“Legacy: W.E.B. Du Bois as a Political Pioneer” includes materials relating to Du Bois’s efforts to change the political system for the better, from founding documents of the Niagara Movement and the Pan-African movement, to materials relating to his unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate and his work for world peace.The exhibit is sure to be inspiring as well as fascinating for all of our future historians!
A pioneering sociologist, historian, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic, Du Bois committed his life to ending racial and social injustice. Without ever seeking a mass following, he was a peerless organizer who helped found both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, and was a key Pan-African theorist. For many years, he was editor of The Crisis and other progressive journals, and an international spokesperson for peace and the rights of oppressed minorities. Through relentless struggle, Du Bois set the stage for the civil rights activists to follow.
These are books on religious and cultural history. I am particularly interested in medieval cognition, with how people in the Middle Ages understood their world. These books unsettle popular notions of how medieval people behaved or challenge modern assumptions about human how humans order their minds and social interactions.
Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Carruthers, Mary, and Jan M. Ziolkowski. Ed. The Medieval Craft of Memory: An anthology of texts and pictures. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Geary, Patrick J. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Ginzberg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1982.
Schmidt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
And a film: Into Great Silence (2006, Philip Gröning). 
Engage scholarship in history, bioethics, legal studies, the arts, and other realms to explore how value has been ascribed to human lives in courtrooms, labs, archives, boardrooms, and universities. Public lectures, panels, and film screenings will consider subjects ranging from the role of war and sacrifice in ancient societies to contemporary reparations movements. Events will examine efforts to compensate individuals and families for lives and limbs lost on the battlefield and in the workplace. We will consider attempts (from the religious to the technological) to purchase eternal life, and reflect on ways in which historians have measured and valued life stories. In sum, this exciting series investigates the many and varied approaches to the questions, what is life worth?
Welcome to the new UMass History Club blog! We are one of the many RSOs at UMass, and proud to finally have our own blog up and running. We will be updating this site regularly to keep you updated on meetings, events, news, and other exciting things. Please feel free to contribute feedback so we can continue to update and improve the site and the club! (Just remember to keep it classy, UMass.)
Our meetings for this semester will be on Mondays at 7pm in Herter 601 (excluding holidays when the University is closed). Our first meeting will be on September 22. Come meet other historiophiles, eat snacks, and learn what the history club has to offer! History majors and non-history majors alike are welcome.
We hope to see you there!
