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  Destiny, Agency, and Adaptation: Climate Change from a Historical Perspective

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  From the Ice Ages of the past to the rapid and intensifying warming of the Anthropocene, only the most ardent skeptic would deny that the earth's climate has changed over time; but what does it mean to think about climate change in historical perspective? In recent years, historians have pointed to manifold ways long-term trends in temperature and weather patterns have shaped and constrained human migration, subsistence, trade, and war. Other historians have explained how nations, empires, and peoples responded to changing climatic conditions, and some believed they could change their place's climate through particular social and economic practices. Put in this way, some historical approaches to climate change seem to dally with determinism while others risk overemphasizing the scope of human agency in the face of vast solar and geological forces. A number of historians have reflected on the tension between the scientific and religious epistemologies that often inform our public conversations about climate change. In recent centuries dramatic changes in human behavior, particularly fossil fuel consumption, have transformed the planet. While scientists, activists, business interests, and policymakers debate the reality of human-caused climate change and what, if anything, to do about it, historians have traced the history of that debate and insisted that it should be informed by history.

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  Revolutions: Moments and Movements in Historical Perspective

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  What is a Revolution? Historians have used the term broadly to describe movements resulting in the toppling of regimes and establishment of new social and political orders, yet much remains unclear. Are revolutions an intrinsically modern phenomenon, or can the concept be productively applied to events in the ancient and medieval worlds? Can revolutions be clearly bounded in time? How do they begin and end? Is there a common trajectory? When and why do revolutions arise in interrelated clusters? However we choose to answer such questions, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and recent events, from the Arab Spring to the riots in Hong Kong, remind us that revolutions, whether a cause of hope or trepidation, have lost none of their force and relevance.

  This symposium will consider revolutions broadly in their social, cultural, and intellectual origins and ramifications, examining the interactions of ideologies, structures, pivotal moments, and social and political movements.

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  Afflicted Bodies, Affected Societies: Disease and Wellness in Historical Perspective

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  The year 2018 marked the centennial of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, one of the deadliest outbreaks of disease in recorded history. To acknowledge the social impact of illness on humanity, and to highlight how historical research can shape our knowledge of medicine and the health sciences at a time when those fields of study are expanding here at Seton Hall, the History Department is hosting a two-day symposium on disease and wellness in historical perspective. Some of the questions we seek to investigate over the course of this symposium are as follows: How have notions of illness and wellness changed over time? In what ways have medical progress and discovery been shaped by wars and natural disasters? How did regimes of hygiene fashion social hierarchies or imperial policy? What have been the social, political, and economic consequences of the diseased body and/or mind in various societies? How do civilizations conceptualize disease and miracles within faith practices? How do public health and issues of social justice intersect?

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  Encounters: Travel and Tourism in Historical Perspective

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  This symposium aims to investigate the social, political, economic, ethical, and historical power of travel and tourism. Some of the questions that this symposium wishes to address are: Are travel and tourism transformative experiences? How do travelers and tourists register and remember their encounters with difference—and how have these representations changed over time? How do souvenirs, memorabilia, and travelogues circulate and facilitate imagination of other people and places? How has tourism contributed to—and undermined—the process of empire-building?

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  Past Perfect: Utopian Visions in Historical Perspective

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  This symposium seeks to explore the phenomenon of utopias in all their incarnations—real and imagined; micro and macro; past, present and future. We seek to situate utopian thinking historically and culturally. Are these visions of a perfect world a distinctive feature of Western modernity or do they tap into a more universal impulse? What can utopias tell us about the societies and eras that produced them? What is the view of human nature underlying utopian ideals? We look to explore the processes by which utopian ideals are developed and disseminated. What sort of people build utopias? What makes some utopian models more attractive than others? What are the conditions in which individuals are prone to affiliate themselves with utopian movements? Finally, we seek to investigate the fate of utopias. Why have utopian communities been so difficult to sustain over time? Have some visions of utopia had more of a lasting impact than others? What is the point at which dreams of utopia cross the line into dystopias—nightmares of oppression, conformity, and the subjugation of the individual?

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  Technologies of Truth: Propaganda, Ideology, and the Modern State

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  The rise of industrialized mass-societies predicated on notions of popular sovereignty transformed relationships between state power, ideology and the population. Modern propaganda is a product of this transformation. Under the old regime, the population was expected to acquiesce, obey, and fulfill its obligations. Belief was an attribute of the spiritual realm, embodied in religious institutions, whose representatives policed the boundaries of acceptable thought. The doctrine of popular sovereignty undermined this division of labor and engendered a new set of imperatives. Rather than suppressing harmful ideas, it became necessary to propagate a positive set of beliefs that would resonate with the interests of power and ensure not only passive compliance, but active support. New modes of communication, such as the mass-circulation newspaper, public events, graphic arts, radio, film and eventually television, played a central role as tools in shaping mass consciousness. In times of peace, varying interests competed to deploy these tools to advance programs ranging from the promotion of commercial products to campaigns for public health, moral reform, and political dominance. At moments of war and crisis, the state mobilized the tools of persuasive communication to inculcate a uniform worldview. Totalitarian parties and regimes, arising in the 1920s and 30s, extended this wartime mobilization of media and ideas into ordinary life, thus exposing populations to a continual torrent of information designed to inculcate a cohesive regime of truth. This symposium will explore the processes and technologies underlying the phenomenon of modern propaganda, and provide a comparative view of the ways in which both state and non-state actors have strived to shape the popular mindset through the manipulation of ideas, images and emotions.

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  Contact Zones: Articulating and Practicing Difference

  Seton Hall University, Department of History

  Notions of shared humanity or fundamental difference among nations, races, and sexes have histories. Since the early modern era countless philosophers and scientists, agents of church or state, and ordinary women and men have attempted to ground fluctuating categories—appearance, language, spiritual beliefs, mode of subsistence, technology and material culture, bodily strength, gender roles, and sexuality—in a divine or natural order to explain existing or desired hierarchies, social relations, and political arrangements. Other individuals have actively resisted such scholarly theories, legal or religious categories, and popular prejudices, implicitly or explicitly putting forward their own understandings of individual and communal identities. These encounters and contests, be they in distant borderlands or urban spaces, have been shaped by individual experiences and aims as well as broad historical processes of exchange, migration, conquest, and sexual contact. The Department of History of Seton Hall University will be hosting a symposium, including scholars whose work addresses these issues through diverse historical methodologies as they pertain to regions around the world. This symposium will provide a comparative view of the varied physical places where diverse peoples and ways of life have come into contact as well as the myriad ways through which individuals and groups have defined, maintained, and undermined categories of difference.