental health and community resources that is identity-affirming. Students can sign up for the newsletter, which includes information on how to sign up for the group’s Zoom.

Virtual Office Hours via The Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS)
Amy Tao-Foster of CMHC has traditionally held office hours at CAAS where students can drop in for support and community, or ask questions about mental health and other resources. She will hold office hours from 1-1:50 p.m. on Tuesdays. Students who are interested can email Amy to schedule a Zoom meeting for office hours.

Counseling Appointments for Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) Students
Staff and faculty can also refer students directly to Amy Tao-Foster as the Diversity Counseling and Outreach Specialist. If students are hesitant to call CMHC to request an appointment, they can be referred directly to Amy at 512-475-6943. If she is unable to answer, they can leave a message with their name, EID, and phone number, and Amy will be able to call them back to set up a phone or video counseling appointment.

Coping with Racial Trauma
Dr. Connesia Handford, also holds a workshop series for students of color on Mondays from noon to 1 p.m., where they can learn helpful tools and techniques for coping with racial trauma. Students can sign up here.

Resources

Readings on the history of anti-Asian racism and how to be an anti-racist ally, compiled by Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder)

Antiracist Toolkit, focused on the action areas of educating and assessing ourselves; examining and revising our work; and enacting change. Created by the Department of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Coronavirus and Racism: Asian-Americans in the Crossfire,” July 2020 episode of Asia Matters podcast featuring AAS President Christine R. Yano (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and Jennifer Pan (Stanford University)

Christine R. Yano, “Racing the Pandemic: Anti-Asian Racism amid COVID-19,” from The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi and published by the AAS Asia Shorts book series

“Black and Asian American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List,” created by Black Women Radicals

“Confronting Prejudice: How to Protect Yourself and Help Others,” from OnlinePsychology@Pepperdine, the Online Master of Psychology program from Pepperdine University

Documenting Anti-Asian racism

“In response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020. The center tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders throughout the United State”

https://stopaapihate.org/

Podcasts and conversations

This is Democracy – Episode 140: Asian American History and Exclusion

A conversation with Dr Madeline Hsu

Books – The Long History of Anti-Asian Racism

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back—with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520256941/driven-out

The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion

This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520219502/the-politics-of-prejudice

Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear

The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.

Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1508-yellow-peril

Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War

Through intellectual vigor, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

At once political and deeply personal, Cho’s analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding—and remembering—the impact of the Korean War.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/haunting-the-korean-diaspora

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history.

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Asian American Experience

DH in an Online World: Building a Digital Humanities Portfolio for the Classroom

February 5, 2021

by Adam Clulow

Digital Humanities is a capacious term that means different things to different people. For me, Digital Humanities is at its best when it emphasizes “making, connecting, interpreting, and collaborating”.[1] When I did my doctorate, Digital Humanities was just emerging as a set of skills and I paid very little attention to it. I wrote my first book much as a scholar might have done at any point in the past century by diving deep into archives and thinking of a largely academic audience. The key shift came for me when I became stuck as I attempted to write my second book.

My research project at this time focused on the Amboyna (Amboina) conspiracy case, a controversial legal trial that took place on a remote island in Indonesia but involved a global list of characters including Japanese mercenaries, English officials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia and local polities. Because it was so controversial, the case generated thousands of pages of frequently contradictory court records, depositions and other materials. Putting together the different versions of the case creates a dizzying Rashomon- like kaleidoscope of possible interpretations, making reaching any sort of conclusion very difficult.

In 2014, after almost a decade of research on the case, I decided that I had to try something different. My breakthrough came when I noticed that all my students in Australia were talking about a different trial that had taken place some year earlier. What I was witnessing was the remarkable worldwide response to the groundbreaking first season of the podcast Serial, which focused on a 1999 murder case in Baltimore. I watched in wonder as students, who were previously reluctant to engage with legal materials, dissected new pieces of evidence, often devoting hour after hour to the details of a decades-old case. The average Serial episode was downloaded over 3 million times and it generated a tremendous response as the public logged vast numbers of hours working through the key pieces of evidence.

