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To kick off the new year, the American Historical Association’s 129^th Annual Meeting will take place in New York City from 2-5 January 2015. We’re thrilled to ring in the new year with 5000 historians in the city we are proud to call our US headquarters. As you finish packing your bags, we’ve put together an OUP guide to the conference, but make sure to leave room in your suitcase. We hope to meet you at our booth (#504), where we’ll be offering discounts on our titles, complimentary copies of Oxford’s journals, and demonstrations of our online resources.

Retrospectives:

• James McPherson’s Battle Cry after a Quarter Century
  Saturday, 3 January 2015 from 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
  Murray Hill Suite B, New York Hilton
• Journeying into Evangelicalism: Twenty-Five Years of Traveling with Randall Balmer’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
  Monday, 5 January 2015 from 8:30 AM-10:30 AM
  Hudson Suite, New York Hilton, Fourth Floor

OUP-chaired panels:

• Buying and Selling History: Some Perspectives on the Marketplace
  AHA Session 38
  Friday, 2 January 2015 from 3:30 PM-5:30 PM
  Clinton Suite, New York Hilton, Second Floor
  Chaired by Tim Bent, Executive Editor for Trade History, OUP USA
• Media Training Workshop for Historians
  Monday, 5 January 2015 from 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
  Concourse E, New York Hilton, Concourse Level
  Chaired by Purdy, Director of Publicity, OUP USA

Special Events:

• The American Historical Association Award Ceremony
  Friday, 2 January 2015 from 7:30 PM-8:30 PM
  Metropolitan Ballroom West (Large), Sheraton New York, Second Floor

In honor of the awards ceremony, we’re celebrating some of the winners with a reading list:

• Kate Brown, winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award for Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, on life in a nuclear wasteland
• Jacob Darwin Hamblin, author of the Paul Birdsall award-winning Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism, on the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the decision to use chemical weapons
• Jacob S. Dorman, winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize for Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religion, on Black Israelites and the meaning of Chanukah
• Deborah Cohen, winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, on Downton Abbey
• Trevor R. Getz, winner of the James Harvey Robinson Prize for Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History, on grappling with a liberal dilemma in writing Abina’s story

Meet the editors of two of Oxford’s online resources offering portraits of men and women whose lives have shaped American, British, and world history.

After Hours:

The American Historical Association has put together a wonderful guide to exploring the city. Inspired, OUP’s history team has pulled together some of our recommendations on entertainment and off-the-beaten track sites.

Theater:

“I enthusiastically recommend Sleep No More, the interactive, immersive reimagining of Macbeth. It’s set in the fictional McKittrick Hotel (in actuality a five-floor warehouse made into over 100 rooms) in the early 20^th century. Following Macbeth throughout his descent into madness was one of the most enthralling theatre experiences I’ve had. It’s heavy on the walking and stairs, but well worth seeing.”

— Kateri Woody, Marketing Associate, Higher Education Division

“You’ve probably heard the buzz about The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-time. It’s all true. Phenomenal acting combined with innovations in set and production design make for a thrilling theatre experience.”

— Alana Podolsky, Assistant Marketing Manager for History, Academic/Trade Division

Museums:

“One of my favorite places in the city is the Morgan Library and Museum. It’s right down the road from OUP, and the library is absolutely beautiful. Also, admission is free on Friday evenings.”

— Alyssa O’Connell, Editorial Assistant, Academic/Trade Division

“MOMA’s exhibit on Matisse’ Cut-Outs could be one of the best exhibits I’ve seen in some time. In ill health, Matisse turned to cut-outs as his primary medium later in life. Like his paintings, Matisse masters the fine line between boldness and simplicity through shape and color. A video of the master at work shows his thoughtfulness as he designs the pieces. The wonderful exhibit draws together large and small-scale works, from his covers for jazz periodicals to his Swimming Pool, a piece he designed for his own dining room in lieu of visiting the beach, which had become too difficult. “

— Alana Podolsky, Assistant Marketing Manager for History, Academic/Trade Division

Off-the-beaten track:

“In a city of skyscrapers, I frequently find myself craving places on a scale I can relate to, pieces of New York that feel human-sized and a part of the city’s deeper history, akin to Back Bay in Boston and Society Hill in Philadelphia. It’s easiest to find these in Greenwich Village or in parts of Brooklyn, but there are other historic places hidden in plain sight in Manhattan.‎

“Near OUP on 36^th Street is a small enclave called Sniffen Court that I have walked past with great envy and intrigue for 18 years. A half-mews, it is a tiny, wrought iron gated community of 1860s homes that were converted from stables after the advent of the automobile. Today these ten mews homes are some of the Manhattan’s most exclusive real estate. One of the homes was listed for sale earlier this year for a mere $7.25 million. There’s artwork on the outside of several building in the mews, winged horses on one and colorful stage designs on the frieze of another, a reminder of a theater well off Broadway, the Sniffen Court Players. Sniffen Court features on the album cover of The Doors’ “Strange Days,” though whenever I peer in, it’s New York of the 19^th century that I am transported to, not 1967.

