C-SPAN is currently running a series on First Ladies, with an episode on Elizabeth Monroe airing tonight, Monday (March 18) at 9 pm eastern time. In addition to being on the television, it will stream live on line at the C-SPAN website (www.C-SPAN.com) and will be available for viewing any time after it airs. Among the show’s interviewees is Daniel Preston, Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at UMW. He’ll be an in-studio guest on Monday.
For more information, see this link.
The History and American Studies Department is happy to announce that Dr. Steven Harris’ book, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, was recently published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Book description:
This book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon.
Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the “housing question” that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.
A class session from Associate Professor Jeffrey McClurken’s “U.S. History in Film” course will air on C-SPAN 3 on Saturday, Feb. 2 at 8 p.m. and midnight and on Sunday, Feb. 3 at 1 p.m.
The class session, focused on the film “Gone With the Wind,” was filmed at UMW in October 2012. Jeffrey McClurken evaluates the 1939 film, examining it as a source on Southern culture during the Civil War & Reconstruction, and reflective of the Depression era in which it was created.
For more information, visit C-SPAN.
The Civil War – Before the Battle of Fredericksburg
Saturday, December 8th, 6 & 10 pm – CSPAN-3
University of Mary Washington history professor Jeffrey McClurken talks about the Civil War leading up to December 1862. He discusses the political situations in the North and South, and traces changes in the Union and Confederate commands to that point in the war. Using the words of politicians, military officers, journalists, and people living in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia during that period, Professor McClurken sets the stage for the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was fought from December 11th to the 13th, 1862.
For more on the full series, see this link. Dr. McClurken’s lecture was originally presented at the Fredericksburg Area Museum & Cultural Center (famcc.org) on October, 16th, 2012.
The History and American Studies Department welcomes the publication of the e-book, Dangerous Waters, authored by our late colleague Richard “Doc” Warner, who passed away last year. A description of his new novel:
Dangerous Waters is now available at multiple online sellers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the Apple iBookstore, among others.
On Friday, June 8, Will Mackintosh, assistant professor of history and American studies, presented a paper entitled “The Loomis Gang and the Funhouse Mirror of Nineteenth-Century Economic Modernity” at the “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America” conference in Philadelphia, Pa. The conference was jointly hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and was organized in conjunction with a special exhibit at the Library Company on the topic of illegitimate and semi-legitimate economies in American history.
In addition to his work at the June event, Dr. Mackintosh also presented a second paper entitled “Mechanical Aesthetics: Picturesque Tourism and the Transportation Revolution ” at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Conference in Baltimore this past July. This paper was presented as part of a panel about rethinking 19th-century US transportation technology from a cultural and experiential perspective.
