October 31, 2014 Manufacturing Fear: The Hidden History of China’s Secret Societies

Friday, October 31, 2014, Eric Mein, Faculty in English, will present a colloquium from noon-12:5- p.m in C-1018 on the following topic: 

“Manufacturing Fear:  The Hidden History of China’s Secret Societies.”  The summary is as follows:

For nearly a thousand years, White Lotus Buddhists and Triad brotherhoods posed a threat to the stability of Imperial China.  They stirred up rebellion after rebellion, from the outlying provinces to the heart of Beijing, from the actual overthrow of the Yuan dynasty to the near overthrow of the Qing during the Boxer Rebellion.  Each time Imperial officials stamped out one secret society, a vast underground network insured that the tradition of rebellion lived on.  Or did it?  With increased access to the People’s Republic, international scholars have unearthed evidence that casts doubt on the accepted history of China and points to a far more sinister origin for China’s secret societies.

October 24, 2014 Emergence of a LBGT Community in Minnesota

Friday, October 24, 2014,  Robert Frame, Faculty in History presents a colloquium on the following topic:

 

Emergence of an LBGT Community in Minnesota:
In 1970, a Minnesota gay couple did the unthinkable: they applied for a marriage license. In 2013, the Minnesota legislature legalized same-sex marriage. The forty-three years in between saw great change within the LBGT communities and in broader society; the emergence of an LGBT community in Minnesota goes back even further. Join us as professor Robert Frame speaks about that long experience of change in Minnesota.

October 10, 2014 Grammar and Privilege

Grammar and Privilege

 

A recent book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, warns that if we don’t know the rules of grammar and punctuation, we risk being misunderstood—or worse—being perceived to be “illiterate.”

 

What about you?  Do you say that you’re good at grammar?  How you answer that question depends on all sorts of things, including what is meant by “grammar” and how one becomes good at it.   For good or ill, we have set up mechanisms that sort people based on grammatical proficiency.  But is that fair?  Should we use skills in grammar as a means to judge writing and writers? 

 

Johan Christopherson is a faculty member in the English department at Normandale Community College