Scholar Offers Insight into Dead Sea Scrolls

CHESTERTOWN, MD—One of the foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lawrence Schiffman, will lecture on the topic at Washington College on Monday, October 22. His presentation,  “Scholars, Scrolls and Scandals: The Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism and Christianity,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall of the John S. Toll Science Center on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

            The talk is sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and the Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture and is free and open to the public.

            Schiffman, who serves as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Yeshiva University, is a specialist in Judaism in Late Antiquity, the history of Jewish law, and Talmudic literature. He has published widely, including numerous scholarly articles on the history and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the 1995 book Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. His expertise has landed him in the PBS Nova documentary “Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” as well as in four BBC documentaries, the McNeil-Lehrer Report, and a Discovery special. He also consulted on the recent Franklin Institute exhibit, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times,” in Philadelphia.

             Schiffman is a fellow with the American Academy for Jewish Research, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. His most recent books include The Courtyards of the House of the Lord:  Studies on the Temple Scroll (2008)  and Qumran and Jerusalem: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Judaism ( 2010). 

Separating the Girls from the Boys—Author Explores How Consumer Culture Defines Identities

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Just who decided girls should wear pink, boys blue? In a talk at Washington College, author and scholar Jo Paoletti will share answers to that question and more. Based on research from her recently published book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, Paoletti’s presentation will examine how consumer culture—from cartoons to fashion—shapes and defines the sexes in the United States, and how changing concepts of sexual identity, in turn, shape the culture.

The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place Wednesday, September 26, at 5 p.m. in Hynson Lounge of Hodson Hall on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.  A reception with the author will follow. The event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of History, the Gender Studies Program, and Phi Beta Kappa.  

Paoletti, an Associate Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, holds degrees in apparel design and textiles and has tracked the changes in children’s clothing—and the meaning behind those changes—for three decades.  “It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” she explained in an article in Smithsonian in 2011, noting that both girls and boys once wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted.’ ”

For more on the speaker: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~jpaol/.

Junior Daniel Primiani Earns a Top Award at History Honor Society Conference

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College junior Daniel Primiani’s research paper on the Revolutionary War and slavery earned a top prize at a recent conference hosted by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta. Primiani brought home the third-place award after presenting his paper, “The Slaves of the Revolution: An Exploration of the Effect of the Revolutionary War on Slaves in the State of Virginia” at the society’s Mid-Atlantic Region conference at Towson University. His was one of only three undergraduate and two graduate works recognized at the regional conference.

            Primiani, of Trevilians, Va., was surprised by the recognition. “I wasn’t really expecting to win because of the number of people there,” he said of the students in attendance from schools that included Catholic University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Howard University, McDaniel College, Notre Dame of Maryland University, St. Mary’s College and Towson University.

Two other Washington College students participated in the conference: Mike Kuethe, a senior from Severna Park, Md., presented a paper titled “Archeology of Anglo-Saxon Ironworking Sites: Assembling a Historical Picture from the Remains of the Past,” and Charles Weisenberger, a senior from Nazareth, Pa., explored the fate of America’s fugitive slave communities in his paper, "The Ecological, Political, and Cultural Failures of American Maroons.”      

            History Professor Kenneth Miller organized Washington College’s  participation in the conference, soliciting work from chapter members and selecting for submission the three best and most appropriate papers for the conference. “The members of the History Department have always felt very confident about the students we send to these annual regional conferences,” Miller said. “Dan, Mike, and Chuck are three of our best. I knew they’d do us proud.”

            Miller was particularly pleased with Primiani’s recognition: “He’s been doing fantastic work this year. Claiming a third-place prize is no small achievement.”

Expert to Discuss Eastern Influences On Renaissance Art, April 27 at WC

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Meredith J. Gill, associate professor of art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, will lecture on “Turks, Scribes, and Magic Carpets: Looking East in the Renaissance” on Friday, April 27, at Washington College. The talk will begin at 4 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Gill’s research revolves around Italian art and architecture from the late medieval period through the sixteenth century, concentrating on theological and philosophical influences. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press) and is currently writing a second book, Flight of Angels: The Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

She also has contributed to many other Renaissance art publications. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Gill has led two sessions of the NEH’s Summer 2010 Seminar, “Re-Mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe” (Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland).

“Turks, Scribes, and Magic Carpets” is sponsored by the Friends of Miller Library, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of History and is free and open to the public.

