History Faculty Publications

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'A Towering Virtue of Necessity': Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford
(University of Chicago Press, 2013) Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Nelson, Andrew J.
Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military- industrial- academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profi table loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.
Amerigo Vespucci and the Four Finger (Kunstmann II) World Map
(National Centre for Maps and Cartographic Heritage, 2012) Metcalf, Alida C.
Is the anonymous painted map of the world, dated c. 1506 in the Bavarian State Library, also known as the "Four Finger" world chart, or as the Kunstmann II, authored by Amerigo Vespucci? The map was a privately-held, highly illuminated painted world map. Its execution implies a map-maker with access to up-to-date Spanish and Portuguese geographic knowledge, and who had likely travelled to the new world. This paper explores the evidence for attributing the authorship of the map to Amerigo Vespucci and asks if digital cartography can further resolve this question.
Beyond Failure: Rethinking Confederate State Policies on the Western Frontier
(8/1/2015) McDaniel, W. Caleb
This paper was delivered at the Remaking North American Sovereignty conference held in Banff, Canada, July 30-August 1, 2015.
Challenges and Considerations Related to Studying Dementia in Blacks/African Americans
(IOS Press, 2017) Ighodaro, Eseosa T.; Nelson, Peter T.; Kukull, Walter A.; Schmitt, Frederick A.; Abner, Erin L.; Caban-Holt, Allison; Bardach, Shoshana H.; Hord, Derrick C.; Glover, Crystal M.; Jicha, Gregory A.; Van Eldik, Linda J.; Byrd, Alexander X.; Fernander, Anita
Blacks/African Americans have been reported to be ∼2–4 times more likely to develop clinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compared to Whites. Unfortunately, study design challenges (e.g., recruitment bias), racism, mistrust of healthcare providers and biomedical researchers, confounders related to socioeconomic status, and other sources of bias are often ignored when interpreting differences in human subjects categorized by race. Failure to account for these factors can lead to misinterpretation of results, reification of race as biology, discrimination, and missed or delayed diagnoses. Here we provide a selected historical background, discuss challenges, present opportunities, and suggest considerations for studying health outcomes among racial/ethnic groups. We encourage neuroscientists to consider shifting away from using biologic determination to interpret data, and work instead toward a paradigm of incorporating both biological and socio-environmental factors known to affect health outcomes with the goal of understanding and improving dementia treatments for Blacks/African Americans and other underserved populations.
Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) Zammito, John
According to Reinhart Koselleck, in every moment a congeries of “temporal strata” are effectively co-present, but not necessarily coherent, hence the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.” Contrast this with the notion of a zeitgeist in which every aspect of a historical moment is integrated by some master principle. There are so many trajectories active in any present that it is unlikely that one might coordinate all of them, if not unwise even to believe that they are coordinated. Not only does each historical present demonstrate at best rhizomic or patchy coherences across domains, but it also registers different paces and intensities in the temporal deployment of the domains. Nevertheless, coherence remains a compelling regulative ideal. Fortunately, path-dependency—cumulation as constraint—is a discriminable feature of the several distinct “layers of time” or diachronic flows co-present in any given historical moment. Moreover, that some strata of experience remain roughly constant enables us to appraise the variation of others. If too many elements enter into simultaneous crisis, if we hit the “perfect storm,” then our capacity to comprehend (like that of our objects of inquiry) may be severely impaired. These insights from Koselleck are eminently applicable and deserve recognition and gratitude in historical epistemology.
Elusive Neutrality: Christian Humanitarianism and the Question of Palestine, 1948-1967
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Cohen, G. Daniel
This article examines the history of Protestant humanitarian interventions on behalf of Palestinian refugees between 1948 and 1967. Deeply concerned with Arab suffering, Protestant churches organized under the World Council of Churches were also theologically committed to a new “Christian approach to the Jews” in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Commitment to neutrality, however, could not keep politics at bay. Indeed, the hallmark of Protestant humanitarianism in the Middle East was a permanent struggle between claims of justice and impartial benevolence, universal human rights and Christian Zionism, empathy for Palestinian victimhood and identification with Jews as symbols of historical injustice.
Failures to Compute
(AAAS, 2013) Mody, Cyrus C.M.
From Materials Science to Nanotechnology: Institutions, Communities, and Disciplines at Cornell University, 1960-2000
(University of California Press, 2013) Choi, Hyungsub; Mody, Cyrus C.M.