“I recently had an opportunity to visit another hidden spot with theater connections that seems out of place and time in Manhattan: Pomdander Walk. Larger than Sniffen Court, this full mews runs between 94^th and 95^th Street, right behind Symphony Space on the Upper West Side. Built for the theater community and intended to be temporary housing, this colorful 1920s era English Tudor village is an oasis from the streets around it. Originally it was inhabited by actors, musicians, and artistic types, but to own one of the full houses on the Walk today would require more than a starving artist’s (or assistant professor’s) income. It is a little piece of Downton Abbey in the heart of Manhattan, a place where residents have long made the city a little less alienating and created a special community.

“The Big Apple Tours during the AHA will be showcasing many architectural and historic sites around the streets of NYC, but part of the joy‎ of the city is just walking and making your own discoveries, architectural and otherwise.”

— Susan Ferber, Executive Editor for American and world history obsessed by architectural history and unusual real estate in New York, perhaps because she doesn’t own any or even live in the five boroughs

However you spend your time at AHA, we hope to see you at the OUP booth. Please stop by and say hi.

Featured image credit: View of NYC from Top of the Rock. Photo by Dschwen, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia commons

The post AHA 2015: Kicking off the new year with the American Historical Association and OUP appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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The story that most Jewish children learn about the holiday of Chanukah is that it commemorates the Jews’ victory over foreign invaders and their sullying cultural influences. Around 200 B.C.E., Judea was the rope in a tug of war between two stronger powers: the Ptolemic dynasty of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria. The Seleucids, led by the kings Antiochus III & IV, won when Antiochus invaded Judea in 175 B.C.E. But in 170 B.C.E. the Jews who favored Egypt took control from the camp that favored Syria. According to the Roman historian Flavius Josephus, Antiochus IV invaded Judea a second time, and not only slaughtered many Jews but also defiled the Temple in Jerusalem, offering swine as sacrifice to pagan gods on its altar.

Cue the heroes: the Maccabees (whose name means “Hammer”), the original Mattisyahu, and his seven sons, including Judah. Together they defeated the forces of King Antiochus and cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem of all of its Seleucid-introduced impurities. A small amount of oil that was enough to last for a single day lasted for eight instead, and with this somewhat pedestrian miracle the festival of Chanukah was born.

It was a miracle whose veracity has been questioned since the Middle Ages, and contemporary scholars have complicated the story quite a bit. The real struggle, they tell us, was not so much between Jews and foreign invaders, but a civil war between the Jews who followed Greek ways and those Maccabean Jews who opposed them.

In other words, the story of Chanukah at its heart is a story of a struggle of a small people torn between stronger nations with powerful cultures. We focus on the symbolic act of purification and cleansing, but we tend to obfuscate the larger cultural terrain. Ancient Jews were fighting not just against foreigners but amongst themselves over whose culture to adapt and to what degree. Cultural adaptations came from within, not just from without.

There may have been a military victory over Syria’s army and the Hellenizing Jews, but the Jews of ancient Palestine were already deeply and inextricably linked to the nations and the cultures of their region. That is, they were not just multicultural (of many discrete cultures) or transcultural (crossing cultural borders); they were polycultural. Their cultural diversity already was internalized and they patched their cultures together based on overlapping similarities, not just warring differences.

So too with today’s Black Israelites, people who believe that the ancient Israelites were Black and that contemporary Black people are their descendants. People of many different faiths have been Black Israelites. In the 1890s there was a wave of Black Israelite churches that came out of the Holiness movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, Anglo-Israelite beliefs helped inspire the Pentecostal movement, the most numerous new religious movement of the twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, Black Israelite beliefs became popular among some who practiced forms of rabbinic Judaism, and the following decade the belief took root in Black Islam and in Jamaican Rastafarianism. During the organizing and militancy of the long 1960s the ideology found supporters among patriarchal and macho advocates of Hebrew Israelite faiths. A tiny fragment of the Hebrew Israelites will yell at passersby on New York street corners to this day, and yell at each other in attempts to purify their practice from any of the contamination of rabbinic Judaism.

But what goes unnoticed is that each of these religions continue to this day. Moreover, each of them change, just as the individuals within them change in their religious practice, growing more or less observant, or moving from one group to the other. It helps to think of these religious waves not as groups or sects but as movements — constantly in the process of becoming. Religious changes also happen inter-generationally, not just within the life of individuals. Many of the children of Black Jews have become more, not less religious. Gradually, over time, Black Jews have become more, not less halachic. The followers of the biggest portion of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, one of the original Holiness groups, now believe that their founding prophet only used the word “Christ” as a necessary expedient, and practice their own unique form of Judaism. Their music has been passed down “mouth to ear” for over a  century, and is some of the most beautiful choral music not just among American Jews, but in American music, period.

Black Israelites teach us that cultures are really polycultural. They are formed not by heated battles between warring binaries, but by acts of collage that emphasize overlapping similarities between dozens of inputs, many of which are already internalized within. This is a more helpful view than picturing cultural formation as the resolution of antagonism between holistic and hostile camps coming from without.

Returning to the story of Chanukah, we can understand history better by focusing not on the moment of conquest and purification but on all the cultures that Jews of Josephus’ day shared with their neighbors, just as we can understand American culture today and in the past by understanding how continuous cultural flows have created polycultures and defied efforts to categorize, rank, or purify. I like it that way.

The post Black Israelites and the meaning of Chanukah appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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