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Fever, Commerce and Diplomacy: Consuls, Commercial Agents and the Transformation of Warm Climate Medicine in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

From colonial medical officers to WHO advisors to Doctors without Borders, border crossers who link medical cultures in disparate parts of the world have recently captured the attention of historians of disease control. By and large, however, those scholars continue to look to the late nineteenth and twentieth century, situating the emergence of border crossers in the rise of modern globalization. This paper challenges this outlook by introducing an overlooked actor from an earlier period: the consul.

From Cold War to War on Terror (a History Talk podcast)

The September 11th attacks put terrorism in the forefront of American consciousness. Since then, the U.S. has waged a nearly ubiquitous global war on terror, that now reaches 76 countries and seems far from over. Although American thought on terrorism persistently goes back to 9/11 and 2001, U.S. interest and rhetoric on terrorism dates back well into the Cold War. How did terrorism become a focal point of U.S. foreign policy? How did earlier precedents shape how the U.S. fights terrorism and its response to 9/11?

From Romanovs to Reds: Russia's Revolutions at 100 (a History Talk podcast)

In February 1917, the 300-year reign of the Romanov dynasty ended. Eight months later in October, Bolshevik forces led by Vladimir Lenin seized power, establishing the world's first state operated on Marxist principles. In the aftermath, a myriad of political, economic, social, and cultural changes reshaped life inside Russia as the establishment of the Soviet Union upended the global order. To mark the 100-year anniversary of the Russian Revolutions, hosts Brenna Miller and Jessica Viñas-Nelson interview expert guests Drs. Angela Brintlinger, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Stephen Norris.

From the History of Refugees to Refugee History

The plight of refugees has again become a dominant focus of public debate as it was in the aftermath of the two world wars. It seems to speak to the desperation of displaced people and the intransigent stance adopted by many governments. In reflecting on the stance and role of historians, this talk proposes a history of population displacement that is attentive to the circumstances, actions and trajectories of refugees in different times and places, and what it means for refugees to encounter government officials and aid agencies, and to interact with one another as well as with people who had not been displaced. In thinking about refugees as agents rather than as flotsam and jetsam, the talk considers how refugees have expressed themselves, including as historians of their own predicament.

From the Transatlantic Telephone to the iPhone

The real origins of the iPhone’s power stems from the pioneering efforts of communication innovators that preceded the AT&T engineers of the 1920s. The story of wired long-distance communication really begins with the Western Union post-diggers who laid the first American transcontinental telegraph in 1861 and the Atlantic Telegraph Company that dropped the first transatlantic telegraph cable into the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.

Gavrilo Princip and the Beginning of World War I

On June 28, 1914, one event changed the world. A Bosnian-Serb youth Gavrilo Princip, aged only 19, shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austrian throne, and his wife Sophie as their motorcade passed by on the streets of Sarajevo.
 

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