Listening to Serial, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something similar (on a far smaller scale) for my classroom, that is make a large quantity of information related to the trial I was working on freely available and see if students would respond in the same way by digging into these sources and putting forward their own conclusions. Working with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, I built an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, designed to do just that. At the heart of the site is an interactive trial engine which places students at the center of the case. To make a complex trial more accessible, we boiled the controversy down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by both sides, the prosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence, related documents and legal commentary from a distinguished trial attorney. In addition, we created a large repository of additional material and documents, which students can work through at their own pace to support their conclusions.

After hundreds of hours of consultation, design, and construction, the website went live in 2016. It was trialed first with multiple classes at Monash University in Australia, then at Brandeis University and finally at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Students worked through the materials, completed the trial engine, and then arrived at class ready to debate and defend their conclusions. When these tests were complete, we made the website publicly available, and since then thousands of visitors from across the world have worked through it, with their verdicts all recorded in our database.

The site had an immediate impact on students, pulling them deep into complicated material and stimulating impassioned and productive debate in big lecture courses and seminars. Although some students tossed off a verdict after racing through the materials, many others confided to me that they had become engrossed by the details of the trial, trawling through the sources and coming back again and again to key points.

As Digital Humanities tools go the Amboyna website is not especially sophisticated or technologically demanding, but it changed my approach to both the case and the classroom more generally. First, having dozens of pairs of new eyes examining familiar material proved a revelation for me. By homing in on points that I had dismissed too quickly and forcing me to defend lazy assumptions in class, these students helped me think through the mass of evidence. Second, it changed the way I taught. Trying and retrying the case in seminar after seminar was one of the most satisfying experiences of my teaching career and it made me want to incorporate such exercises into all my classrooms. Over the long term, the experience convinced me that I wanted to focus my energies and time on DH resources built for the classroom that could be used to enrich my teaching and then pushed out to other teachers looking for reliable, vetted digital content.

This ethos motivated a second DH project, Virtual Angkor, which was built from the ground up for the classroom. Constructed by a team of Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians at Monash University in Melbourne, Flinders University in Adelaide and the University of Texas at Austin across a period of more than ten years, the Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. Although it has been used for research, Virtual Angkor was constructed specifically for the classroom and can be used at both secondary and tertiary level. It deploys advanced Virtual Reality technology, 3D Modeling and Animation to bring a premodern city to life, to place students on its streets and allow them to interact with a historical environment.

Most Asian history survey courses make reference to Angkor but the standard black and white illustrations featured in textbooks make it difficult for students to gain a sense of the scale and grandeur of the city. The Virtual Angkor project allows educators to place students inside the Angkor Wat complex, to view the famous bas-reliefs first hand without leaving their seats, to sail down one of the hundreds of canals crisscrossing the city, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across Southeast Asia and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions enter, exit, and circulate around the complex. The result is to draw students into a virtual world and then to use this experience as a jumping off point to engage with primary sources.

Both my Amboyna Conspiracy Trial project and Virtual Angkor were driven by faculty, that is by professors like me with an interest in DH and some funding. In 2020, I wanted to try something different: to see if a group of students could develop their own DH resources in the form of historically-based, educationally focused video games. The experiment was driven, first, by an awareness of the dramatic growth of the video games industry in recent years and, second, by a sense that History departments needed to engage more closely with what has become a key conduit for students in our classes.

At current estimates, video games are a $120 billion industry and one that is growing rapidly every year. For university students in particular, video games are pervasive. According to surveys, more than 70% of college students play video games, even more watch gaming content streamed on a range of services and the overwhelming majority report some exposure to video games across multiple platforms. At the same time, video games have become an increasingly important gateway for majors. Many students who enter our classrooms come to History via historically-based games which proliferate across multiple platforms.

Historians can engage with video games in two basic ways. First, we can deploy them much as a film or a novel to interrogate popular understandings of particular topics, moments or figures. Second, we can use them as a learning tool by asking students to design their own games. This was our approach. After an open call for applications followed by interviews, we recruited four students, Ashley Gelato, Michael Rader, Izellah Wang and Alex Aragon, for a semester long Digital Humanities internship focused on game design, story-telling, programming, and history.

