Speaker

Liz Cheney

Lecture date

Originally aired: March 5th, 2024

Time

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Title

Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning

Liz Cheney served as the U.S. representative for Wyoming’s at-large congressional district from 2017 to 2023. She chaired the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership, from 2019 to 2021, and served as the Vice Chair of the Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Decades from now, scholars, historians, and students will look to the events of January 6, 2021, as pivotal in American history — events that put to the forefront the question of whether the founding principles of our nation and our Constitution will continue to stand. Cheney had a front-row seat to the events of the day as well as a direct influence, on how they are understood by the American public. Her experience is reflected in her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. In 2022, Cheney, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, received the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s Profile in Courage Award.

Speaker

Kelly Lytle Hernández

Lecture date

Originally aired: February 6th, 2024

Time

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Title

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of history, African American studies, and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, Lytle Hernández is the author of Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.

In her latest book, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, Lytle Hernández frames our understanding of U.S. history in a groundbreaking narrative that tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who, from the United States, sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican American population, making the magonistas’ story integral to modern American life, our understanding of our nation’s borders, and the American identity.

Speaker

Jonathan Eig

Lecture date

Originally aired: October 17th, 2023

Time

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Title

Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and a biographer, acclaimed as a “master storyteller” by filmmaker Ken Burns. A former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, he is the author of six books, including three New York Times bestsellers.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Eig’s latest book, King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. — and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father — as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, Eig gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.