Department of History

National Symposium organized by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and the George A, Smathers Libraries to commemorate the opening of the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History, a collection of more than six hundred oral histories with African Americans on topics including slavery, segregation, and civil rights. This is part of a three-day symposium that will feature films, exhibits, and lectures on African American history. Speakers will include Professor Larry Rivers, Florida A&M, Evelyn Foxx, President Alachua…

A talk by Joel Beinin, Stanford University Arab workers, especially in Egypt and Tunisia, participated prominently in the popular uprisings of 2011. They were motivated by declining standards of living and loss of job security in the decades preceding the uprisings. In Tunisia, the mid-level leaders of the national trade union federation (the UGTT) and rank and file workers were critical participants in the movement that ousted president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. While there was a substantial movement of labor…

“The Rural Afterlives of Slavery: Landownership, Politics, and Farming Practice Among Black Farmers in Clarke County, Georgia, 1865-1980” Motivated by the controversy over the University of Georgia’s 2016 disturbance of a burial ground of enslaved people, this paper examines the "rural afterlives" of slavery by looking at the dynamics of race, land ownership, and agricultural transformation in Athens-Clarke County between 1865 and 1980. This paper is the earliest phase of a micro-history that will place everyday agricultural practice, ecological strategies, and small-scale investment decisions…

Talk by Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe, Assistant Professor, Criminology, University of Illinois at Chicago. Recent scholarship and activism paint a troubling picture of the American carceral state and chart a way out by utilizing the framework of abolition. But disability and madness and their histories of oppression and resistance are largely missing from as ways to inform policy and activist resolutions to incarceration. For example- the erasure of the most massive exodus of people from carceral enclosures in the U.S., deinstitutionalization.…

A talk by Joel Blecher (Ph.D. Princeton) is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018). His current book project on Islam and the Spice Trade has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library of Congress. This event is made possible by the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Endowment in Islamic…

Panel discussion sponsored by the W. George Allen Chapter of the Black Law Students Association, speakers: Professor Kenneth Nunn, Levin College of Law Professor Sarah Wolking, Levin College of Law Moderator: Professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, Levin College of Law

A talk by Ana-Lucia Araujo, Department of History, Howard University. This talk is part of the 2019-2020 Series "Rethinking the Public Sphere, Part I"

A work in progress by Florin Curta. If you are interested in reading the paper before the talk, please contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu

A talk by Joshua Teplitsky Assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in Judaic Studies at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of the Jews in Europe in the early modern period, with a particular interest in cultures of knowledge-making, printing, and book collecting David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, assembled a remarkable collection of Jewish books that today testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across…

The Caribbean: A Cultural Encounter The conference schedule is here: https://discoveryhistory.org/2019-conference-schedule/ Throughout time, humans have ventured over the hill, beyond their own territories.  Wherever such journeys of exploration have taken us, we have learned about ourselves while interacting with others and sharing our ideas, history, and culture.  The Society for the History of Discoveries celebrates the geographic discoveries and cross-cultural interactions that result from travel around the globe and the exploration and mapping of Earth’s land and sea surfaces from earliest…

A work in progress presented by Grace Hoffman. If you would like a copy of this paper in advance, please contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu

Ibram Kendi will speak about his new book, How to Be an Antiracist This talk is sponsored by the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities  

A work in progress presented by Bogdan Dumitru. If you are interested in seeing a draft of this paper, contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu

Presentation by Ciprian Cretu, Fulbright Scholar from Bucharest, Romania. For advanced copies of the paper, contact the author: ciprian.cretu@drd.unibuc.ro

Presentation by Norman Goda.

A book talk with affiliated professor Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, presentations by Geoff Eley and Sueann Caulfield, University of Michigan.

Screening at the Museums Challenge Symposium presented by the Mellon Intersections Group on Mass Incarceration. At The Wooly (20 N. Main Street) Hidden Lives Illuminated is a project commissioned by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site of animated short films created by artists incarcerated at the Pennsylvania State Corrections Institution at Chester and Philadelphia’s Riverside Correctional Facility for Women. Keynote speaker, Sean Kelley, Senior Vice President + Director of Interpretation will share remarks about the project. The Museums Challenge Symposium celebrates the work…

Lecture by Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver. Presented by the Mellon Intersections, Mass Incarceration Working Group See details here: https://humanities.ufl.edu/event/migrating-to-prison-americas-obsession-with-locking-up-immigrants-cesar-cuauhtemoc-garcia-hernandez/

The eleventh annual Honors Thesis Conference is the culmination of a process that students in the History Department’s honor’s seminar have been working on since last summer. In the summer of 2019, students began collecting and reviewing primary source material from a wide range of archives. Some students, used documents UF’s own Smathers Library. Others traveled to archives at the United Nations, Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, in Cuba and in Europe. Others used online resources, from Netflix…

Please join us for our next History Workshop which will feature a pre-circulated paper by our esteemed colleague Alice Freifeld, recently retired but still flourishing with her scholarship. Alice has assembled a stunning array of three discussants, whose scholarship spans Germany (with our very own Norm Goda), France (Jean-Marc Dreyfus of Manchester), and Poland (with our new colleague joining us in the Fall, Natalia Aleksiun). PLEASE NOTE: due to time changes, we will convene at NOON. The Zoom link is…

For more than six decades, Cuba and its leaders have played an outsized role in international affairs, dominating discourse far beyond what a small island nation could expect. And yet, the ordinary Cubans who have lived with the interminable revolution have rarely been heard from.

Soccer is the only sport played in every corner of the world. Can soccer also be an effective means of global diplomacy?

Please join the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center on January 14, 4:30 pm for the inaugural event in the 2023 Challenging Racism public program series. Staff and students at the Gainesville Sun and the Proctor Program have embarked upon a partnership to explore the history of the Sun’s coverage of race relations from Reconstruction to the present in Gainesville. A panel of student and newspaper researchers will discuss their findings at the event. Light refreshments will be served.…

Dr. Dan Simone earned his Ph.D. from UF in 2009. He wrote his dissertation, “Racing, Region, and the Environment: A History of American Motorsports," under the guidance of Dr. Jack Davis. While at UF, he also served as Program Coordinator of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.  From 2010-2015, Dr. Simone taught World History and Environmental History courses at Monmouth University. In 2016, he was hired as Curator of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, and held…

Our annual showcase of theses by undergraduate honors students. For more on our program, check out its homepage here: https://history.ufl.edu/undergraduate-studies/undergraduate-honors-program/

Organized by UF’s Phi Beta Kappa Society Chapter.

In the 19th century, the Choctaw Nation passed a law to criminalize whooping, and many Choctaw citizens were prosecuted for this crime in the period between 1880 and 1906.  This talk considers the linguistic, historical, and anthropological meanings of whooping for Choctaw people and the forces that led to its eventual criminalization.