History Club Visits the Erie Canal

By History Department on October 31, 2018

On September 29th, the Colgate History Club took an excursion to cruise the Erie Canal, in Herkimer, NY. We boarded our Colgate transportation on a Saturday, all excited to explore and learn about the Erie Canal and its long history.

We were all first timers on the Erie Canal and didn’t know too much about the canal before the trip, except for the basics, such as its transportation function, the economic prosperity it brought, and also its impact on indigenous people living around the canal. Although we all had different reasons to go on this trip, everyone greatly enjoyed this experience, combining our love of learning history with a nice boat ride on a beautiful fall day.

Marcy Norton Delivers Reading Lecture

By History Department on October 10, 2018

On October 3, the Colgate History Department welcomed special guest Marcy Norton for the annual Douglas K. Reading Lecture.. Persson Auditorium was packed for the occasion. The subject of Norton’s lecture, “Taming the Wild: Animal Familiarization in Greater Amazonia, 1492-1700,” was human-animal relations, colonialism, and science. She will soon publish a book on this topic with Harvard University Press.

Norton began by introducing animal familiarization, or taming. She first came across this topic 10 years ago when she decided to write a book about humans and animals after 1492. She started by reading treatises about hunting in Europe and began to notice a discrepancy between the way animals were objectified through livestock husbandry, and the way they were viewed as fellow subjects in the aristocratic hunt.

Finding this difference intriguing, Norton moved on to studying Read more

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The London History Study Group

By History Department on October 2, 2018

Last week the History Department celebrated student research by awarding the London Study Group Work-in–Progress prizes. As the description of the prizes has it: “The three papers all demonstrate energetic archival work, spritely imagination, and a willingness to be wrong and re-assess, whilst remaining (in our profession’s favourite expression) ‘very much works in progress’.” The three papers were:

Emily Kahn, “‘A Right to an Opinion’: Post-Blitz Planning Exhibitions and Public Participation in Reconstructing London, 1943–1951”
Mara Stein, “‘A Most Extraordinary Variety of the Human Race’: the Ethnic Show in Victorian Britain, 1840–1900.”
Annie Zhanling Wang, “Defining Black Theatre—Racial Discourse in the Early Life of Talawa Theatre Company, from 1986 to 1996.”