The game to be developed was constrained by a set of guidelines. First, it had to be built around a specific historical episode, the Akō incident (also known as the story of the 47 ronin). Second, the game had to have clear educational payoff that could provide a window into the difficult life of a low-ranking samurai family in the eighteenth century. Third, the game had to be developed on zero budget, using only free, publicly available platforms and software without purchasing game assets.

The result of the experiment was impressive: a deep learning experience for the students, who combined extensive research, multiple disciplines and different technologies, to produce a fully functional game, Ako: A Tale of Loyalty, that was hooked to contemporary scholarship. By the end of the semester in May 2020, the game was distributed to beta-testers who provided feedback. In September 2020, it was used for the first time in a university setting as an educational resource and it will soon be released on commercial platforms where it will be available for download at no charge.

I have other DH projects but the ones described above taught me four key lessons. First, decide what you want to achieve with your DH profile. Having taught at high school and a range of tertiary institutions, I decided I wanted to reach as many teachers and students as possible. For this reason, I built DH resources specifically for the classroom as there is a huge appetite for vetted, scholarly content that is also accessible. Second, the technological hurdle can be as high or as low as you want. Although I have grown accustomed to using bulky Virtual Reality equipment in class, some of my best teaching experiences have been using the Amboyna conspiracy trial website even though this is nothing more sophisticated than a few web pages, some videos and a basic voting system. Third, collaborate always and often. In History, the emphasis is so often on solo-authored publications and this is how we are trained. But DH is done best when you collaborate as widely as possible. This means making connections, working across disciplines, and constantly communicating. For Virtual Angkor, working with Tom Chandler, who teaches in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash has been illuminating, challenging and always exciting. And fourth, don’t be afraid to share your research. For the Amboyna Conspiracy trial website, I was counseled not to put all my material online as it might be used by other scholars or would diffuse the argument of my eventual book. In fact, sharing these resources was the best thing I could possible have done as it sharpened my argument while creating a community of scholars who pushed me to rethink my assumptions. Although I love working by myself in archives with only the sources and my computer, DH can be an antidote to the sometimes isolating nature of our profession. It pushes us to collaborate, to share and to think about how our research can be useful for others. This is why I find Digital Humanities so exciting and why I think it rewards any time you invest in it.

Right now we are, I believe, in a moment of transition when not only faculty but also undergraduate students can produce world-class DH resources like the Ako game that can be developed across a single semester and then shared around the world for use in a range of classrooms. This makes Digital Humanities skills more important that ever before. All of this brings me to one last lesson that has animated the development of my DH portfolio: Just start. You never have all the skills, all the training and all the resources but you can produce something valuable that will be of use. Whereas academic publishing is measured in months or usually years, DH allows radically different timelines. Starting is often the hardest part of DH projects but in a very short space of time your work can reach a wide audience.

[1] Digital_Humanities. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. MIT Press. December 2012.

IHS Workshop: “Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire” by Rupali Warke, University of Texas at Austin

December 15, 2020

In 1707, after the death of the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the power and authority of the Mughals who ruled over the greater part of South Asia for about two hundred years started to disintegrate. The weakening of the imperial center altered the socio-political conditions, which led to the rise of strong regional powers who aspired to fill the political vacuum. The Maratha empire established by Shivaji in 1674 was an important post-Mughal state which grew in this period and posed a formidable challenge to the British political ambitions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Conventionally, historians of early colonial and modern India have viewed the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha state as an assertion of Hindu religious orthodoxy. It has been argued that symbolic acts such as the coronation ceremony of Shivaji popularized the notion of caste and Brahmanical caste hierarchy among the people in an unprecedented way which led to hardening of caste and religious boundaries. This paper will critique and revise the historical interpretations that associate Maratha polity with religious orthodoxy and the Brahmanization of Indian society by highlighting a parallel tradition of Indo-Islamic Sufi discipleship and Dargah worship practiced and patronized by the Maratha aristocrats and the masses.

