- Speaker
- H.W. Brands
- Lecture date
-
Originally aired: May 7th, 2024
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
H.W. (Henry William) Brands was born in Oregon, went to college in California, sold cutlery across the American West, and earned graduate degrees in mathematics and history in Oregon and Texas. He taught at Vanderbilt University and Texas A&M University before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History.
Brands’s latest book, Founding Partisans, narrates how the country’s first years unfolded in a contentious spiral of ugly elections and blatant violations of the Constitution. Still, peaceful transfers of power continued, and the nascent country made its way towards global dominance, against all odds. Founding Partisans is a powerful reminder that fierce partisanship is a problem as old as the nation.
He lectures frequently on historical and current events and can be seen and heard on national and international television and radio. He publishes history-themed poetry on Twitter and “A User’s Guide to History” on Substack.
- Speaker
- Ned Blackhawk
- Lecture date
-
Originally aired: April 2nd, 2024
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a professor of history and American Studies at Yale University and was on the faculty from 1999 to 2009 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in history from University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Washington and is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West, a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
In his recent book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Blackhawk provides an Indigenous perspective on questions of citizenship and the literal and figurative shaping of what America is today. Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
- 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.
