Newsletter & Events from the Penn History Department
March 2020
Democracy and Truth
Sophia Rosenfeld shares her take on the hearings leading up to President Trump’s impeachment, the wealth of conspiracy theories surrounding them, and tips on how to absorb it all without feeling dazed.
History Teaches Us to Resist
On the Tonight Show with Trevor Noah, Mary Frances Berry discusses misconceptions about MLK, Jr., the essential role of protests in politics, and her book "History Teaches Us to Resist."
Sorting Out the Mixed Economy
Amy Offner's new book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas, was called an "epic and field changing work" in Dissent Magazine.
African American Voting
Kathleen Brown and Mary Frances Berry, along with Political Science's Adolph Reed, define what the “Black vote” means when viewed through history, and what it doesn’t mean when viewed as an indivisible bloc.
Upcoming Department Events
MARCH 17, 2020
Annenberg Seminar in History
Lauren Benton: "Empire as Domus: Households and Legalities of Small Wars"
MARCH 27, 2020
Penn Economic History Forum
Stefan Link: "Business as Political Action: the Ford-GM Rivalry in the 1920s and the Limits of ‘Embeddedness’"
MARCH 31, 2020
Latino Studies/Dept. of History
Valeria López Fadul: "The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge Making in Early Latin America"
New Faculty Spotlights
Jared Farmer studies the overlapping historical dimensions of landscape, environment, technology, science, religion, culture, and law. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West.
Anne Berg studies the histories of waste and recycling, film and cities, racism and genocide. Trained as a historian of modern Germany and Europe, Anne increasingly ventures into more global terrain.
Undergraduate Spotlight
Senior history major Daniel Brennan has received a prestigious Thouron Award to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom.
Carson Eckhard is currently a junior history major focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century America, and a member of the Penn Slavery Project.
Graduate Alumni Spotlight
Matthew Karp (Princeton University, Penn PhD '11) sits down with Eric Foner at a Verso Books event to discuss Karp's new work on “The Mass Politics of Antislavery.”