For thousands of years, inequality of income and wealth has been a defining feature of civilization. Only violent shocks have greatly narrowed the gap between rich and poor: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse and catastrophic plagues. This lecture examines these processes over the long run of history, and considers the prospects of leveling in today’s more stable world.

Center for Global Humanities

Walter Scheidel - Economic Inequality from the Stone Age to the Future

Practically all contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth century thought that the main cause of the French Revolution was something called "modern philosophy." Very few modern historians have taken their explanation very seriously. But are we right to dismiss it without really considering it? What, in any case, did contemporaries mean when they said that "la philosophie moderne" was the principal cause of the Revolution? Obviously, their view was closely connected with the issue of Human Rights and public declarations of Human Rights such as that promulgated by the French National Assembly in August 1789. Do we have anything to learn about Human Rights, Philosophy or Modern History from this strange historiographical paradox?

Jonathan Israel - Radical Enlightenment and the Making of the French Revolution (1750-1800)

Terrestrial life is under threat from three major insults: 1. Global warming. This can be interrupted and remedied by massive government investment in alternative renewable energy sources, carbon tax and massive conservation of wasted energy as an example to the rest of the world. 2. Nuclear power. Future accidents like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and the problem of massive quantities of radioactive waste which must be isolated from the ecosphere for one million years, which will inevitable leak and concentrate in food chains inducing epidemics of cancer, leukemia, genetic diseases and congenital abnormalities for the rest of time. Solution: Close down all nuclear reactors as a matter of urgent priority and put all nuclear scientists to work researching answers to radioactive waste storage. 3. Nuclear war. The ever-present and largely ignored threat of nuclear war. The US and Russia presently own 97% of the 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Nuclear war would create nuclear winter and the final epidemic of the human race. Answer: Support, urge and insist that President Obama negotiate with Russia for urgent abolition of nuclear weapons.

Helen Caldicott, M.D. - How to Fix a Threatened Planet

This seminar details how the eighteenth-century American educational system instilled in the founders of the United States a love and admiration for the historians and orators of ancient Greece and Rome. It then identifies the lessons that the founders learned from each period of Greek and Roman history and demonstrates that these lessons influenced their approach to a host of constitutional and practical issues that were crucial to the formation of the new American republic. In so doing it shows that the vivid tales of Greece and Rome shaped the founders' own heroic quest to win American independence and establish a durable republic.

Carl J. Richard - Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers

The seminar challenges the myth that psychiatric drugs reverse underlying chemical imbalances or abnormal brain states. It traces the historical development of this idea, and how it replaced an earlier understanding of psychiatric drugs as psychoactive substances that produce altered mental states, which can suppress the symptoms or manifestations of mental disorders. The seminar suggests that the current view of psychiatric drug treatment reflects political, commercial and professional interests rather than scientific fact. The seminar also explores the way that psychiatric drug treatment has promoted increasing medicalisation of human distress and social problems which has facilitated neoliberal social and economic policies.

Joanna Moncrieff - The Myth of the Chemical Cure: The Politics of Psychiatric Drug Treatment

This lecture focuses on the medical and cultural history of transfusion before the twentieth century, from the ill-fated experiments of the late seventeenth century to the re-introduction of the practice in nineteenth-century England. The early stories of transfusion include first-person accounts of medical/surgical experiments, medical case histories, and lectures delivered to medical students; as well as works of popular literature, such as satires and tales of sensation and horror.

Ann Kibbie - On the Brink of the Grave: Early Stories of Blood Transfusion

The President's Malaria Initiative, the Global Fund, and the Gates Foundation are currently funding an ambitious program of malaria reduction with a long-term goal of eradicating the disease in Africa. In the 1950s and 1960s, the World Health Organization, as part of its malaria eradication program (1955-1969), undertook a series of pilot projects to develop protocols to eradicate malaria in tropical Africa. The projects encountered a spate of difficulties that were unable to be surmounted. What can the study of antimalaria campaigns in the past tell us about the present? In what ways has the malaria problem itself changed over time? In what ways can the fields of historical epidemiology and global health history improve the practice of public health?

James L. A. Webb, Jr. - The Trouble with Malaria in Africa

This illustrated lecture explains the American Revolution in the Philadelphia region from a rarely considered perspective: how did the Revolution draw upon and reshape the cultural diversity of early American people? We will learn how the distinctive identities of Quakers, African Americans, and Pennsylvania Germans shaped the Revolutionary mobilization in crucial ways that had lasting consequences for postwar American political life.