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“Inventing a Nation: A Special Series on the American Founding” Premieres October 18

CHESTERTOWN, MD— As the contemporary political scene grows more and more polarized, Americans of all persuasions — from Tea Party adherents to civil-liberties advocates — look to the nation’s 18th-century founding to promote a wide array of 21st-century positions. This sense of connection to history energizes American politics, but in the struggle to claim the Founders as our “own,” are we losing sight of who they really were?

In a special four-part series on America’s founding era, premiering at Washington College on October 18, acclaimed historian Richard Beeman will take audiences behind the scenes of the debates that produced our political system, providing new context for understanding questions that continue to divide Americans today.

Hosted by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, “Inventing a Nation: A Special Series on the American Founding” will run for four consecutive Tuesdays: October 18, October 25, November 1, and November 8. All sessions will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, on the Washington College campus (300 Washington Avenue).

“Inventing a Nation” is co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of History. All programs in the series are free and open to the public.

One of the nation’s leading historians of America’s revolutionary and early national experience, Richard Beeman has been a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania for 43 years and has served as Chair of the Department of History and as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the scholarly advisory board of the American Revolution Center and the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center.

Beeman recently joined the Washington College community as a Senior Fellow of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, as well as of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture. In this role, he serves as a resource for the Washington College community, providing mentorship of high-achieving students and leading public programs such as “Inventing a Nation.”

“This series will serve as a kind of crash course in the dramatic highs and lows of America’s first 25 years,” said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center. “But it will be about the present almost as much as the past. As we prepare to enter a watershed election year, Dr. Beeman will, in a sense, be untangling the basic DNA of American politics.”

The series format is flexible, and can easily accommodate both repeat and one-time attendees. Those who can attend multiple sessions are encouraged to approach “Inventing a Nation” as a mini-seminar (with no assigned reading or papers!), but each week’s program will stand alone, and those who can make only one or two sessions should not hesitate to attend.

“The Founders and the Myth of the Original Meaning of the Constitution” (October 18) will explore how the Founders themselves understood the meaning of many of the clauses which they drafted, and how they might have wished their Constitution to be interpreted by subsequent generations.

“The Creation of the Bill of Rights” (October 25) will delve into the reasons that the U.S Constitution did not originally contain a bill of rights and the process by which Americans moved to add one. It will conclude with reflections on the meaning of the Bill of Rights today.

“The Founders, Religion, and Separation of Church and State” (November 1) will explore the attitudes of the members of the Constitutional Convention toward the role of religion in public life, and then move forward in time to discuss the views of subsequent generations.

“Sex, Lies, and the Founders: The American Presidency, Democracy, and the Media” (November 8) will explore the dramatic shift in the nature of presidential elections – and the relationship of the president to the people at large – that played out within a decade after the Constitution was adopted. In this concluding lecture, Beeman will discuss the impact of the democratization of American presidential politics, and the development of an aggressive news media, on the barrier between a president’s public life and his private affairs.

Beeman’s 2009 book, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Random House), won the George Washington Book Prize in 2010 with high praise from the jurors, who deemed it “the fullest and most authentic account of the Constitutional Convention ever written.” He is also the author of five other books on revolutionary America, including The Penguin Guide to the American Constitution (Penguin, 2010) and Patrick Henry: A Biography (McGraw-Hill, 1974), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Over the course of his career, Beeman has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Huntington Library. He has served as a Fulbright Professor in the United Kingdom and as Harmsworth Distinguished Professor of American History at Oxford University.

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Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center: http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Social Historian Coontz Revisits and Updates The Feminine Mystique in Sept. 13 Visit to Campus

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Would Don and Betty Draper’s marriage have had a better chance today than in the decidedly unliberated 1960s depicted in the hit TV series Mad Men? The nation’s preeminent expert on the state of marital bliss in America, social historian Stephanie Coontz, will be on the Washington College campus Tuesday, September 13 to argue an emphatic “Yes.” A fan of Mad Men, Coontz recommends it as “a much-needed lesson on the devastating costs of a way of life that still evokes misplaced nostalgia.”

In a talk titled “Mad Men, Working Girls, and Desperate Housewives: Women, Men, and Marriage in the Early 1960s,” Coontz will discuss why social changes since the 60s have been good for families and good for the institution of marriage. Her presentation will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, inside Hodson Hall on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. A book signing will follow.

