Recent ucsb_journalhist_vol6issue1 items

Joséphine Baker and Eartha Kitt: How Two Americans Became French Icons

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt were Black female entertainers who found great success when they emigrated to Paris. They both sought asylum in France after feeling threatened by racism in America

French citizens were obsessed with jazz, and continued to be into the 1970s. Even during the Great Depression, jazz musicians, who were only hired if they were Black made about $300 per week. One of the most talented of these jazz stars was Baker. Known predominantly for her iconic stage presence, Baker was beloved by the French. With her signature crossed eyes, high energy movements, and beaming smile, Baker graced stage after stage in France.

Kitt’s stage presence and her ability to sing in seven languages propelled her European career forward. She went from being too poor to recognize a banana to favoring beluga caviar. Of course, Kitt had ups and downs in France in the 1950s-1960s. She was also privy to a snide comment or two about the fact that she was mixed...

The Power of Words from Disney to de Gaulle: Gaucho Goofy, BBC, Free France & Argentina’s Second World War Neutrality

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Can the resistance thrive far from the battlefields, in places disconnected from the focal points of conflict? This study examines the intermesh of diplomacy, culture, and resistance in Argentina during World War II, breaking assumptions about neutrality in a country later shadowed by its ties to postwar fleeing Nazi fugitives. Argentina’s undecided wartime stance—fluctuating between official neutrality and Axis sympathies—was molded by U.S.-led propaganda, European colonial-cultural ties, and profound internal divisions. At the heart of all this was Albert Guérin, a WWI veteran and industrialist who led the Free French Committee in Buenos Aires. His grassroots resistance completely diminished geographical boundaries between continents. The committee united ideological factions through BBC broadcasts, distributed over 150,000 propaganda bulletins across Latin America, and significantly bolstered the Allied cause, recognized even by de Gaulle himself. Simultaneously, through the...

Boiling Down the Female Egg Industry and Advertising in Contemporary US History

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Advertisements targeted at intended parents and potential donors use women’s bodies to market a commodity—a female egg. Human eggs became commodified shortly after the first baby was conceived via egg donation and must be understood as a broader shift in reproductive medicine. This shift, combined with the increased cost of education, pushes women to potentially commit to invasive hormone injections, surgeries, and the risk of cancer in exchange for financial compensation. As assisted reproductive practices gained traction in the 1980s, demand for donor eggs surged, and private agencies—not clinics— stepped in as middlemen. To meet the demand, unregulated private egg agencies thrived under limited oversight and targeted college-aged women with ads that did not properly inform women of the risks. In this landscape, human eggs were no longer biological matter but high-value objects exchanged in the free market. Companies, namely YourEggs, adjusted to the societal shift to social...

Knowledge Making and Treatment in Early Modern Recipes: Baker, Woolley, and Shirley.

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Early modern English households produced a vast array of household recipes aimed at treating and preventing a wide variety of illnesses. Recipes were published in well-read books like Hannah Woolley’s The Supplement to the Queen-Like Closet, but they were also traded between households, creating a web of social exchange, and tested and tweaked by many recipe makers, illustrating how the home acted as a site of scientific endeavor. These household collections, now being transcripted more and more, have become a helpful source for historians looking at household economies, medical histories, and women’s participation in medicine. In this paper, I aim to contribute to the growing field of early modern recipe research through an analysis of three recipe collections: Hannah Woolley’s published recipes in The Supplement to the Queen-Like Closet, the household recipes of Margaret Baker (approx. 1675), and the recipes of Dorothy Shirley (written approx 1693/4-1721)....

Agency and Mutuality: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early Jesuit Missions to China

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article investigates the interactions between European and Chinese scholars during Jesuit missions in the sixteenth century, focusing on how both cultures resisted and adapted the new knowledge being presented to them, resulting in a dynamic exchange between two schools of thought. By observing both Chinese and Jesuit primary sources through this lens of academic interchange, this piece presents a new angle of the Jesuit settlements beyond the traditionally Eurocentric perspective that minimized Chinese agency and contributions to the Western world. Through accounts from missionaries, such as Matteo Ricci, it is evident that Jesuit scholars understood Chinese officials would likely be uneased by the presence of Catholic foreigners and resistant to interrupt centuries of spiritual tradition, forcing the Jesuits to barter new academic intellect to remain in the established empire. While the impact of the Jesuit’s in China has been historically highly documented, as seen in...

Sacred Simultaneity: The Hereford Mappa Mundi as a Zwischenform Between Bild and Diagram

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Hereford Mappa Mundi, the largest extant medieval world map, defies easy categorization. While scholars often dismiss it as either a purely symbolic artifact or laud it as a proto-cartographic stepping stone, such binary depictions overlook its core nature. Ultimately, the map is ultimately a zwischenform (in-between form), a hybrid form situated between schematic diagram and narrative image (bild). Drawing on Aristotle’s theory of visual duality and Andrea Worm’s conceptual framework of bild and diagram, this paper analyzes the map’s historical and aesthetic dimensions to argue that it occupies a liminal space in visual thought. Both theological chronology and spatial geography are present, merging sacred history, pseudo-science, and cultural ideology into a single visual artifact. The map’s topographical, ethnological, and zoological distortions function as more than error or ignorance; they reflect a medieval worldview that sought to organize space according to divine order....