During the last several decades, interdisciplinary research centers have emerged as a standard, powerful tool for federal funding of university research. This paper contends that this organizational model can be traced to the ‘‘Interdisciplinary Laboratories’’ program funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1960. The novelty of the IDL program was that it created a peer group of university laboratories with sustained funding to ensure their institutional stability. The Cornell Materials Science Center, one of the ﬁrst three Interdisciplinary Laboratories, served as a breeding ground for a new community of engineering faculty members, who subsequently helped establish a series of interdisciplinary research centers at Cornell, including the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures (or National Submicron Facility) in 1977. The Materials Science Center and National Submicron Facility provided explicit models for the expansion and coordination of networks of interdisciplinary centers, both within single universities (such as Cornell) and across multiple campuses (through programs such as the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers). The center model has proved both ﬂexible and durable in the face of changing demands on universities. By examining the Materials Science Center and the National Submicron Facility, we show that recent institutional developments perceived as entirely novel have their roots in the high Cold War years.
Gender and Colonial Politics after the Versailles Treaty
(Berghahn, 2010) Wildenthal, Lora; Canning, Kathleen; Barndt, Kerstin; McGuire, Kristin
Haiti's Usable Past: Violence, Anglophilia, and Antebellum American Abolitionists
(2003) McDaniel, W. Caleb
His Brothers' Keeper: John Brown, Moral Stewardship, and Interracial Abolitionism
(Slavery and Abolition, 2011-03)
Recent biographies of abolitionist John Brown emphasize his uniqueness and cast him as an anomalous figure in the antislavery movement. This article, however, makes the case for Brown’s representativeness by connecting his career to his formative years in northeastern Ohio, a geographical and cultural context that shaped Brown’s lifelong image of himself as an advisor and manager of wilderness communities. That self-image made Brown similar to white ‘moral stewards’ in many reform movements. Even Brown’s interracial relationships, though difficult to interpret because of sparse documentary evidence, were shaped partly by the culture of moral stewardship in which Brown’s career began.
How the Book of Changes Arrived in the West
(Middlebury College, 2012) Smith, Richard J. (Richard Joseph), 1944-
In several respects the transmission of the i ching (or book of changes) to the West parallels the process by which Buddhism and Daoism traveled to Europe and the Americas. In each case Western “missionaries” played a part in the process, and in each case there were varied responses over time, ranging from blind indifference to rational knowledge, romantic fantasy, and existential engagement. But in nearly every instance, as in East Asia, there was an effort, often quite self-conscious, to assimilate and domesticate the classic. As with the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Tibetans, Westerners sent missions to China, and they brought back all kinds of useful information. But compared to their East Asian counterparts, these Western missions proceeded from very different motives and had a very different focus. Moreover, in contrast to the premodern spread of the Yijing and other texts to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, where elites were completely comfortable with the classical Chinese script, in the West the Changes required translation, raising issues of commensurability and incommensurability that are still hotly debated today.
Human Rights Activism in Occupied and Early West Germany: The Case of the German League for Human Rights
(The University of Chicago Press, 2008) Wildenthal, Lora
Human Rights Advocacy and National Identity in West Germany
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) Wildenthal, Lora
Introduction
(Duke University Press, 2001) Wildenthal, Lora
Liberdade entre fronteiras: libertos no Território Indígena e no Sul dos Estados Unidos
(SciELO, 2019) Yarbrough, Fay A.
This essay examines how the former slaves of Choctaw Indians, and in Indian Territory more generally, discussed and imagined freedom within this context by exploring their memories of the era within the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) slave narratives. These former slaves often described owners and overseers, and the announcement of emancipation in very similar language to those familiar with the accounts of ex-slaves from the Confederate states. Where their accounts differ markedly, however, is in terms of their access to land once the Civil War ended and the process of Reconstruction (1863-1877) began: the former slaves of native peoples in Indian Territory gained rights to land, while those from the Southern states did not.
Lora Wildenthal on Neta C. Crawford
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) Wildenthal, Lora
Mapping the Traveled Space: Hans Staden's Maps in Warhaftige Historia
(Brown University, 2009) Metcalf, Alida C.
By examining the map and map-like illustrations published in Hans Staden's Warhaftige Historia (1557), this article argues that the maps underscore the truthfulness of the narrator by reinforcing his role as an eyewitness observer. Beyond bolstering the narrator?s authority, Staden's map projects a distinctly different image of Brazil. The mapping tradition of mariners seems to have been a major influence, and the map accords ownership of the mainland to indigenous groups, making his a unique representation of sixteenth-century Brazil.
Migrant Self-Selection and Random Shocks: Evidence from the Panic of 1907
(Cambridge University Press, 2023) Escamilla-Guerrero, David; López-Alonso, Moramay
We study the impact of the 1907 Panic, the most severe economic crisis before the Great Depression, on the selection of Mexican immigration. We find that migrants were positively selected on height before the crisis. This pattern changed to negative selection during the crisis but returned to positive selection afterward. Adjustments in selection were partially mediated by the enganche, a historical labor-recruiting system that reduced migration costs but only for taller laborers with above-average earnings potential. We document that labor recruiting contributed to maintaining the relatively constant height profile of the migration flow in the short run.
New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era: An Introduction
(The University of North Carolina Press, 2012-06) McDaniel, W. Caleb; Johnson, Bethany L.

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