Rupali Warke earned her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Dr. Warke is a historian of early modern and modern South Asia, specializing in history of gender, colonialism, and political economy. Her other research interests include popular culture and contemporary politics in South Asia. She holds an M.A and M.Phil. in history from Jamia Millia Islamia University, in New Delhi. In 2018, she received a Continuing Fellowship from the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School at UT Austin. In 2016 she won the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Rajendra Vora Fellowship. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies in 2020-2021. Read more about her work here.

Responder:
Donald R. Davis, Jr.
Professor and Chair, Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

November 24, 2020

This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

For more than a decade now I have been researching and teaching about the Amboina (Amboyna) trial. This was an enormously controversial conspiracy case that took place on a remote island in Indonesia but involving a global list of characters including Japanese mercenaries, English officials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia and local polities. In 1623, Dutch authorities accused a group of English East India Company merchants and Japanese soldiers of plotting to seize a Dutch East India Company fort and with it control over the trade in precious spices. The alleged conspirators were arrested, tortured and based on their confessions subsequently executed. By the time the trial concluded, a total of twenty-one men were dead, beheaded by Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) authorities.

The trial is important for two reasons. First, there is a still unresolved question over the guilt or innocence of the alleged conspirators. For close to four hundred years now, scholars and popular writers have been debating just what happened on this island: who was guilty, who was innocent and what it all means. Historians writing in English have generally insisted that no plot existed and hence that the VOC had no basis to execute a group of English merchants and their supposed Japanese collaborators. In contrast, most Dutch historians argue that there was some sort of conspiracy and, because of this, that the Company had every right to take judicial action.

While this debate shows no signs of ending, Amboina is also important for a second reason: it became the centerpiece of a long propaganda campaign waged by the English East India Company that turned what happened on this remote island into a symbol of Dutch treachery, cruelty and betrayal.

The trial

The Amboina case generated a vast archive of court records, depositions and other materials spanning more than five thousand pages. But because so many witnesses were on the payroll of either the Dutch or English companies, the archive offers little clarity about the possible conspiracy and the trial itself. Instead, putting together the different versions of the case creates a dizzying Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of possible interpretations. While working on what would become my book, Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, I decided to develop a specialized teaching website designed to take the case into the classroom.

My impetus for this website came from watching my students talk about a long-concluded trial in a different part of the world. What I was witnessing was the remarkable worldwide response to the groundbreaking first season of the podcast Serial, which focused on a 1999 murder case in Baltimore. Serial became the most downloaded podcast in history, and it generated a tremendous response as the public logged vast numbers of hours working through the key pieces of evidence.

Screen-capture from the website for the first episode of Serial, Season One: Episode 01.

Listening to Serial, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something similar (on a far smaller scale) for my classroom: what would it be like to make primary source documents related to the 1623 trial freely available for students to dig into and interpret, putting forward their own conclusions about what happened? Working with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, I built an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, designed to do just that.

Screen-capture of the homepage of *The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial*.

At the heart of the site is an interactive trial engine which places students at the center of the case. To make a complex trial more accessible, we boiled the controversy down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by both sides, the prosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence, related documents and legal commentary from a distinguished trial attorney. In addition, we created a large repository of additional material and documents, which students can work through at their own pace to support their conclusions.

The site became the centerpiece of classes I taught on the rise of the Dutch and English chartered companies in the seventeenth-century and their competition over precious spices. Students were challenged to work through large quantities of seventeenth-century primary source material online before taking on one of four roles—Barrister (Attorney), Witness, Researcher or Judge—in a comprehensive and competitive examination of the original trial. The exercise produced some of the most exciting classes I have taught. Students pored over the minutiae of the case and came to class prepared to debate their conclusions.

The trial exercise proved so successful in part because it harnessed a familiar genre: True Crime and the dissection of a single criminal case and subsequent trial. Students know this genre intimately, and once they are confronted with an archive of this kind I have found that they tend to dive right in. But Amboina is also important because it seeped into the English popular imagination for decades after the trial concluded. This part, the long legacy of the Amboina trial in print and image, has always been far more difficult to teach.

