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Dr. Ashley Wright’s article published

Ashley Wright“Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon” has been published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon.   Read more here.

Dr. Noriko Kawamura at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ)

Noriko KawamuraDr. Kawamura, of the Department of History, WSU, will give an invited talk at the last session of the DIJ History and Humanities Study Group in 2016: Thursday, December 8 in Tokyo, Japan.

Emperor Hirohito from the Pacific War to the Cold War.

Emperor Showa, better known in the English-speaking world as Emperor Hirohito, has been one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Pacific War. He was both sovereign of the state and commander in chief of the Japanese imperial forces; but above all, he was the manifestation of divinity and a symbol of the national and cultural identity of Japan. Yet under the Allied occupation the emperor was spared from the Tokyo war crimes trial and continued to reign in postwar Japan until his death in 1989 as “the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people” under the new democratic constitution written by the U.S. occupiers.

This talk will examine the extraordinary transformation of Emperor Hirohito from a divine monarch during the Pacific War to a humanized symbolic monarch supposedly with no political power during the occupation years (1945-1952). The talk will focus on the paradoxical role Emperor Hirohito played at home and abroad as tension between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated into the Cold War in East Asia.

Kawamura suggests that underneath the stereotypical portrayal of Emperor Hirohito as a passive but shrewd survivor/collaborator of the U.S. occupiers, he acted as a major player in U.S.-Japanese diplomatic negotiations behind closed doors and participated in the shaping of Japan’s domestic and national security policies. The talk will explore possible reasons behind the emperor’s actions.

Pearl Harbor legacy examined

sun-raymondAssociate Professor Raymond Sun writes Pearl Harbor article that was published in the Spokesman Review Dr. Sun states: “The passage of the World War II generation is certainly cause for reflection – sorrow mixed with appreciation for its remarkable accomplishments. At the same time, the loss of our living connection to the attack on Pearl Harbor provides an opportunity to revisit the lessons and legacies we draw from this defining event in United States, and indeed world, history. By doing so, we might become more aware of the selective remembrance and forgetfulness that have characterized our common memory of Pearl Harbor, and fashion a more complex, but also more honest and helpful, historical legacy to root and guide us in facing our challenging 21st Century world.”

 

Dr. Jennifer Thigpen researches America’s foreign mission movement

Jennifer ThigpenNew research by Jennifer Thigpen, associate professor of history and an expert on America’s foreign mission movement, demonstrates that, as American Protestant missionaries and their wives labored to bring Christianity to the region’s native inhabitants in the early nineteenth century, they also carefully built networks across a complex set of competing local, national and international interests.  “Going Out to the World: The American Foreign Mission Movement in the Global West” is the tentative title of her new book-length project.  Read more about Dr. Thigpen’s research.

Global Case Competition team travels to Switzerland

students-in-genevaThe team of five students advised by Ken Faunce, won the WSU Global Case Competition. The theme in conjunction with the United Nations was “Arbitrary Detention in the U.S.”  The team looked at the debtor’s prison concept. The team highlighted the issue and then came up with solutions to the problem. Eighty students competed. By winning, the team traveled to Geneva, Switzerland for a week in November to present their findings to the U.N. Arbitrary Detention Working Group. Also, the team leader is History major, Maddy Hunter.

Pictured here is the team in Geneva.  See more about this event by reading the brochure.

 

Dr. Jesse Spohnholz’ article published in “Past and Present”

Jesse SpohnholzJesse Spohnholz’s article “Archiving and Narration in Post-Reformation Germany and the Netherlanders” was published in the Past and Present, 2016 Supplement. The article offers an example for how the ‘literary turn’ and the more recent ‘archival turn’ speak to Reformation history.  For the next three months, the article is available for free download.   “Past & Present” is one of the most prestigious history journals in the English-speaking world.  For the full text, see more.

Graduate students who have taken History 580: Historiography and undergraduates taking History 445: The Reformation next spring should check it out!

Free lecture: Volcanoes, Climate and People… Dr. John Wolff Nov. 9, 7 p.m.

mount-st_-helensProfessor and Associate Director, John Wolff, of the School of the Environment, is giving a Roots of Contemporary Issues-sponsored lecture on Wednesday, Nov 9, 7pm, CUB 220 (Senior Ballroom). The lecture is titled “Volcanoes, Climate, and People: Natural vs. Anthropogenic Causes of Global Change.”   This lecture is also in partnership with the WSU Cougar Historical Society.

For more detailed information on the subject, see more here.

Dr. Lawrence Hatter to give talk at Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy Nov. 3.

Lawrence HatterDr. Lawrence Hatter will give a talk November 3 on his forthcoming book, “Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U. S. – Canadian Border” at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy.  See the link to the UM Colloquium Series.

He received his M.A. in History from University of Missouri and his Ph.D. from University of Virginia, and he currently serves as Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University. He has published articles in Journal of the Early Republic, Diplomatic History, and American Review of Canadian Studies, among other places, and his current book project, Citizens of Convenience: Nationhood, Empire, and the Northern Border of the American Republic, 1783-1820 is under contract with University of Virginia Press, to be published as part of the Early American Histories series.