History Talk

During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy emerged as an important aspect of relations between states across the globe. Exhibitions, concerts, performances, book readings, and film screenings captured the ideological message of each side, as they showed conflicting “ways of life” in the global Cold War context. Based on Theodora Dragostinova’s recent book, "The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene," this talk interrogates the importance of Cold War culture in a global perspective, tracing the cultural contacts of small Bulgaria from the British Museum and NYC’s Metropolitan to New Lexington, Ohio, to Mexico City, New Delhi, and Lagos.

Panel:

--Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center

--Theodora Dragostinova | Associate Professor, Department of History

Brought to you by the Clio Society of the Ohio State History Department, in partnership with the Bexley Public Library and the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.

 

Posted December 15, 2021

 

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In this talk about her new book, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This talk investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Prof. Mytheli Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development.

Panelists:

Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center

Mytheli Sreenivas | Associate Professor, Departments of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This talk is brought to you by the Clio Society of the Ohio State History Department, in partnership with the Bexley Public Library.

 

Posted September 14, 2021

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point?

Join Professor Chris Otter as he takes us back over the last 200 years to explore how we developed our current diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar. He’ll explore how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.

Panelists:

Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center

Chris Otter | Professor, Department of History

This event is presented in partnership with Bexley Public Library.

 

Posted June 14, 2021

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

Faculty experts from the Ohio State University Department of History hold a conversation about the first one hundred days of the Biden administration.

Panelists:

Maysan Haydar, Lecturer and Graduate Student, Department of History

Treva Lindsey, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Peter Mansoor, Professor and General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History, Department of History

Margaret Newell, Professor, Department of History

Joseph Parrott, Assistant Professor, Department of History

 

 

Posted May 7, 2021

Shannon Gonzales-Miller, PhD, shares her dissertation research project that sought to examine the experiences of identity erasure, invisibility and hyper visibility for Urban Indian, graduate students who attended an historically and predominately white public university. She considers how prevailing, monolithic descriptions of Native students influences the classroom experiences of non-Reservation Native students. 

 

Posted April 21, 2021

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

This presentation is an Indigenous autoethnographic study of a family’s story of survival through the Native American boarding school system. Although this project was in a part an academic exercise, it was also an effort to reclaim pieces of a family’s experience that was purposefully silenced and erased from mainstream hegemonic nationalist narratives. Speaker: Melissa Beard Jacob, PhD | Intercultural Specialist, Native American and Indigenous Student Initiatives, Office of Student Life Multicultural Center | The Ohio State University

This video is presented in partnership with Ohio State Newark Earthworks Center, American Indian Studies, and the Department of History.

Posted April 6, 2021.

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

With more than 80 million forcibly displaced people in the world and another 260-plus million international migrants, humans today seem to be on the move. Debates over immigration and refugee policy in the U.S., Europe, and across the world have become fierce and deeply divisive, to say the least, and will surely continue to dominate politics in the coming years. All the while, lives are in the balance as people around the globe take the often difficult decision to set off to make a new home in another country. History allows us a glimpse at the motivations and predicaments people on the move face today and in the future.

Ohio State University Department of History panelists Theodora Dragostinova, Associate Professor; Maysan Haydar, Lecturer and Robin Judd, Associate Professor discuss these issues with Host Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor, Department of History.

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Posted February 4, 2021.

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

On World AIDS Day 2020, in the midst of another pandemic, Ohio State University History Professor Thomas McDow presented a close look at the historical factors that shaped the global spread of HIV, from equatorial Africa to the world.

Thomas F. McDow is a specialist in African History at Ohio State University. He co-teaches a course with a microbiologist on the global history and science of HIV and is writing a history of HIV in Tanzania.

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Posted December 4, 2020

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

This content is made possible, in part, by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this content do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ohio State University experts Melissa Beard Jacob, Ph.D., and Associate Professor Daniel Rivers discuss Indigenous Peoples' Day and the history of Indigenous People. Dr. Jacob is the Intercultural Specialist for Native American and indigenous Students and Dr. Rivers is a faculty member in the Department of History.

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Posted October 14, 2020.

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

A conversation with Ohio State University Department of History faculty members, John Brooke, Jennifer Eaglin and Samuel White about the historical context of climate change.

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Posted September 29, 2020.

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]