The long legacy

When news of the case reached Europe around May 1624, it sparked immediate outrage. Passions were inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets on both sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. While both companies pushed their own version of the case, the English East India Company scored the greatest successes. By any measure, the English East India Company waged an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign against its Dutch counterpart. This is brilliantly discussed in Alison Games’ recent book, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, which shows how successive generations of English writers came to invoke “Amboyna as a shorthand to convey cruelty and betrayal without comment or elaboration, so certain were they that their readers would understand the significance of the word.”

The propaganda campaign took many forms. The English East India Company commissioned a “very large picture, wherein is set forth those several lively, largely artificially bloody tortures and executions inflicted upon our people at Amboyna.” But its key instrument was a printed pamphlet, a relatively cheap publication that was printed again and again, often with an illustration of the English being brutally tortured.

The first shots of the pamphlet war were fired by VOC supporters in a short publication, Waerachtich Verhael vande Tidinghen ghecomen wt de Oost-Indien, that was first published in July 1624 and later translated into English as A True Declaration of the News that Came Out of the East Indies. Widely believed to be the work of a senior Dutch official, it denounced the “abominable conspiracy” while offering a measured defense of the legal proceedings. The English Company was quick to respond, commissioning A true relation of the unjust, cruell, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies, by the Neatherlandish gouernour and councel there, which was compiled on the basis of the testimony provided by the handful of survivors of the trial who had made their way to England.

A true relation of the vnivst, crvell, and barbarovs proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies (London: Nathanael Newberry, 1624). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1624b. — *A true relation of the vnivst, crvell, and barbarovs proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies* (London: Nathanael Newberry, 1624), sigs. π1r and B1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1624b.

True Relation proved an enormously successful and durable text. It took a complex trial and turned it into a straightforward and compelling story in which the “unsatiable covetousnesse of the Hollanders” had driven them to engineer a “cruell treacherie to gain the sole trade” in precious spices. It reimagined a disparate and largely undistinguished group of British merchants as pious martyrs united by their Protestant faith and it included a potent woodcut image showing an unnamed English merchant being tortured with water and candles while another kneels in prayer, ready for execution. As Anthony Milton has shown, such depictions, which seem to have drawn on an early edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, confirmed the English in Amboina in their new role as righteous martyrs. The 1624 True Relation was endlessly printed, modified, retitled and reprinted for the rest of the seventeenth century, making it an extraordinarily successful weapon in the English Company’s campaign to place blame and win compensation for what had happened on Amboina.

John Foxe, The first [-second] volume of the ecclesiasticall history, contayning the Actes & monumentes (London: John Daye, 1576), sig. TT6v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, -q- BR 1600 F6 1576.

While these printed books underpinned a sharp deterioration in Anglo-Dutch relations, it is a struggle to get students interested in poor-quality PDFs of old pamphlets. In Spring 2020, however, I tried something different. With Aaron T. Pratt, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, I combed through the Center’s vast collection for everything connected to Amboina and laid out what we found around a group of large seminar tables.

It proved a revelation. By the time we were done, the students could see before them in concrete form an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign as represented by a series of interlocking texts that all borrowed from each other. Beginning with the 1624 True Relation, the display showed how an image was formed, how it was entrenched with key symbols and how it was subtly manipulated over time, appearing each time in a slightly different form. In 1651, for example, the same basic pamphlet was reprinted for a new audience.

A true relation of the unjust, cruel, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies (London: William Hope, 1651). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1651. — *A true relation of the unjust, cruel, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies* (London: William Hope, 1651). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 646.6 E2 1651.

In 1665 it was republished again, and in 1672, close to fifty years after the original trial, a new version promised to reveal “the naked truth of this cause, hirtherto masked, muffled and obfuscated”.

True Relation spawned a host of sub-texts, too. In 1673, for example, John Dryden wrote the charges against the Dutch into a play, Amboyna: A tragedy. Damning the Dutch as bloody murderers, the play gave a new generation the chance to discover, as one stage direction put it, “the English tortured, and the Dutch tormenting them.” And Dryden threw in new crimes, accusing the Dutch of rape and cannibalism.

