Events - JCMML
The next Joseph C. Miller Lecture Series on September 27, 2021, by Alessandra Batty, University of Bonn.
Next Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series on September 13, 2021, by Manuel Barcia Paz, University of Leeds.
Childhood and children are new areas of research in Ottoman social history. Despite increasing interest in the history of children, we have still not established how Ottoman subjects of the 1600s conceived and perceived childhood. As far as the Crimean Khanate is concerned, there are no studies on childhood of any kind whatsoever. To fill this gap, at least partly, I will address the children forced to live as slaves. As the child slaves that were born in Crimea or had arrived at an early age grew up within local society, they lived like Muslims, and were unaware of their Christian pasts.
In the early 1930s, the Japanese military established a system of brothels, called "comfort stations", for the use of its soldiers and recruited tens of thousands of women as military prostitutes, called "comfort women". The majority of these women were recruited from the populace of Japan's colonies, in particular Korea, or occupied territories in China and South East Asia. Public discourse about the legality and morality of this system started in 1936 and intensified during the 1990s when Korean and other victims broke their silence.
How did child labor opposition become a global movement between the 1880s and 1930s, and how do we write its history without a Western bias? Based on Nina Schneider's recent book, this lecture first explores how a diverse but connected network of advocates in the Americas turned child labor into a global concern. Unlike the tightly organized anti-slavery movement, these opponents operated through a loosely institutionalized network, sharing similar tactics and platforms across borders. She also address the methodological challenges of researching this history, specifically the struggle to construct a global narrative that avoids Eurocentric diffusion models and national biases, a difficulty that ultimately inspired the book’s experimental structure.
How can the historical and geographic location of Cape Town, perched at the literal hinge of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, reframe our understanding of creolisation? As a former Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlement, Cape Town is deeply layered with the legacies of unfree labor and diasporas from across both ocean worlds. This lecture with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, explores the Cape as a vital transoceanic site to examine how creolisation manifests in diverse creative expressions, from Longarm dancing and Cape Malay foodways to the Afrikaans language and the contemporary visual art of Thania Petersen. Ultimately, She suggests that retrieving these memories of creolisation offers an anti-hegemonic resource for resistance, resilience, and community-building today.
What did Black freedom mean for the development of citizenship and democracy in the early United States? In this lecture, Damian Pargas (Leiden University) traces how the free Black population expanded continually in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, as northern states abolished slavery while southern states redoubled their commitment to it. He examines how the resulting disputes over the citizenship rights and legal personhood of free and formerly enslaved African Americans, over movement across state lines, access to justice, and participation in democracy, became a driving force behind the sectional conflicts that ultimately led the United States down the path to civil war.