The Modern History and Literature Program, Caspersen School of Graduate
Studies,
Drew University, announces this year's graduate student conference:

~~1968: GLOBAL RESISTANCE AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE~~

To be held on the Drew University campus in Madison, NJ, November 3-4, 2006.

Schedule of events, directions, and further info available at the conference
website: http://groups.drew.edu/68hist .

Keynote Speaker: Jeremi Suri, Professor of History, University of
Wisconsin - Madison. Author of _Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the
Rise of Détente_ (Harvard) and _The Global Revolutions of 1968_ (Norton,
forthcoming).

Special Presenter: Mark Rudd, leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike
and occupation; National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society;
co-founder of the Weather Underground.

Within the emergent field of 1960s studies and within the popular
imagination of the decade, 1968 has a luminous significance. The year's
iconic status stems, in part, from the raw power of its defining events: in
the United States, student uprisings at Columbia University and San
Francisco State College, and violence at the Democratic National Convention;
the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; urban
unrest and the rise of Black Power; the accumulating strength of feminism,
and gay and lesbian, Native American, and Chicano/a activism.
Internationally, 1968 saw the Tet Offensive and My Lai massacre; youth
rebellions in France , West Germany , and Japan ; the Prague Spring and
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ; the activist phase of China 's Cultural
Revolution; the massacre in Mexico city , and "revolutionary" and repressive
violence throughout the " Third World ." But beyond its obvious tumult,
"1968" now serves as a metonym for the 1960s as a whole and a marker of the
era's distinctive sensibilities and contradictions: the mixture of
exhilaration and dread, the perception of infinite possibilities and tragic
constriction.

Recent scholarship on 1968 has focused on its particular eruptions and
reactions, but also on the question of their systemic connection. Were the
wide-ranging instances of social unrest the manifestations of a global
zeitgeist, conditioned or at least influenced by broad macro-economic and
geopolitical forces? Or were these phenomena the outgrowth of primarily
local and unrelated conditions? Does a satisfying analysis require a partial
synthesis of both these possibilities, as well as a frame for thinking both
similarities and differences?