Department News

The Michael Powell Memorial Lecture Series is pleased to announce an inaugural lecture by Professor Natalie Zemon Davis, "Trickster Travels: A 16th-Century Muslim between Worlds" on Tuesday, November 1, at 7:45 PM in Thomas Great Hall, Bryn Mawr College.

Friends, I am writing History majors to let you know that on Thursday, October 27, Kate Carte Engle '94, one of your predecessors in the History Department and currently teaching at Texas A&M, will be on campus to lecture in the late afternoon (see text below) at 4:30 in the Philips Wing of Magill Library under the auspices of the Young Academic Alumni Lecture Series. I hope you will be able to attend.
In addition to her lecture on the 27th, she would be happy to meet with current majors over lunch on that day to talk about her graduate school experience and her work. Lunch would be in the DC; for those not on the meal plan, the Library will provide a ticket. Please let me know (rkieft) if you would like to attend.

The Terrible Obscurity of Being Quaint: What Bethlehem's Moravians Can Tell Us about Religion and Economic Life in Early America.

With a few years of its founding in 1741, the communitarian settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania had become a tourist destination for everyone from pleasure seekers to statesmen. Having been relegated to the status of a curiosity, neither contemporaries nor subsequent historians have considered the town's unique economic structure for what it tells us about wider trends in early American history. A close examination, however, permits us explore how religious actors viewed the dramatic economic changes of the eighteenth century, engaging one of the most persistent questions of American history.