history

Pizza and Oklahoma Politics

Join TU Communications Hall of Fame inductee Jenkin Jones, Jr. for a lecture on the history of Oklahoma politics. This event is free to attend and lunch will be provided.

Jenkin Jones, Jr. spent his 32-year career at The Tulsa Tribune in a variety of jobs, from reporter to editor and publisher. His specialty was in travel and political writing, covering eight national conventions throughout his career. In addition to his time at the Tribune, Jenk worked at the Colorado Daily, The Minneapolis Tribune and The Anchorage Times. He has taught journalism and political history at universities, and was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2006.

William and Rita Bell Distinguished Lecture Series: Jesus and Judaism — Why the Connection Matters

Join TU’s Department of Philosophy and Religion for a lecture featuring Amy Jill Levine.

Numerous Christians regard Jesus as rejecting a Judaism—influenced by legalistic, elitist Pharisees—incorrectly characterized as obsessed with ritual purity, misogynistic, vengeful and xenophobic. Understanding Jesus in his Jewish context corrects false stereotypes, brings new meaning to his parables, politics and piety, and opens new paths for Jewish-Christian relations.

Amy Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University.

Levine is the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the first winner of the Seelisberg Prize for Jewish-Christian Relations. Levine describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who works to counter biblical interpretations that exclude and oppress.

Her publications include: The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; six children’s books (with Sandy Sasso); The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III, the first biblical commentary by a Jew and an Evangelical); The Jewish Annotated New Testament (co-edited with Marc Brettler); The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (with Marc Brettler); The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers); and thirteen edited volumes of the Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Her Beginner’s Guide series includes Sermon on the Mount, Light of the World, Entering the Passion of Jesus, The Difficult Words of Jesus, Witness at the Cross and Signs and Wonders.

Shakespeare’s Catholic Dimension

Paul Voss (Georgia State University) will discuss the Catholic aspects of William Shakespeare’s work.

Documentary Screening: Harriet Tubman, Visions of Freedom

Kick off Black History Month with a new documentary about the legendary life of Harriet Tubman, who repeatedly risked her life to help other African Americans out of slavery. TU professor Kristen Oertel will host a discussion afterward over peach cobbler from Wanda J’s.

Postponed: Documentary Screening: Harriet Tubman, Visions of Freedom

Note: Due to inclement weather, this event has been postponed until Feb. 21.

Cultures of the Americas Seminar

The Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum and the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities invite you to attend a public seminar and discussion featuring Alaina E. Roberts and her new book I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Roberts will be joined by two guest commentators, Gregory Downs (University of California, Davis) and Kristen Oertel (University of Tulsa), who will offer commentary on the book and its broader significance. Roberts will respond to those comments with her own presentation. The remainder of the public seminar will be open to public discussion with the author and guest commentators. We strongly encourage attendees to read Roberts’ book before the seminar.

Alaina E. Roberts, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, has authored one book and has been featured in TIME magazine, CNN, The Atlantic and more. Her research illuminates the many intersections of Native American and Black life from the 1400s to the modern day.

Coffee and light breakfast provided at 8:30 a.m. This presentation is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and registration is required.

Prior to the event, on Friday, Feb. 3, from 5 to 6 p.m., seminar attendees are invited to join us at the Zarrow Center for a casual welcome reception to meet the speakers and explore the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities NEH-funded Pathways to Freedom exhibition, focused on the history and futures of Oklahoma’s all-Black Towns.

Please contact Alex Patterson at 918-631-6412 or arp442@utulsa.edu if you have questions.

From the Publisher:

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of “40 acres and a mule”—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I’ve Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.

Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Is free will an illusion?

The Thomistic Institute at The University of Tulsa presents a lecture by Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, titled Is free will an illusion?

Free pizza will be provided.

Annual Eddie Faye Gates Lecture with Dr. Autumn Brown

As part of Gilcrease Museum’s IMLS CARES Act Grant “From Trauma to Resilience: Learning from the Eddie Faye Gates Collection,” Gilcrease invites you to attend a free and public lecture by IMLS Research Scholar Autumn Brown, co-hosted with the Greenwood Cultural Center. Registration is required.

“Break and Build: They can break, but they can’t erase – they can build, but they can’t bury”

This year’s Annual Eddie Faye Gates lecture, co-hosted by Gilcrease Museum and the Greenwood Cultural Center, will center on resilience, strength and rebuilding. The importance of Greenwood and North Tulsa goes far beyond the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In fact, the Greenwood District was a fully realized antidote to the violent racial oppression of the early 1900s and remains a space of solace for Black Tulsans and descendants of the Race Massacre. Brown will examine the importance of North Tulsa in Eddie Faye Gates’ life and work, as well as the many ways in which Greenwood is thriving today. What took years to build was destroyed in less than 24 hours. But as the title of the lecture states, they can break but they can’t erase.

Autumn Brown is IMLS Research Scholar at Gilcrease Museum. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education at Oklahoma State University. Her doctoral research focused on Civil Rights leader and teacher activist Clara Luper. She is the lead researcher in the IMLS CARES Act Grant at Gilcrease Museum focused on the Eddie Faye Gates Tulsa Race Massacre Collection and is also a research professional at OSU with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program (OOHRP). She is a member of Tri-City Collective, Inc., whose work is driven by a passion for social justice and creative expression.

Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture in History

Join us for the annual Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture featuring Craig Koslofsky, professor of history at the University of Illinois. His lecture, “Tattooed Servants, Soldiers, and Sailors in the British Atlantic World, c. 1700-1750,” is part of a larger study on the history of human skin in the early modern world.

Koslofsky’s current book project is tentatively titled, The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, and he is also the author of the award-winning Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

The Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture honors two former TU faculty members, Ed Cadenhead and William Settle, who taught history for decades and published world-renowned works of history.

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First Annual Anthropology Festival

Join Lambda Alpha on Chapman Commons from Noon to 5pm for a great day of anthropology, food and fun. Atlatl (early human spear throwing technique) and javelin demonstrations, learn how to flintknap (make stone tools) and lots more! This event is free and open to the public.

Join the Lambda Alpha GroupMe for updates to this and other events.