Check out the 2024- 2025 EMSI Seminar Series.
View the full EMSI Calendar of events here.
RSVP for the Linda & Harlan Martens Economic History Forum
Saturday, February 8, 2024
Huntington Library
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA
Stewart R. Smith Board Room
Lunch will be provided by EMSI to all who RSVP by January 31.
This conference will examine the intersection of the rise of modern European capitalism with non-European actors and institutions. The goal is to understand not only the deep interrelatedness of international trade. Rather than looking at the rise of European empire and wealth as a great divergence, we are looking to understand the odd convergences which led to the period of European economic domination and how it grew from competition and plunder, as well as from emulation and cooperation with foreign empires, in particular in China, India, and the Middle East.
EMSI Awarded Major Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for LA2026
For LA2026, EMSI will coordinate humanities discussions related to the 250th anniversary of 1776 and the West for public audiences.
The discussions will take place at our partnering institutions:
▪ Autry Museum of the American West.
▪ Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
▪ USC Special Collections and USC Fisher Museum of Art.
▪ Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.
▪ The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
▪ El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.
You can find our award listed on the NEH Press Release for grants awarded in August 2024.
EMSI is soliciting applications for graduate and undergraduate student research assistants to support the programming.
Visit the application page here.
We look forward to sharing more when the project begins in January 2025!
Early Modern Book-of-the-Month
This new feature highlights books from USC Libraries Special Collections with an emphasis on new acquisitions.
France, c. 1790
USC Libraries Special Collections GV1234.F73 1790
Demandes et réponses is an 18th-century manuscript game book with playing cards. This is a version of “Questions and Answers,” a popular early modern game that encouraged flirtatious conversation. Men read questions written on the verso side of the playing cards, which would then be answered by women reading their replies from the book. The USC copy of Demandes et réponses is previously unrecorded and includes all forty original playing cards.
For more information, contact Derek Christian Quezada Meneses, Rare Books Librarian, USC Special Collections.
Recent Events
Upcoming Events
Sophie Coulombeau, University of York
“The Foreign Wealth of Nations”
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Land Acknowledgement
The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) exists on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino-Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples who continue to call this region home. EMSI respectfully acknowledges these Indigenous peoples as the traditional caretakers of this landscape, as the direct descendants of the first people. EMSI recognizes their continued presence and is grateful to have the opportunity to work and learn on this land.
Image: Vallard Atlas, detail of chart 3, 1547. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
