The Hollywood cinema is often said to have altered in the decade following World War I. Historians frequently characterize the period in terms of the development of new feminine stereotypes—the flapper epitomized by the stars Clara Bow and Colleen Moore—and of a new sexual permissiveness both reflected within films and, perhaps, reinforced by them. Others have explained the new representations of sexuality seen in the films with reference to the emergence of a culture of consumption. But these by now standard interpretations of the period do not account for the nature or full extent of the cinema’s transformation. The lecture describes a decisive shift in taste that was manifested in critical discourse, in filmmaking technique and narrative. It will contrast what came to be identified as sophisticated taste, films deemed on the edge of what censors or more conservative viewers would tolerate, with naïve taste, films dismissed as cloying, overly melodramatic, or simply old fashioned.

Please join us for a "Humanities Happy Hour" before the lecture. The University Club will open a cash bar from 4:30-5:30 that afternoon.

Iran was invaded by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan in 1219-23, and again by his grandson in the 1250s. The Mongol kingdom that was set up at that time lasted until the 1330s. The lecture will explore the nature of the Mongol impact on Iran. Was it wholly destructive, as traditionally believed, or are there positive elements that historians, without minimising the death and destruction that the Mongols brought with them, ought also to consider?
 

David  Morgan is professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Medieval Persia 1040-1797, "History of the Near East" (Longman, 1988) and The Mongols, "Peoples of Europe" (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986).

Please join us for a “Humanities Happy Hour” before the lecture, The University Club will open a cash bar from 4pm-5.30 that afternoon.

How do we explain the power and significance of black music in American life? Working against common arguments that attribute value to inherent qualities of "blackness" (soul, rhythm, etc.), this paper will suggest that black music's aesthetic and cultural importance depends on the music's tenuous, contradictory status as a form of cultural property that is at once particular to black culture and accessible to the broad expanse of consumer America. This ambiguity of ownership reveals how aesthetic value is inextricably connected to race and economy, revealing what we might call the racial properties (or propertied value) of black music.

How did the people of England in its earliest recorded period think about war, peace, and the perennial issue of the containment of violence? Approaching this question as a problem in mentalities, this lecture will attempt to come to grips with key terms in the Old English language that were used for conflict and its resolution, taking into account the assumptions that these terms presuppose — assumptions that differ markedly from ones that are generally accepted today.