The Death of Isolationism: U.S. Foreign Policy and Afghanistan

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The September 11th attacks ignited a new era of American foreign policy–the Global War on Terror. As the United States sought out punishment for those responsible, Americans created a new narrative in which the U.S. played a more centralized role within the deterrence of globalized terrorism. Academic literature published after 9/11 has maintained that the United States became aware of threats from Afghanistan as a result of the 1998 Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings; however, this study argues that the United States government was aware of terrorism from the nation of Afghanistan earlier than 1998 and ignored it in a larger effort to absolve the U.S. from participation in international affairs. While this study does not explain modern events between Afghanistan and the United States, it serves to analyze the pre-existing history between the two nations up to and including 2011 and contribute to existing scholarship about U.S.-Afghan relations.

The Rise and Fall of Boomtowns:Remington-UMC in Bridgeport during the First World War

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Rise and Fall of Boomtowns: Remington-UMC in Bridgeport during WWI" journeys the story of Remington Arms Corporation and how it build Bridgeport into a 'boomtown' during WWI. From a surge of immigration, to the emergence of women in the workforce, and all the socialist ideas spurring clashes between corporations and workers' unions, Bridgeport was a hotbed for all things involving the US war effort throughout the 1910s. Just as much as companies like Remington-UMC built this boomtown, ripple effects from this era are felt to this day by the departure of the company in the 1970-80s, following the national trend of 'white flight' to the suburbs and manufacturing jobs moving abroad. By understanding this story, the hope is that Bridgeport will see a revival built upon the legacies of its predecessors.

Sonic Essentialism and Anti-Gay Policing in Mid-Century America, 1920-1960

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the height of the pansy craze through the post-Prohibition crackdown, vice officers, liquor agents, journalists, and lay observers repeatedly testified to the supposed hallmarks of “vocal homosexuality.” But how did vocal manner come to be heard as diagnostic of sexual deviance? On what grounds did courts accept auditory impressions, often framed as “what one might hear with one’s eyes closed,” as damming evidence of homosexuality? And why, long after visible “gender codes” were discredited as indices of homosexuality—after gay men unsettled, parodied, and multiplied the categories meant to contain them, and after psychiatric, military, and intellectual authorities conceded that no fixed sign could define “the homosexual”—did courts continue to admit testimony about the sound of queerness? Why did the ear remain credible long after the eye had been discredited, and why does it remain so today? Through an analysis of popular press coverage from the “pansy craze,”...

Missionaries and Monarchy: How Protestant Missionaries Influenced the Hawaiian Government from 1820 to 1863

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unprecedented events and circumstances allowed for Protestant missionaries to gain significant Hawaiian Government access within just a few years of their arrival in Hawaii. These events include the death of King Kamehameha I, the dissolution of the traditional Hawaiian religious system in 1819, and successful interactions by missionaries with the monarchy of the Islands. Within just a few decades, Hawaii was transformed by the missionaries in almost every way possible; government structures changed, Protestant Christianity flourished, literacy rates soared, and international interactions increased. In past literature, authors have often characterized the missionaries as successful victors who used their wit and strength to conquer the hearts and attentions of the Hawaiian Monarchs and their people. In this telling, it feels that the quick spread of Christianity was inevitable. On the other hand, more recent literature has portrayed the missionaries as villains, and the Monarchs...

Gender and Authority: Early Ecclesiastical Legislation on Women in the Late Roman Empire

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In an effort to set official precedent to festering doctrinal issues and create uniformity between the juxtaposed episcopal and imperial institutions, the first ecumenical councils of Christian church, ranging from 325 to 767 CE, were called to action. Over multiple lengthy council sessions, religious leaders and governmental officials assembled to engage in intense philosophical and theological debate, ultimately issuing sets of creeds and canons to be enacted into official imperial legislation. While many of the canons were primarily intended to cast authority over the male clergy and the laity, the rulings nevertheless had significant implications on the social, moral, and sexual autonomy of women. From the initial seven councils, I will focus solely on canons that explicitly regulated women; the First Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.), the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.), the Second Council of Constantinople (553 A.D.), and the Second Council of Nicaea (787 A.D.).The objective...

Mothers of the Nation:The Intersection of Motherhood and Activism in Women’s Fight Against Apartheid in SouthAfrica, 1948-1994

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Previous literature has either excluded or diminished the role of motherhood in female political activism. However, South Africa’s high fertility rate, averaging six children per woman in 1950, suggests that most women were mothers during apartheid. Drawing upon memoirs, interviews, anti-apartheid pamphlets, and newspapers, this paper examines the intersection of motherhood and activism in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Mothers faced the combined burdens of motherhood, patriarchy, and apartheid. With a husband oftentimes absent and laws that patriarchal norms reinforced, most mothers bore the brunt of household and familial duties, including financially supporting their families. They jumped over hurdles unique to their identity as women, restricted in terms of earning an income and having agency within the activism movement. They also faced emotional challenges as anti-apartheid activism encompassed imprisonment, to which mothers, who were held responsible for childcare,...

Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Stories of the Guatemalan Genocide

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the Guatemalan genocide of the early 1980s through the lived experiences of Maya communities targeted by Efraín Ríos Montt and previous leaders. Drawing on survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation and human rights reports, this paper illustrates how state violence served as both a counterinsurgency tactic and a racialized project. By emphasizing Mayan voices, many of whom witnessed the destruction of villages, the disappearance of relatives, and the systematic use of terror, this paper highlights the human dimensions of a conflict too often reduced to Cold War narratives. The evidence reveals a consistent pattern of the Guatemalan state casting Maya peoples as internal enemies, enabling scorched-earth campaigns, forced displacement, and widespread massacres under the guise of national security. Survivor accounts complicate official explanations and demonstrate that the violence overwhelmingly targeted civilians, regardless of political affiliation....