On February 27, 2009, Professor Oliver Rink, the department’s specialist in American colonial history, delivered the second talk in this year’s History Forum series. In his presentation, “Wampum, Furs, and Guilders: Dutch Commercial Capitalism Comes to America,” Professor Rink returned to a subject that had inspired some of his earliest scholarship, which he now sees through the lens of more recent work on native American populations and his personal experience teaching with biology Professor Maynard Moe the popular course in biohistory, Plagues and Peoples. Rink took his audience on an expedition to the Lower Hudson River Valley in the seventeenth century, where Dutch colonists created a trade system that brought them into conflict with the Dutch West India Company. Woven throughout the talk was his analysis of the influence of Dutch capitalism and of European diseases on the lives and trading networks of Native Americans. The audience also gained an appreciation of how geography and environment influenced the development of New Netherland.
 In the spring quarter the History Forum will sponsor two presentations. Dr. Lia Schraeder (right), our new lecturer in Latin American history at CSUB, will speak on April 24 at 3:30 in the Albertson Room. Her presentation, "Spirits of the Times: Spiritism and the Mythology of the Mexican Revolution," is based on a portion of her dissertation and manuscript on the religious movement of spiritism in Mexico. Scholars of Mexican history generally represent spiritism as a "dissident" social movement and associate it with the first president of the Mexican Revolution, Francisco Madero. Dr. Schraeder’s presentation will re-examine such scholarship, while exploring the latent radicalism within spiritist rituals and on the margins of the movement.
On May 22, 2009 CSUB graduate students Becky Orfila, Elise Palos, Peter Parra, and Marie Poland, will present a panel featuring their research in regional history, including the history of Bakersfield’s Tenderloin district from 1870-1920, African-American airmen at Minter Field, the evolution of a Mexican-American club at East Bakersfield High School as reflected in a series of murals painted at the school, and the Sherman Institute, a Riverside-area boarding school for native americans established in the early 1900s. The forum will begin at 3:30 in Music Building room 114.
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WINNERS OF THE FIFTEENTH ANNUAL (2009) J.R. WONDERLY MEMORIAL PRIZE
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Graduate Division:
Elise Palos, La Tolteca: A Club and its Mural. The History of a Mexican-American Student Organization
Undergraduate Division:
First Place: Daniel Sexton, Mexico for the Mexicans: The 1938 Oil Expropriation
Second Place: Jon Doll, Popular Justice in Gold Rush Era San Francisco: The 1851 and 1856 Committees of Vigilance
Congratulations to all the prize winners!
To conserve resources, beginning with this Spring 2009 number of the History Newsletter, issues will be available primarily through our website. At this link, you will also find an archive of many past newsletters. If you wish to continue receiving a paper copy of the newsletter, please contact our production editor, Jean Stenehjem, at 654-3079 or jstenehjem@csub.edu.
Students should be aware that the new Social Science Subject Matter Program goes into effect on July 1, 2009. New students, and those who cannot complete the existing program by that date, should plan on following the new program’s requirements. If you have any questions, please see Professor Rodriquez, the Social Science Coordinator (FT 301-A), and take the time to look at the History Department’s Social Science web page (http://www.csub.edu/history/ss.htx) for additional details. Like all majors, students seeking subject matter certification through the Social Science Program should regularly meet with their advisors to ensure that they are correctly following the program requirements. In addition, students should remember that they need to have earned a minimum GPA of 2.7 in all courses taken for the Social Science Program, and that only those courses with grades of C- or better will count for the program.
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A STUDENT BLOOPER FROM HIST 231
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"Before the Enlightenment, people always had to agree with what the higher Archie said, even if the laws did not make any sense."
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