Liam Riordan - The American Revolution and the Origins of American Multiculturalism

With poverty and violence increasing in Guatemala, tourism and foreigners increasingly dominating Yucatán, and militarized security and the forces of globalization shaping even Chiapas—the home of the revolutionary Zapatista movement—many Mayas have good reason to hope for dramatic change. After briefly examining the evidence in Maya calendrical systems for millenarian predictions, Carey explores more recent Maya histories and the ways indigenous women and men reconstruct their own pasts and forge their own futures in nations that often celebrate their ancestors but discriminate against their contemporaries.

David Carey, Jr. - 2012 and the Maya: Past Predictions and Future Histories

Professor Anouar Majid walks us through the history of American-Muslim relations, outlining what unites and divides the two cultures, reflecting on the most sensitive issues in the complex relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, and suggests ways for both civilizations to build a better future.

Anouar Majid - The Past and Future of American-Muslim Relations

Future world prosperity requires an ever-expanding supply of vital raw materials - oil and natural gas, copper and iron, food and water, and many others. At present, we rely for our supplies of these materials on sources that were discovered and developed in past decades and centuries; however, many of these reserves are now facing depletion at a rapid pace, and so future growth requires the development of new reserves. With most of the world's known resource reserves already in production, this is producing a desperate search for new deposits in those few areas that have hitherto escaped full exploitation - the Arctic, the deep oceans, inner Africa, and war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. This search will itself prove dangerous, given the desperate need for supplies and fragility of many of the target habitats, but also raises an even more frightening peril - the eventual depletion of all readily accessible natural resources. Unless steps are taken now to develop a new industrial paradigm based on renewables, conservation, and efficiency, we could witness the wholesale collapse of industrial civilization.

Michael T. Klare - The Race for What's Left

Drawing on his work in disability studies and his experience as a father of a child with Down syndrome, Bérubé will argue that an understanding of disability and human variation is critical not only for the humanities, but also for the life sciences and "applied" fields such as bioethics. Taking on the work of philosophers such as Michael Sandel, Julian Glover, Eva Kittay, Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer, he will show that intellectual disability should be of crucial importance to intellectuals– and that our major intellectual traditions have largely failed to meet that challenge.

Michael Bérubé - Bioethics: Too Important to be Left to Bioethicists

This seminar examines various forms of interactions between Arabs and Europeans in the early modern period. Based on Arabic sources from Aleppo, Paris, Meknes, and Moscow, Professor Matar focuses on a number of case studies relating to political history, personal relationships, and travel experiences. From ambassadors to priests and jurists, Arabs wrote about their views of the French, the Russians, and other nationalities.

Nabil Matar - Europe Through Arab Eyes: Encounters in the Early Modern Period

In this illustrated lecture, Professor Martin explores psychiatric categories involving emotion through ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary US. She asks how these categories are culturally created, measured and applied in relation to gender and race; then modified, contested, and rejected in contexts such as clinical rounds, patient advocacy support groups, and internet newsgroups. Some issues raised include: What definitions of rationality do mood disorders entail? What are the implications for the personhood of the patient of treating "irrational" mood disorders with psychotropic drugs intended to "manage" them? What are the stakes of the current broad revaluing of "mania" for larger cultural contexts, such as competitive US corporations, which now place a high value on energized, "manic" states for the sake of the innovation and creativity they are believed to yield?

Emily Martin - Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture

Historian Jerold Auerbach argued in 1983 that "where community ends, law begins" and critiqued "misguided enthusiasm for alternative dispute resolution" while remaining skeptical about whether law produces justice. In this seminar, we affirm and challenge parts of Auerbach's analysis in the light of contemporary challenges of legal systems and courts, changing notions of community, and innovative forms and uses of conflict resolution. We look at ways that "dispute resolution" techniques have been used to build relationships on individual and communal levels in the aftermath of systemic violence. We review research about what people understand justice to be. In examining these and other examples and issues, we reflect on the complex relationships between solving problems, resolving disputes and finding justice.

Craig McEwen - Solving Problems, Resolving Disputes and Finding Justice

The University of New England Center for Global Humanities offers lectures by leading scholars to explore the human condition in the 21st century.

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Center for Global Humanities

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