History
History is a way of understanding the whole of the human condition as it has unfolded in time. Without history, nothing makes sense, from the meaning of words to the formation of identities, to institutions, states, and societies. History straddles the boundary between the social sciences and humanities. Like the other social sciences, it has established methods of investigation and proof, but it differs from them in that it encompasses, potentially, every area of human culture from the beginning of recorded time. Like the other humanities, it uses ordinary language and established modes of telling its stories, but it is constrained by evidence left us from the past.
The History Department is home to a distinguished group of scholar-teachers whose work ranges from the medieval to the post-modern, from the Middle East to the Midwest, from gender and sexuality to science and economics, from micro-history to world history.
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Upcoming History Events
Spring 2025 - Special Event, Thursday, April 10 @4:30PM, PAC/FCPA 001
Resistance in the Barracks: French Conscripts in the 1968 Years
A History Homecoming event
Thursday, April 10 @ 4:30PM in PAC/FCPA 001
Donald Reid ’74 is the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books on French workers and on the afterlife of the Resistance in postwar France. He is currently writing a history of insubordination among conscripts in the French army during the decade and a half after May 1968.
Spring 2025 - Distinguished Meigs Lecture, Thursday, May 1 @4:30PM, PAC/FCPA 100
Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life
Annual Distinguished Meigs Lecture
Thursday, May 1 @ 4:30PM in PAC/FCPA 100
Drawing on his forthcoming book, Kelley examines the hidden relationship between policing, gendered racial capitalism, and collective organized resistance. Taking as astarting point Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s oft-quoted definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” he reconstructs the lives and life-worlds of selected victims of state violence in order to uncover the policies and processes that rendered them vulnerable to premature death in the first place. Although Making a Killing takes a long historical view, at times reaching back to the 19th century, the focus is on policing in the neoliberal city, when federal cutbacks and the global slump of the 1970s left many municipalities financially strapped. Urban police departments simultaneously became budgetary burdens as well as new vehicles to generate revenue. Police, in tandem with other state and corporate entities, have increasingly become engines of capital accumulation, government revenue, gentrification, the municipal bond market, the tech and private security industry—in a phrase, the profits of death.
While laying bare the operations of our own American thanatocracy, Kelley also shows how the struggle to defend and protect Black lives remains the tip of the spear in our current resistance to rising fascism.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the award-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press 1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.
His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Social Text, Metropolis, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.
See all History events here
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We are pleased to announce that the Wesleyan Majors Committee has recently published Volume 15 of The Undergraduate Journal of Wesleyan University: Historical Narratives. Click here to access Historical Narratives Volume 15 and past issues.
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