The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies
THE CENTER'S GOALS
Karin Rosemblatt
Director
The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland presents the Spring 2021 schedule of events:
Part of the Miller Center theme of Difference
Friday, February 12, 12:00 Noon
Mary Mendoza, Department of History, Penn State University
Unnatural Border: Race and Environment across the U.S.-Mexico Divide
Discussant: Chantel Rodriguez
This presentation will explain the causes, development, and legacy of fence construction along the international boundary line. Construction of the border fence began in the early twentieth century as a U.S. Department of Agriculture initiative to stop the movement of a cattle tick—a non-human natural threat—and, by mid-century, grew into a multi-pronged effort to control the dynamic flow of human migration. As the United States and Mexican governments passed laws, built fences, and hired agents to police the boundary between the two nations, the border became an expression of human imagination rather than a geographical certainty. And while state-sanctioned efforts to control movement largely failed, the symbolic power of the border increased, creating and solidifying a highly contested and racialized landscape of power, difference, and exclusion by the end of the twentieth century.
Monday, March 22, 12 noon
Stanley Maxson, Department of History, University of Maryland
“Seek, and You Will Find”: The Spatial Politics of African Americans Petitions for Civil War Pensions
Stanley Maxson explores the spatial politics of African Americans who mobilized the resources of kin and community in their struggle for Civil War pensions. He recasts African American interaction with the U.S. Pension Bureau as a question of competing information practices—the bureaucratic and the vernacular. Reconstructing a day in the life of Richard Blanton, a Black minister and pension sub-agent in Nashville, Tennessee, Maxson argues that African American struggles for pensions were based on the shared ownership of information, widely dispersed among people and across space.
Friday, April 16, 2021, 4:00 p.m.
Manu Karuka, Department of American Studies, Barnard College
Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
Empire’s Tracks reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee nations, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path, situating the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an interdisciplinary examination of legislative, military, and business records, this talk connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism.
Book Events
Friday, February 19, 4 p.m.
Colleen Woods, Department of History, University of Maryland
Bradley Simpson, Department of History, University of Connecticut
A celebration of Colleen Woods's new book Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization.
Friday, April 2, 4:00 p.m.
Alejandro Cañeque, Department of History, University of Maryland
Richard Kagan, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
Erin Rowe, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
A celebration of Alejandro Cañeque's new book, Un imperio de mártires: Religión y poder en las fronteras de la Monarquía Hispánica (Empire of Martyrs: Faith and Power on the Global Frontiers of the Spanish Monarchy)
