On This Day...September 29

1758 England's Admiral Horatio Nelson was born.

1789 A regular army was established by the U.S. War Department with several hundred men.

1829 The first public appearance by London's re-organized police force was met with jeers from political opponents. The force became known as Scotland Yard.

1918 Allied forces scored a decisive breakthrough on the Hindenburg Line during World War I.

1967 The International Monetary Fund reformed monetary systems around the world.

1988 The space shuttle Discovery took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It was the first manned space flight since the Challenger disaster.

On This Day...September 28

551 B.C. Teacher and philosopher Confucius was born. He dedicated most of his life to teaching, starting at the age of 22 when he opened his first school.

48 B.C. Pompey the Great was murdered on the orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt.

1066 William the Conqueror invaded England.

1850 The U.S. Navy abolished flogging as a form of punishment.

1939 Germany and the Soviet Union agreed on a plan to partition Poland.

1989 Ferdinand E. Marcos died in Hawaii, in exile, at the age of 72.

1995 Yasser Arafat of the PLO and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed an accord that transferred control of the West Bank.

2009 Iran tested its longest-range missiles and warned they could reach any place that threatens the country, including Israel, parts of Europe and U.S. military bases in the Mideast.

Women's Studies Colloquium

Debora Halbert: “The Labor of Creativity: Women’s Work, Quilting, and the Uncommodified Life.”
Presentation Date & Place: October 1 (12:30 to 2:00 pm) in Saunders Hall, Room 624.

While the law of copyright has become important as a regulatory tool governing the culture industries, there is a disconnect between the way people create, the reasons for their interest in creating things, and the way the law “protects” the end result of creativity. While public attention is focused on the theft of intellectual property, the everyday use and meaning of intellectual property is far less clear. Furthermore, the law does not tend to apply as clearly to areas of creative expression populated by women. This means, for example, that artistic expressions in women’s work – quilts, macramé, crochet, cooking, and fashion, are less apt to be protected by copyright than works of art that fit within a more traditional understanding of artistic expression as something that is “fixed in a tangible form” by an “original author.” By contrast, women’s creative work is often collaborative, without direct access to an original author, deemed too “practical” to achieve copyright status, or based upon traditions that are in the public domain.

In this talk, I’d like to walk through a series of stories as they relate to women’s work and intellectual property. These stories range from the legal story of copyright to the stories women tell about their own work. In preparing the paper upon which this talk was based, I collected the stories of quilters in an effort to think through the nexus between creativity and the law. Quilting is a creative activity where copyright plays a very small role except to impose restrictions on the actions of quilters. The women who took my survey saw creativity as part of a connection between themselves, their families and their communities. Their creative work, in other words, is a gift they want to share instead of a product they want to own.

History Workshop - this Friday!

The second meeting of the History Workshop will take place on Friday, October 1st at 2:30 pm in the History Department Library. The topic will be "Communities Imagined, Emotional, and Textual: English Identity and Hybridity in the Tenth Century" by Professor Karen Jolly. A brief description of the topic is included in the attached flyer.

Matt Romaniello and Suzanna Reiss

Duel - a new play by Richard Tillotson

All the World’s a Stage Theatre Company will present a Readers’ Theater production of Richard Tillotson’s new play, DUEL, directed by Paul Mitri of the UH Drama Department, at Church of the Crossroads, Weaver Hall, on Friday and Saturday evenings, September 24 and 25, at 7:30 pm.

Admission is free, donation suggested. Attached is a press release and poster. Below is a full synopsis.

Duel tells the story of an attempt to create a television mini-series about the life-long rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, a rivalry which began when the two first met as officers in the American revolutionary army. It ended with the famous duel when Burr took Hamilton's life. In the intervening decades, the men engaged in a progressively more venomous competition as lawyers and businessmen, in politics, and as patrons of an enigmatic courtesan known as Mrs. Reynolds. Hamilton's liaison became a notorious scandal that destroyed his chances for the presidency. This episode in American history is a tragic story. But the play's other story, the contemporary attempt to create a TV show about Hamilton and Burr, is comic. The producer is a woman who admires Burr for his feminism and thinks Hamilton was a corrupt womanizer. Her adversary is an historian she hires to vet thesc-ript for historical authenticity, who admires Hamilton for his brilliance but regards Burr as villainous. As the Hollywood producer and the English historian struggle to make their own views prevail, they must contend with other interpretations by a power-hungry film director and the actors who strive to upstage one another. The play cuts back and forth in time, presenting competing visions of "what actually happened” in the eighteenth century while the producer and the historian discover themselves involved in a messy love affair. Unable to agree on their own personal history, they still manage to collaboratively imagine the tragic conclusion of Hamilton and Burr’s life-long life-long rivalry.

Aloha United Way Bake Sale and White Elephant - Mahalo!

The History Department would like to take this opportunity to send out a "big" mahalo to all that participated in yesterday's fundraiser, from those that volunteered to bake, contributed items to sell, made info signs, helped carry tables/chairs and boxes, and to those that came by to make purchases or gave a donation. It was a great effort and a terrific turn out. We collected $418 for Aloha United Way. Thanks again for caring and "making a difference in the community."

LIVE UNITED

GIVE. ADVOCATE. VOLUNTEER

On This Day...September 22

1792 The first French Republic was proclaimed.

1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebel states should be free as of Jan. 1, 1863.

1949 The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.

1961 - U.S President John F. Kennedy signed a congressional act that established the Peace Corps.