As one of the core features of modern states, universal schooling provided a tool with which to disseminate the skills and knowledge demanded by the new era of industrialization and interstate competition, as well as to impart what it meant to be a citizen. Citizenship education, in fact, or "civics," lay at the heart of the education enterprise in the modern world, reflecting the new circumstances of competing nation-states and hence prioritizing the cultivation of the population’s identification with and allegiance to a particular nation and/or the state.  An education system, then, came to be regarded as a strategic necessity if not entirely an idealistic or humanitarian one. 

This presentation explores modern Korean state making through an examination of citizen education at the turn of the 20th century.  How did the larger purpose of universal schooling and citizenship education evolve as the Korean state underwent so many dramatic shifts in form, function, and even sovereignty?  What role did the educational institutions, from the state bureaucracy to the schools themselves, play in spreading the lessons of loyalty, allegiance, and identity?  And finally, How did Confucian ethics and statecraft affect the demands of the modern schooling system?  Indeed the legacies of pre-20th century Korea extended well into the colonial era (1910-45), including the period of wartime mobilization in the 1930s and 40s, when schooling became central to the intensified, radical assimilation policy of turning Koreans into "imperial subjects."

Professor Hwang conducts research on the modern transformation of Korea, broadly conceived.  He is the author of Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea (2004), and co-edited, with Professor Gi-Wook Shin of Stanford, Contentious Kwangju:  The May 1980 Uprising in Korea's Past and Present (2003).  His latest book, History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan) is expected to be published in 2010.  He teaches courses on Korean history and society, East Asian and world history at the University of Southern California.  He is a graduate of Oberlin College (AB) and Harvard University (Ph.D).

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.

The routine employment of torture on the popular television series 24 has given rise to the charge that the program lends verisimilitude to  the questionable premise that torture is a legitimate and effective means of interrogation. A growing body of evidence suggests the critics' charge is correct. Indeed, the Dean of the US Military Academy at West Point grew sufficiently concerned about the pernicious effects 24 was having on his cadets that he traveled to California to meet with the show's creators to ask them to tone down the use of torture on the program. The Intelligence Science Board has echoed the critics' concerns, arguing that similar reality-distorting attitudes towards torture can be seen in the public at large. But how and why can a wholly fictional program like 24 actually influence political reality? Is this case something of an exception, or more akin to the rule?  Unfortunately, evidence suggests that fiction and other socially constructed portrayals of political reality-including propaganda, false flag operations and conspiracy theories-have long exercised demonstrable effects on political reality, often in unforeseen and unintentional ways.

Through the lens of the invasion panic that gripped Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, Greenhill will explore how and why national security-related "social facts"-i.e., things that are deemed to be "true" simply because they are widely believed to be true-can become broadly adopted and disseminated and, by extension, thereby influence the development and conduct of national security policy. Greenhill will further explore what this historical case can tell us about the theoretical and policy implications such "social facts" may hold for the threats we face today, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Kelly M. Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. from M.I.T., a C.S.S. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Greenhill previously held pre- or post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and at CISAC.

Her work has appeared in a variety of venues, including the journals International Security, Security Studies, and International Migration as well as in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in briefs prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court. Greenhill has two books shortly forthcoming with Cornell University Press: the first, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, focuses on the use of large-scale population movements as instruments of state-level coercion; and the second, Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (co-edited with Peter Andreas), examines the politicization and manipulation of crime and conflict-related statistics. She is currently at work on a new book, a cross-national study that explores why, when, and under what conditions, fiction, so-called "social facts" and other non-factual sources of information-such as rumors, conspiracy theories and propaganda-materially influence the development and conduct of national security policies.

Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Ambassador Oren has written extensively for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. His two most recent books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and The Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy:  America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, were both New York Times bestsellers. They won the Los Angeles Times’ History Book of the Year prize, a National Council of the Humanities Award, and the National Jewish Book Award.

Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Ambassador Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the Lebanon War, a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an IDF spokesman during the Second Lebanon War and the recent Gaza operation.  He acted as an Israeli emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations, and as the government’s director of Inter-Religious Affairs. He has testified before Congress and briefed the White House on Middle Eastern affairs.

Ambassador Oren is married to Sally, and they have three children—Yoav, Lia, and Noam.

Audio Synopsis:

Ambassador Oren begins by tracing the history of the US-Israel relationship, which he spent several decades researching as a historian prior to being appointed Ambassador. He notes that the United States and Israel have long maintained a spiritual and democratic connection, augmented in 1967 by a strategic/military relationship following the Six Days War.

Ambassador Oren was appointed in July 2009, six months in to the Obama administration. He cites three initial areas of disagreement between the current Israeli and American administrations: strategies for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons; settlement freezes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and the logistics of a two-state solution. Oren feels that these points of disjuncture have largely been overcome through close cooperation and an ongoing dialogue.  Agreements have been reached, for example, on the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints, a ten-month moratorium on West Bank construction, and the imposition of sanctions on Iran.

In conclusion, Ambassador Oren offers an optimistic outlook for the future of U.S.-Israel relations, pointing out Israel's close economic and trade partnership with the United States in addition to its strategic and ideological partnerships. He asserts that the idea of America is indivisible from the idea of a recreated Jewish state.

A question and answer session addressed such topics as the likelihood of success of sanctions against Iran; what alternatives are available if sanctions fail; whether Medvedev's administration has been more willing to engage with Israel than was Putin's administration; how problems with the Palestinian education system are being addressed by Israel; and how an independent, demilitarized Palestine might change Israel's relationship with other Middle Eastern countries.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974

The exploration of visual archives related to Korean history has grown at an exponential rate over the past decade.  While photographs ostensibly hold the possibility of tranforming the captured ephemeral moments into the fixity of celluloid perpetuity, they can have profound effects on changing memories of the past, and collapsing time and space.  This lecture examines the history and the meanings of photography in modern Korean history through the two dual prisms of "wormholes" and "phantom zones."

Lynn is the AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia.  He is also the editor for the journal Pacific Affairs which has been published continuously since 1928.  His research covers a range of topics relating to modern and contemporary Korea (both South and North), and Japan.  His publications include Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas Since 1989 (2007); "History of Gendered Migration in the Two Koreas," Harvard Asia Quarterly (2008); "Moving Pictures: Postcards of Colonial Korea," International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter (2007); and "Vicarious Traumas: Television and Public Opinion in Japan's North Korea Policy," Pacific Affairs (2006).

Lynn received a B.A and an M.A from University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

San Francisco State University will host a conference September 16-17, 2010 exploring the question and place of rights in history, politics, and society.

Rights, both individual and collective, have long been a theme in American society, often seen in conflict with state power. The conference welcomes papers on assertions of rights by insurgent groups, resistance to rights claims, and governmental efforts to suppress or promote rights, in areas including but not limited to: civil liberties; disability rights; labor and economic rights; feminism and antiracism; immigration; environmental justice; access to healthcare; the prison industrial complex; sexual orientation; the stateless; and human rights.

The goal is to bring together a wide variety of people from a range of academic, activist, legal, and community spaces to examine the place of rights within the context of American society (as situated within a boarder global political community). To that end, the conference is open to historians, both senior and junior scholars, graduate students, community advocates, archivists, and lawyers.

The deadline for submission of proposals, consisting of an abstract of 1000 words for panel and workshop proposals or 300 words for individual presentations and a one-page CV for each participant, is March 15, 2010. Send your proposals to

Christopher Waldrep
Department of History
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California 94132

or via email to cwaldrep@sfsu.edu.

More information is available at this link.