By the 1680s, Amboina had not lost its potency even though half a century had passed since the trial itself. The Center has a remarkable text from 1683 entitled Unparallel’d varieties: or, the matchless actions and passions of mankind. Displayed in near four hundred notable instances and examples. This introduced a new and evolving image of Amboina. Here the English were not simply righteous martyrs. Instead, their judicial murder had been marked by a sign of divine wrath from the heavens. In this retelling, which drew from part of the True Relation but gave it new form, the execution of the English merchants in Kota Ambon was accompanied by “a great darknesse, with a sudden and violent gust of winde and tempest” that almost wrecked the Dutch ships clustered in the harbor. This was followed by a terrible illness that “swept away about a thousand people, Dutch and Amboyners.” The meaning of such signs was unmistakable. They were “a token of the wrath of God for this barbarous tyranny of the Hollanders.” In 1683, all of this was included in a new image paired alongside one drawn from the original 1624 woodblock print. Like its predecessor, this image had a long life and was reprinted in 1712 as part of a new text, The History of the Barbarous Cruelties. There can be little question as to what it would have meant to the reader. Here we see God’s wrath at the top of the image in response to what the Dutch have done in the lower half.

*The history of the barbarous cruelties and massacres, committed by the Dutch in the East-Indies* (London and Westminster: n.p., 1712), frontispiece and sig. A1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, DS 642 H25.

We live in a digital world. This trend has become even more pronounced now as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us out of in-person seminar spaces and into Zoom classrooms. But there remains something immensely powerful about encountering original documents right in front of your eyes, in seeing how an image morphs and evolves in print and in standing around a table with a series of interlocked texts arrayed in front of you. This is the joy of having something like the Ransom Center on campus. It is a reminder of how lucky we are as historians to have this incredible resource available to us and our students.

Adam Clulow is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014), which won multiple awards including the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is creator of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an online interactive trial engine that received the New South Wales Premiers History Award in 2017, and Virtual Angkor with Tom Chandler, which received the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History.

History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium: Society and Information in Writing the History of Disease (Sumit Guha)

October 30, 2020

Professor Guha’s interest in disease history originated in his study of demography. He has published on disease mortality in Victorian England in “The Importance of Social Intervention in England’s Mortality Decline,” Social History of Medicine 7,1 (1994), 89-113. His earlier work on South Asia is compiled in Health and Population in South Asia (2001/2009).

This talk, “Society and Information in Writing the History of Disease,” draws on “India in the Pandemic Age,” recently published in Indian Economic Review (https://doi.org/10.1007/s41775-020-00088-0). The latter originated in a request from the Review to write a historical essay that would preface a more contemporary special issue of the journal. It was also written in a couple of weeks, when libraries were closed.

Addressing an audience of economists, the article tried to tease out the historical processes that produce the data series utilized by medicine and the sciences. Professor Guha will address some of these larger epistemological problems in his talk.
_______________
Sumit Guha holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Professorship in the UT History Department. He is the author of The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941 (1985), Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (1999), Health and Population in South Asia from earliest times to the present (2001), and Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013). His most recent book, History and Collective Memory in South Asia,1200–2000, was published by University of Washington Press in 2019.

Other writings by Sumit Guha on Not Even Past

History Between Memory and Reconstruction

Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?

IHS Book Talk: “History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000,” by Sumit Guha, University of Texas at Austin

More to Read about Caste and South Asia

Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

Climate in Context Conference Report

Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Session II: Historicizing Climate

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Virtual Conference

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

Opening Remarks

Land Acknowledgement

Conference Theme Introduction

Session I. Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Opening Keynote Address: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

Session II. Historicizing Climate

FRIDAY, APRIL 23

Opening Remarks

Session III. Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Session IV. Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Session V. Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Concluding Remarks

Closing Keynote Address: Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

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DH in an Online World: Building a Digital Humanities Portfolio for the Classroom

IHS Workshop: “Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire” by Rupali Warke, University of Texas at Austin

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

The trial

The long legacy

History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium: Society and Information in Writing the History of Disease (Sumit Guha)

Other writings by Sumit Guha on Not Even Past

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