Virtual Event Via Zoom 5th/6th November 2021 In November 1621 colonists in Massachusetts celebrated a year of survival and their first harvest with a feast that has since been called The First Thanksgiving. The feast was a supposed celebration of resilience after hardship. It was not until 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War and with the nation divided, that this feast was enshrined as a national holiday and a touchstone of American tradition and ideology: a story of togetherness projected over the realities of division, exceptionalism, genocide, and slavery. Now, four hundred years later, the story of the First Thanksgiving both provides comfort in another time of hardship while also revealing a depth of narrative ideology and mythology which obfuscates the ideological construction of modern day American nations. In the narrative of the US, in particular, at home and abroad, we see an increased awareness and attention […]

We invite applications to a conference dedicated to situating the COVID-19 pandemic in American and global history. The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted historians with the disruptive power of infectious disease. The impact of the crisis has been multifaceted, global, and immense in its scale and ramifications. For the United States, the experience has been especially confrontational. As of the time of writing, the US has among the highest rates of infection and the highest number of deaths of any country on the planet. The virus (and the measures taken to contain it) has disrupted almost every aspect of American life, revealed and exacerbated social, economic, racial and political fault lines, and raised major constitutional issues concerning the role of federal and state authorities in maintaining social well-being. This public health emergency has also set in motion an as yet uncertain set of consequences for the US’s position in the world.  President […]

27th Annual BrANCH Conference University of Warwick, 8-10 October 2021   Peter Parish Memorial Lecture: Professor Vivien Miller (Nottingham) Vitriol Throwing in Victorian America. BrANCH Keynote: Elaine Frantz (Kent State University): Title: The Nineteenth-Century Arrest as Trauma and Performance. Saturday New Directions in History Roundtable : History of Emotions Jo Cohen (QMUL): A Feeling for Property: Writing Histories of Emotions and Capitalism Tom Wright (Sussex): Charisma and the Problem of Crowd Emotions Iain Flood (Newcastle University): Postbellum Missouri: Individual Emotions and Political Change   This has been an unusual year (or has it been two?), and we are so excited at the prospect of holding BrANCH2021 at Warwick, and in person. The Covid situation remains ongoing and subject to change, so please be aware that it may not be possible to refund the full cost of the conference if travel restrictions are put in place from outside the UK. For […]