Graduate Historians’ Association
The Graduate Historians’ Association is an organization dedicated to the study of history at the graduate level. Membership is open to any graduate student at Michigan State University. The association organizes and sponsors periodic events for graduate students to meet and share research, and also maintains an email list for graduate student announcements. All graduate students in the Department of History are automatically added to the list. The GHA is currently soliciting research presentations for an upcoming series of monthly brownbags. These are designed to help graduate students prepare conference presentations and job talks in a collegial atmosphere. Anyone interested in presenting should email one of the officers.
Meetings
Tuesday, January 24th – 4:30
Tuesday, January 10th- 4:30 pm
Thursday Nov. 3rd – 4:00 pm – Brandon Miller
“SOVIET WOMEN BATTLE THE GREEN DRAGON: ALCOHOLISM AND FEMALE VOICES IN THE (RE)CONSTURCTION OF MASCULINITY AFTER STALIN”
Recent studies of the Khrushchev era have highlighted the role material consumption (and appropriate attitudes toward it) played in state plans to remodel female realms of existence in order to remove vestiges of the prerevolutionary past from their domestic routines and more fully integrate them into Soviet society. However, an examination of a cache of letters sent to both members of the Supreme Soviet and various media outlets in the late 1950s and early 1960s uncovers a popular engagement with consumptive politics that were directed at Soviet men and their purported alcohol abuse. These responses to alcohol reform efforts indicate that for many Soviet women, the battle against the male penchant for drink represented in their minds one of the last hurdles in overcoming the lingering personality defects of capitalism. If the ?green dragon? could be effectively tamed, it would hasten the radiant future now supposedly on the horizon. In order to do so, some of these women took up the pen as their sword?writing directly to the highest echelon of Soviet power in order to ask for state intervention in their family lives as a means of curing their male relations? problems with alcohol. Moreover, these women believed that they would get the help that they asked for as they saw their requests as directly in line with contemporary ideas on proper socialist living and morality. Thought to be living on the cusp of a move to communism, the scientific-technological discourse of this period merged with the spirit of state-promoted activism to give these women the impetus not only to demand change in their families, but the tools with which to reconstruct the men in their lives.
Friday, Nov. 11th, – 4:00 (314 Morrill Hall) – Jenni Marlow
“Polish-Jewish Relations: From the Domestic Realm to Rescue”
This paper utilizes a close reading of memoirs, survivor testimonies from both the immediate postwar period and later, press publications, letters, and other archival materials such as rejected applications for status as Righteous Among the Nations to explore how shifts in power, brought about by the Nazi Occupation of Poland, created new environments for both rupture and continuity. It uses the relationships between Polish Catholic domestic workers and their middle class Polish Jewish employers to examine the ways some pre-war relationships shaped ideas about the ethnic/religious ?other? and feelings of shared responsibility. These domestic workers were located on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy in the Polish state before the war based on their gender, educational levels, and socioeconomic status. When the acting state power structures changed due to the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland this created a new social and political environment. In this new political landscape these Polish Catholic women, according to the occupying regime, became socially superior to their former Polish Jewish employers. It would seem that these women found themselves in new positions of power. In this new context some women chose to sever their ties with their former employers while others used their new status to aid their former employers who found themselves in increasingly life threatening situations. Yet another segment of these women chose to harm their former employers for their own benefit. I argue that in some cases the domestic realm allowed for much more porous ethnic/religious divides than are currently characterized in the existing literature. The characteristics of the domestic realm /sometimes/ then encouraged the formation of bonds of affection and familial feelings between both the former employer and employee. This in some cases caused the former employee to continue to align herself with the former employer and directly thwart the norms being put forward by the new occupying state and some of their fellow Poles, thus demonstrating continuity in this period of rupture.
