Spring 2008 Semester
April 12, 2008
Exec Co planned a trip to the Saratoga Battlefield, accompanied by Prof. Tullman Nechtman, Department of History.
Skidmore College Consortial Conference on Science, Politics, and Society
April 4 & 5, 2008 - Skidmore College,Saratoga Springs, NY
Sponsored by:
Skidmore College Honors Forum
The Skidmore College Office of the First-Year Experience
The Mellon Foundation
Participating Institutions:
Skidmore College
Hamilton College
Union College
Colgate University
The purpose of the conference is to bring faculty and students from these institutions together, including first-year students, for a variety of student presentations and discussions about science and the interaction between science, politics, and society as a whole. We also hope that the conference will lead to future collaborations between students and faculty between these and possibly other institutions.
Jon R. Ramsey Honors Forum Lecture
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Tillman W. Nechtman, Assistant Professor
British & British Imperial History
Department of History
Skidmore College
Alternative Histories:
Corporate Corruption, Imperialism, and Globalization
in Eighteenth-Century British India
Corporate executives distort their companies' earnings and siphon funds for their own aggrandizement. Politicians pursue policies that daily drift the country closer to a new era of imperialism. Globalization threatens to alter life's comfortable and familiar patterns permanently. These might well be the headlines of news reports and editorials from today's New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they could just as easily have been headlines and editorials plucked from the expanding news media of late-eighteenth-century Britain.
In the fifty year span from 1750 to the dawn of the nineteenth century, the executive leadership of the East India Company perverted their corporation's charter to trade British goods to South Asia into a mandate for power, and, in doing so, they transformed a publicly-traded English company into what one critic would call "a state in the disguise of a merchant." In an effort to shed some historical light on the headlines we encounter each morning - the news of Enrons and Microsofts, of Afghanistans and Iraqs, and of NAFTAs and WTOs, this talk will explore the relationship between corporate malfeasance, imperialism in India, and globalization in the late-eighteenth century. It will suggest that eighteenth-century Britons, not unlike those of us in early-twenty-first-century America, found themselves at a significant historical intersection where multiple and competing visions of Britishness were available for the choosing, and it will investigate the choices Britons made as a matter of history with an eye to the decisions we in contemporary America might make about our future.
Fall 2008 Semester
October 27, 2008 and October 28, 2008
Shades of Gray Discussion topics: "Who Owns Your Vote, and What is it Worth?"
In early October
HF 101 students visited the State Capitol in Albany and the Corning Tower, the tallest building in Albany.