For the first installment in the Hamilton College Humanities Forum, Visiting Assistant Professor of History Christopher Hill will discuss “Taking the Cross out of the Crusades: Pop Culture’s Secular Transformation of High Medieval Piety,” on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 4:10 p.m. in the Science Center’s G041 classroom. The lecture is free and open to the public. More ...

Professor of History Thomas Wilson presented "'Sacrifice to the Spirits as Living': A Confucian Theory of Gods" at the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies on Oct. 2. The paper is a chapter from his book manuscript titled Confucian Gods and the Rites to Venerate Them in Imperial China. More ...

Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School Paul Finkelman delivered a lecture on constitutional jurisprudence and roles of slavery and race in the construction of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution Thursday evening. An expert in American legal history, race and the law, slavery and the constitution and the founding fathers, Finkelman began his remarks with a famous quote by Thomas Jefferson, the fundamental architect of American ideology. More ...

Assistant Professor of History Chad Williams published a review of the book Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) by Margaret Humphreys in The Journal of African American History. Williams’ teaching and research interests include the history of African Americans soldiers. More ...

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Maurice Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History and Woodstock attendee, was interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio with Woodstock performer Richie Havens and longtime New York disc jockey Pete Fornatale. The Chronicle of Higher Education published Isserman’s essay, “3 Days of Peace and Music, 40 Years of Memory” on the same day, Aug. 10. More ...

A letter to the editor by Chad Williams, assistant professor of history, appeared in the July 25 edition of The New York Times. Williams, who specializes in African American history, commented on the recent controversy surrounding the arrrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Barack Obama's subsequent remarks. More ...

Fallen Giants - A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes by Maurice Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History, and University of Rochester Professor Stewart Weaver was reviewed in the July 17 issue of Commonweal, the independent journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics. More ...

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Michael Harrington's article "Our Fifty Million Poor" in Commentary magazine (a liberal journal of the time), James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman wrote an essay titled "Michael Harrington: Warrior on Poverty" about Harrington and his essay for The New York Times Sunday Book Review. More ...

"Getting High on the Himalayas," a review of Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes published in The New York Review of Books, declared the book an "authentic history" and "a big book in every sense." The book  is co-authored by James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman and University of Rochester Professor of History Stewart Weaver. More ...

Maurice Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History, penned an in-depth review of Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey in the June 10 issue of The Nation. In the article, titled "Afterimages," Isserman examines the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the "Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary comandante turned itinerant guerrilla" and Casey's analysis of "the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star." More ...