Session II

In 1810, Latin American revolutionaries met in Philadelphia to seek U.S. support for the cause of winning independence from Spain. In the spring of 1812, Mexican revolutionary José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara returned from Philadelphia to the Spanish Texas-Louisiana border ready to fight for the independence of Spanish Texas from Spain. They thought winning Texas would have a domino effect for independence all the way down to South America. The revolution, however, did not begin with an invasion; it came in the form of pamphlets, broadsides, and manuscripts.

Coinage was an invention of the Greek world. This innovation was the product of a society that was more and more market oriented. Conversely, coinage accelerated immensely market processes. This talk will explore the reasons why the Greek world made the choice of “commodity money” when other contemporary societies followed quite different tracks.

Over 200 different sign languages can be found in Deaf communities all over the world. This presentation will provide an overview of research on sign languages while describing the analyses of form and meaning that have assisted scholars in achieving a better understanding of the origin and diversity of this relatively understudied group of languages. This talk will also discuss the relationship of sign language to the gesture systems of hearing people.

Cabaret music, especially in the Jewish traditions of the twentieth century, has been inseparable from film since the first talkies and the first English- and German-language sound films: The Jazz Singer (1927) and Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930). The cross-fertilization between film and music intensified through the 1930s, with the rise of Yiddish film in Eastern Europe and the cabaret experiments of film composers such as Hanns Eisler and Friedrich Holländer.

The departure of Jews from Iraq is puzzling in retrospect, considering the degree to which Iraqi Jews were immersed in Iraqi life and culture. This emigration, however, was spurred by the increasingly volatile situation in the years 1948–1951. The desire of the state of Israel to bring Iraqi Jews to Israel, in conjunction with brutal right wing nationalist activity in Iraq and the ineptitude of the Iraqi leadership, provided the impetus for emigration. The escalation of the conflict in Palestine prompted Iraqi right wing politicians to mark all Iraqi Jews as Zionists.

Chinese scholarly interest in the canonical texts of the West has increased on a pace with their recent economic development.  But what they are reading, and what sense they make of it, would surprise many a western Classicist.  Interpreting many of our ancient texts through the approach (ironically enough) of the famous University of Chicago scholar Leo Strauss, they find in these texts arguments that presciently point to the failure of modern democracy and its values.  In other words, the western classics have become tools in suggesting that the answer to what should succeed co