This 25-minute lecture covers the varieties of reasons and ways one reads in graduate school, and techniques and functions of note-taking.
-
The New Yorker, September 2014 This essay explores the ambiguities and politics of border-making through the history of the Chamizal, an area of about seven hundred acres contested by Mexico and the United States for a century. In the mid-19th century, American and Mexican boundary surveyors established that the border…
-
Colonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War
by paul.kramerIn Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick, eds., Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U. S. Body Politics in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) The essay explores the U. S. military’s regulation of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, and a resulting scandal, as a lens onto the…
-
This is a fuller, more detailed version of the above essay, on the history of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo.
-
The New Yorker (July 2013) This essay tells the story of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, emphasizing the ways that controversies over its uses and legal status have long and troubling histories. US access to the bay emerged from coercive diplomacy between the U. S. and…
-
Review of Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
by paul.kramerAndrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa is a truly remarkable achievement, one of the most powerful and illuminating works to emerge so far in the effort to recast historical thinking beyond national scales. At its core, it is an inter‐imperial history of German colonialists attempt to transplant New South cotton varietals…
-
In Douglas Northrup, ed., A Companion to World History (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) This article discusses the possibilities and limitations of region as a subject and frame for the writing of global histories. It explores competing definitions of the term “region” and, embarking from constructivist premises that cast regions…
-
-
Slate (April 2012) This essay discusses present-day anti-immigration laws through California’s 19th-century struggle with the federal government over immigration. When, in August 1874, 22 Chinese women were barred from landing at San Francisco by a California official who identified them as “lewd and debauched”—undesirable immigrants under state law—they took the…
-