Coontz’s recently published A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2011) pulls author Betty Friedan “down from heaven and up from hell,” in the words of the New York Times, challenging both conservative and liberal myths about the impact of her controversial book The Feminine Mystique. Described as “an inventive biography of a book,” A Strange Stirring is based on interviews with some 200 men and women (mostly women) who read Friedan's book when it was first published in 1963, and found their lives changed in response. Dubbed “better than the original” by the Huffington Post, Coontz’s book reveals how a generation of women came to realize their dissatisfaction with domestic life reflected not a personal inadequacy but rather a social and political injustice.

In addition, Coontz examines women’s changing status from the 1920s through the 1950s, compares the dilemmas of working-class and middle-class women, white and black, in the early 1960s, and illuminates the new mystiques and new possibilities facing men and women today. “We still haven’t fully figured out how to combine a loving family life with a rewarding work life,” Coontz writes in A Strange Stirring. “But The Feminine Mystique reminds us of the price women pay when we retreat from trying to resolve these dilemmas or fail to involve men in our attempts.”

Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wa., has devoted her career to the study of gender relations, families, and child development. She is Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families, which is based at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. Her previous book, Marriage: A History (Viking), was named one of the best books of 2005 by the Washington Post.

A former “marriage consultant” to Ladies Home Journal, she also has written for countless other publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. Recent national TV and radio appearances include interviews on NPR’s “Fresh Air”, C-SPAN, Oprah, the Today Show, and The Colbert Report.

Coontz’s talk is cosponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of History, Gender Studies Program, C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and the William James Forum. For more information, visit www.washcoll.edu.

Goodheart to Read from Best-Selling History, Tuesday, May 3 at Hynson Lounge

CHESTERTOWN, MD—On Tuesday, May 3, at 4:30 p.m., Washington College’s Adam Goodheart will give a reading from his new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, which was published three weeks ago by Alfred A. Knopf and is already a New York Times Best Seller garnering wide critical acclaim. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. A book signing will follow. Goodheart's reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, the Rose O'Neill Literary House, and the Washington College Department of History.

In a publishing year in which the 150th anniversary of the Civil War has sparked a flood of new books about the conflict, none has received more positive press and critical praise than 1861. In a front-page review in the April 24 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate described Goodheart's account of the secession crisis as "exhilarating" and "inspiring," praising the author for his ability to combine the journalist's eye for telling detail with the historian's rigorous research and the novelist's ability to make readers care about his characters. "1861 creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine," Applegate wrote.

The new work of history, which Knopf describes as "a sweeping portrait of America on the brink of its defining national drama," was also excerpted in the New York Times Magazine on April 3. Goodheart has recently appeared on panels with filmmaker Ken Burns and noted historians James McPherson of Princeton and David Blight of Yale, and will be giving talks and readings at universities and cultural institutions across the country in the months ahead. (For a listing, visit http://www.adamgoodheart.com/events.) He has been a guest this month on CNN, Fox News, and the nationally broadcast public radio shows "Fresh Air," "Here and Now," and "Studio 360," among many other venues. (Click here to listen to the Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross.)

Praise for the book has been effusive from the start. Kirkus Reviews called it "beautifully written and thoroughly original—quite unlike any other Civil War book out there," and Pulitzer-winning historian McPherson wrote that "Adam Goodheart is a Monet with a pen instead of a paintbrush." The Boston Globe's reviewer wrote, "Hardly a page of this book lacks an important insight or a fact that beguiles the readers. ... Goodheart shows us that even at 150 years' distance there are new voices, and new stories, to be heard about the Civil War."

Goodheart is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. Based at the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertown's colonial waterfront, the Starr Center supports the art of written history and explores the nation's past—particularly the legacy of its Founding era—in innovative ways through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. For more information, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu

Slavery of Another Kind: William & Mary Historian Presents 'Marie-Marguerite's Journey' at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Brett Rushforth, Assistant Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, will present "Marie-Marguerite's Journey: The Life and Lessons of an Indian Slave in the French Atlantic World" at Washington College's Litrenta Lecture Hall on Thursday, April 2, at 7 p.m.

