Research Seminars

2023 - 2024 Series -- View Series PDF

• January 17, 2024: Sam Schirvar, “Home and Hands”: Cherokee Nation and the Turn to Tribal Enterprise

  This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of the turn to tribal enterprise as a reservation economic development strategy during the 1970s. Over 345 factories were built on or near reservations to employ Indigenous workers during the 1960s and 1970s. Less than a dozen of these firms were tribally-owned by 1970. In contrast, by 1979, over two thirds of the manufacturing facilities operating on reservations were Native-owned, many by tribes.

• February 14, 2024: Dr. Na Oyo A. Kwate, “The Blacker the Bum Wine”

  “The Blacker the Bum Wine” is chapter from a manuscript in progress with the tentative title, Terror’s Terroir: The Corner Liquor Store in Black Urban Life. Terror’s Terroir investigates the prevalence and impact of corner liquor stores in Black urban life from approximately 1950 to the present.

• April 24, 2024: Brent Cebul, “Creating the Intern: Philanthropy, Universities, and the New Deal”

  Proximity to power, access to professional networks, and acquisition of insider knowledge has come to define the “intangible things” unpaid internships claim to offer students—whether in the public service or in proliferating private internship programs. This paper locates the origins of the modern, private white-collar internship in the growth of the New Deal administrative state and the simultaneous emergence of entrepreneurial, growth-oriented private universities and elite philanthropies concerned with fostering “realistic” and “impartial” administrators and managers.

• May 29, 2024: Anna Andrzejewski, "Making Paradise: Living in South Florida’s Vacation and Retirement Communities"

  In the 25 years after World War II, the coastline of South Florida was transformed into a sprawling cultural landscape of leisure, made up of suburban communities designed for vacationers and retirees. While builders and real estate developers were integral in drawing throngs of leisure seekers to South Florida from the Midwest and Northeastern U.S., residents also played a critical role in shaping this “paradise.”