Events

…it’s all fun and games!

Have a little fun with Archives and Special Collections for the 2022-2023 season of First Fridays. This year we investigate materials in the archives that are strictly recreational.

Presentations begin at noon. Light refreshments and appetizers will be available. ASL interpreters will be present for all First Fridays events. Presentations resume in person this year, with the option to stream via Zoom. Please make a reservation if you plan to attend in person or online.

Playing Ball in the James Ford Bell Library

Presented by Anne Good, Assistant Curator, James Ford Bell Library

Ball games, in fact games and recreational activities of all sorts, were played by peoples throughout the premodern world. This talk by assistant curator Anne Good will share accounts and images of recreation documented in the Bell Library’s collections.

‘Get Together Americans!’ Through Neighborhood Home Festivals

Presented by Ellen Engseth, Curator, Immigration History Research Center Archives

The Parranda, a Puerto Rican custom of progressive parties, were adapted by Rachel Davis Dubois in New York as the Neighborhood Home Festival. Their purpose was intercultural experiences, developing friendships, and combating racism.

About

First Fridays is made possible by a generous gift from Governor Elmer L. Andersen and Mrs. Eleanor Andersen in honor of former University Librarian Dr. Edward B. Stanford.

Department of History, Columbia University

Title: On Mathematical Measurement and Representative Politics: Rethinking the 1960s Apportionment Revolution

Abstract: The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr sparked renewed interest in the mathematics of electoral politics in the United States. In the three months following the Court’s ruling that malapportionment cases were justiciable, challenges to the existing apportionment plan were brought up in 22 states. Initially, however, there was no clearly articulated standard by which malapportionment should be measured. As then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller retorted when pressed on why New York has not revised its apportionment plan, “But what would be your basis for apportionment? Have you got a formula?” In search of a solution, political scientists, mathematicians, and early computer enthusiasts began asking whether mathematical analysis could be used to achieve fair representation. In this talk, I survey some of the early 1960s attempts to bring mathematical and computational techniques to the study of political representation. I demonstrate how conflicting ideas about how to measure fairness came to influence electoral politics in the Unites States and how claims to mathematical exactitude served to further obscure political questions. 

Automation by Design is a global, interdisciplinary, virtual CBI symposium on the politics and culture of digital automation and will be held as a 1.5-day virtual symposium Friday through Saturday, February 17 & 18, 2023. This symposium will explore how automation—from its algorithmic and architectural design to its structuring, materiality, maintenance, and use—has developed jointly with social politics. 

Learn more and register on the conference homepage. 

Register

Automation by Design is a global, interdisciplinary, virtual CBI symposium on the politics and culture of digital automation and will be held as a 1.5-day virtual symposium Friday through Saturday, February 17 & 18, 2023. This symposium will explore how automation—from its algorithmic and architectural design to its structuring, materiality, maintenance, and use—has developed jointly with social politics. 

Learn more and register on the conference homepage. 

Register

History, Winona State University

Title and abstract: TBD

…it’s all fun and games!

Have a little fun with Archives and Special Collections for the 2022-2023 season of First Fridays. This year we investigate materials in the archives that are strictly recreational.

Presentations begin at noon. Light refreshments and appetizers will be available. ASL interpreters will be present for all First Fridays events. Presentations resume in person this year, with the option to stream via Zoom. Please make a reservation if you plan to attend in person or online.

Fun With a Purpose: Pageants and Parades in the Social Welfare History Archives

Presented by Linnea Anderson, Archivist, Social Welfare History Archives

Pageants, festivals, parades, and exhibitions were popular activities in early 20th-century community centers and recreation departments. These events used patriotic, historical, cultural, and literary themes to entertain and educate. Join the fun for stories that range from neighborhood festivals to major civic productions with casts of thousands and elaborate sets, costumes, music, and dancing.

About

First Fridays is made possible by a generous gift from Governor Elmer L. Andersen and Mrs. Eleanor Andersen in honor of former University Librarian Dr. Edward B. Stanford.

History, University of California Santa Barbara

Title: Collaboration Across and Beyond “Two Cultures”

Abstract: There is a growing recognition today that the image of the sciences and the humanities as two separate “cultures”, famously described by C.P. Snow in his Rede lecture in 1959, is no longer tenable. Movements within the historical profession, such as “big history,” “deep history”, and bio-history, are trying to articulate modes of constructive engagement between historians and natural scientists. Within natural sciences, there has been a similar pattern in the relatively recent past that involves the increasing blurring of boundaries between the natural and the social/human sciences. The trend is posited as a distinctly twenty-first-century phenomenon. Against this backdrop, I argue that throughout the twentieth century, when the specialization has driven the sciences and the humanities father apart, there have been notable examples of collaborations between natural scientists and historians, that were diverse, complex, and, at times, surprisingly productive.

History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

Title and abstract: TBD

Department of History, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

Title: “Forgotten Clones: The Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution”

Abstract: Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American embryologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs and his team developed the technique of nuclear transplantation using frogs in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, Marie DiBerardino, John Gurdon, and University of Minnesota’s own Robert McKinnell before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, I demonstrate how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of what was then referred to as the Biological Revolution. My work illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as providing new insights into the changing cultural perceptions of the biological sciences after the Second World War.

History of Science and Technology, University of King's College, Halifax

Title and abstract: TBD