November 2023 Newsletter
Welcome to the final CHA newsletter of the year!
We are proud of all of you for making it almost all the way to finals, and we are rooting for everyone as they enter the dreaded finals season!
If you haven't gotten our newsletter before, the CHA hosts a variety of events on campus throughout the year for anyone interested in history. These events include midterm and finals study breaks, panel discussions with distinguished professors, and our fantastic peer mentoring program! This newsletter will also include suggestions for events related to history taking place in the city!
If you know of a history events to include in the next newsletter or a history fact that us Columbia history nerds need to see, please submit them to the google form below and they might appear in the next newsletter!
Suggestions for the CHA Newsletter!
CONGRATULATIONS!
WE ARE SO EXCITED THAT OUR CHAIR, Mrinalini, WAS NAMED A 2024 U.S. RHODES SCHOLAR!!!!!!!!!!!
We are so unbelievably proud of her and we know that she most certainly deserves it! Please join us in congratulating her on everything she has accomplished so far! She will be going to Oxford next year, and we cannot wait to see all the amazing things she is going to do in the future!
Finals Study Break!
We know you don't want to even think about finals, but somehow it has crept up on us once again and is only weeks away!
On December 12 from 2-3pm, stop by Fayerweather 411 for a quick study break and some yummy snacks, no sign up necessary!
(And we will be giving out CHA stickers!)
We hope that you will be able to join us for at least a little bit and maybe feel a bit less stressed as you take a break from all of that intense studying you (probably, hopefully!) will have been doing. Press the pause button for a second and have some snacks to fuel you for your exams! You got this!
History Events in the City
New York City is one of the best cities in the world to visit museums and see other historical events! We live here nine months of the year, so we might as well take advantage of it!
(Don't forget that students get free admission to almost every museum in NYC!)
American Folk Art Museum: "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness"
This exhibition will feature an immersive viewing of approximately 22 paintings by five contemporary Black artists in the American Folk Art Museum collection: Leonard Daley, Claude Lawrence, J.B. Murray, Mary T. Smith, and Purvis Young. By positioning these artists in conversation with one another, the exhibition will explore the artistic self-expression of Black makers working in and around abstraction.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a passage by literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers, whose groundbreaking 1987 essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book includes the statement: “in order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.”
MoMA: "Ken Jacobs: Deep Cuts"
Ken Jacobs is one of cinema’s living treasures. For the past 70 years, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker has reawakened the sense of awe and mystery that many 19th-century audiences must have felt when confronting motion pictures for the first time. His lifelong project has been the aesthetic, social, and physiological critique of projected images—images that by turns mesmerize and disorient the viewer.
Jacobs has credited his discovery of his passion for movies to trips to MoMA in the late 1940s, recalling that “The Museum of Modern Art plunged me, when a teenager, into the unexpectedness of art.” It is a fitting tribute to the artist, then, that the Museum has recently become home to the largest collection of his films and videos, which number more than 200 to date. The three moving-image works shown here can only hint at the exhilarating breadth of his career.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "The African Origin of Civilization"
Scholars today recognize Africa as the source of our common ancestry. But in 1974, Senegalese scholar and humanist Cheikh Anta Diop shocked and challenged historians by asserting the influence of ancient African civilizations in his groundbreaking book The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. This exhibition pays homage to Diop by presenting masterpieces from the Museum’s collections from west and central Africa alongside art from ancient Egypt for the first time in The Met’s history.
Through twenty-one pairings of works from different African cultures and eras, this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to appreciate the extraordinary creativity of the continent across five millennia, revealing unexpected parallels and contrasts. Although there was no contact between their creators, the works share deep and underrecognized histories.
Opens December 14th, 2023
Columbia Historical Fun Fact!
Did you know...
The first class of graduates from Columbia was made up of only five students.
And...
During the American Revolution, the Battle of Harlem Heights was fought on September 16, 1776 on the land where Columbia University sits today (check out the plaque commemorating it near the Earl gate!).
Meet the new Team!
Chair: Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa CC'24
Vice Chair: Kay Zou CC'25
Treasurer: Janus Yuen CC'25
Outreach & Marketing Coordinators: Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell CC'24, Tenley Roberson CC'24, Kira Ratan CC'26, Belan Yeshigeta CC'26
Transfer/ GS Coordinator: Sophia Sanico CC'24
Mentorship Coordinator: Megan Meyerson CC'24
Newsletter Written by: Tenley Roberson
