Join us for the 2023 Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series featuring Nina Totenberg, Mae Ngai, Douglas Brinkley, and Peniel E. Joseph

Link: Watch lecture here ⟩
Speaker: Heather Cox Richardson
Lecture date: September 17th, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College who writes widely about Reconstruction, the Civil War, and the history of the Republican Party. She is the author of seven books including, most recently, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, as well as the award-winning How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. She also writes the popular newsletter, Letters from an American, a daily chronicle of American politics read by 1.4 million subscribers.

At a time when the very foundations of democracy seem under threat, the lessons of the past offer a roadmap for navigating a moment of political crisis in the United States. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, revealing how the roots of authoritarianism can be traced back through the earliest days of the republic. With remarkable clarity and the same accessible voice that brings millions of readers to her daily newsletter, Richardson wrangles a chaotic news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to and what possible paths lie ahead.

An essential read for anyone concerned about the state of America, Democracy Awakening is more than a history book. Richardson reminds us that democracy is not a static institution but a living, evolving process that requires constant vigilance and participation from all of us. This powerful testament to the resilience of democratic ideals shows how we, as a nation, can take the lessons of the past to address today’s challenges and secure a more just and equitable future.

Speaker: Nikole Hannah-Jones
Lecture date: February 4th, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: The 1619 Project

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and the Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of The 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The book version of The 1619 Project as well as The 1619 Project children’s book, Born on the Water, were instant number one New York Times bestsellers. The 1619 Project is now a six-part docuseries on Hulu.

Hannah-Jones has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice, and her reporting has earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “Genius Grant,” a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, and the National Magazine Award three times. She serves as the Knight Chair of Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism & Democracy. Hannah-Jones is also the co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color, and in 2022 she opened the 1619 Freedom School, a free, afterschool literacy program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.

Hannah-Jones holds a master of arts in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her bachelor of arts in history and African American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Speaker: Lindsay Chervinsky
Lecture date: March 4th, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture, and U.S. government institutions. She is executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History, a historian at the White House Historical Association, and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She earned her bachelor of arts in history and political science from George Washington University and completed her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis.

Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution and the co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. Her third book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, is an authoritative account of the second president of the United States that shows how John Adams’s leadership and legacy defined the office for those who followed and ensured the survival of the American republic. He defended the presidency from his own often obstructionist cabinet, protected the nation from foreign attacks, and forged trust and dedication to election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power between parties, even though it cost him his political future.

Speaker: Steve Inskeep
Lecture date: April 8th, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America

Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR’s Morning Edition as well as its morning news podcast Up First. Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Cairo, and Beijing; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “The Price of African Oil,” on conflict in Nigeria. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Inskeep and NPR’s Michele Norris conducted “The York Project,” groundbreaking conversations about race that received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence.

Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi as well as Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson’s long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.

In his newest book, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, Inskeep illuminates President Abraham Lincoln’s life through 16 encounters, some well known, some obscure, but all imbued with new significance. A compelling and nuanced exploration of Lincoln’s political acumen, Differ We Must illuminates a great politician’s strategy in a country divided — and lessons for our own disorderly present.

Speaker: Hampton Sides
Lecture date: May 13th, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Title: The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

Hampton Sides is best known for his gripping nonfiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of discovery and exploration. He is the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground.

His latest history, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, was named a Best Book of the Year So Far 2024 by The New York Times Book Review. In his account of Cook’s last journey, Sides both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and a Yale graduate, Sides is the 2015 Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute and an advisory board member of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and the Author’s Guild. He is editor-at-large for Outside and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. He is also a partner of Atalaya Productions, an independent film company that develops nonfiction and historical stories for the screen.

A frequent lecturer, Sides divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Colorado College, where he teaches narrative nonfiction and serves as Journalist in Residence.