Slavery in the context of colonial America most readily conjures grim imagery of ships laden with human chattel, of Africans in chains transported to the New World. But another woeful saga of enslavement unfolded in concert with the West African diaspora: from New France to the southern English colonies, Native American slavery flourished.

The compelling story of one such slave serves to illustrate the broader social condition: Marie-Marguerite, as she would come to be known, was captured by a rival tribe and knew slave status as a child before ever setting eyes on a French settler. The forced journey that was her life—from the Mississippi Valley to Michilimackinac, from Fort Detroit to Montreal, to Quebec and beyond—was a journey across the clash of cultures and the faultline of disparate repressions: Indian slavery, European slavery and the hybrid slavery forms that emerged therefrom.

At William & Mary, Brett Rushforth teaches courses on the history of early America, American Indians, and comparative race and slavery. His research focuses on cultural, diplomatic and commercial relationships between Europeans and the Native peoples of the Atlantic world.

His first book, co-edited with his colleague Paul Mapp, is Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2008). He is currently finishing revisions on a second book, Savage Bonds: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, which explores the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies. It will be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is also at work, with Christopher Hodson, on a study of the early modern French Atlantic. Under contract with Basic Books, its working title is Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Columbus to the Rise of Napoleon.

Dr. Rushforth's Washington College lecture is presented by Phi Alpha Theta, the Department of History, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Theta of Maryland Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to "Marie-Marguerite's Journey: The Life and Lessons of an Indian Slave in the French Atlantic World" is free and open to the public.

'African Women and Colonialism' Discussed at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Washington College's Conrad M. Wingate Lecture in History presents "African Women and Colonialism: Suppression or Empowerment?"—a talk by Dr. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Distinguished Professor of History Emerita, University of Colorado, Boulder, at Litrenta Lecture Hall on Wednesday, February 4, at 4:30 p.m.

McIntosh has an A.B. in early modern European history from Radcliffe College, an M.A. in African history from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in early modern English history from Harvard. She is the author of Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 and several other works on early modern life, thought and society published by Cambridge University Press.

She is co-author, with Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, of Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900-2003 (Ohio University Press, 2006), winner of the 2007 Aidoo-Snyder Scholarly Book Prize awarded by the African Studies Association for the best scholarly book on African women.

McIntosh's latest work is Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change, forthcoming from Indiana University Press in spring 2009.

In addition to her long affiliation with the University of Colorado, Boulder, McIntosh was Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, East Africa, in 2002-3

The Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture in History is held in honor of the late Conrad Meade Wingate '23, brother of late Washington College Visitor Emeritus Phillip J. Wingate '33 and the late Carolyn Wingate Todd.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to "African Women and Colonialism: Suppression or Empowerment?" is free and open to the public.

Washington College Hosts Phi Alpha Theta History Conference, March 31

Chestertown, MD, March 28, 2007 — An array of historical topics will be explored when Washington College's chapter of Phi Alpha Theta and the Department of History host the Phi Alpha Theta Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in William Smith Hall on Saturday, March 31. This year's conference marks the first time Washington College has hosted the event.

Phi Alpha Theta, the student-run National History Honor Society, sponsors regional and national conferences with presentations, informal discussions and a lecture series. In addition to having the opportunity to present thesis proposals annually at the regional meeting, students also submit writings for publication in The Historian, the organization's academic journal.

As this year's venue for Phi Alpha Theta's regional gathering, Washington College will play host to numerous participating institutions including the Catholic University of America, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Delaware State University, Georgetown University, Hood College, McDaniel College, Mount St. Mary's University, Shepherd University, the United States Naval Academy, the University of Maryland-College Park and the University of Maryland University College.

Sessions will be held throughout the day and will include panels given by graduate as well as undergraduate students. Subject areas will include: the Colonial and Revolutionary Era, 20th Century Conflict Around the World, Perspectives on World War II and Its Aftermath, Perspectives on Female Gender Roles, Maryland During and After the Civil War, the Modern Far East, Ancient Rome, Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and many others.

Washington College students Samantha Blau, Gillian Bourassa, Brenna Bychowski, Karen Ferguson, Laura Powell, Brandon Righi and Brian Taylor "gave unselfishly of their time, energy and expertise in planning the conference," said Professor Janet Sorrentino, Washington College's coordinator for the event. She added that other regional schools' faculty members—especially Bud Burkhard, Sandra Horvath-Peterson and Rusty Monhollon—also were key in the planning and execution of the conference.