Podcasts Archives | Page 4 of 13 | National Humanities Center

Podcasts

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Molly Worthen, “From St. Paul to Populist Politics: The Evolution of Charismatic Leadership”

Charisma is a concept we typically use to refer to individuals who fascinate, attract, and captivate us in some way. The word’s modern usage, however, obscures its origins in Christian doctrine. In such contexts, charismatic figures were understood to have a kind of divinely ordained authority and spiritual influence. In this podcast episode, Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the evolution of charisma in the popular consciousness and its role in various historical epochs and movements.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice

Catherine M. Cole reveals how the voices and visions of artists in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo can help us see what otherwise evades perception from the injustices produced by apartheid and colonialism. Examining works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Faustin Linyekula, Gregory Maqoma, and others, Cole demonstrates how the arts are “helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise.”

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Laura F. Edwards’s compelling book considers the sweeping transformation of American law produced in the wake of the Civil War. Through her analysis of constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, and legal claims espoused by everyone from national politicians to everyday citizens, Edwards demonstrates how the notion of rights became so integral in post-Civil War America, especially in the lives of African Americans, women, and organized laborers.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: The Life of Roman Republicanism

Joy Connolly argues in her most recent book, The Life of Roman Republicanism that “Cicero, Sallust, and Horace inspire fresh thinking about central concerns of contemporary political thought and action” including the role conflict plays in the political community, the conditions needed to promote an equal and just society, citizens’ interdependence on one another for senses of selfhood, and the uses and dangers of self-sovereignty and fantasy.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their human "property," fugitive slaves forced the nation to confront the truth about itself, and led inexorably to civil war. Andrew Delbanco's masterful examination of the fugitive slave story illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

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Nerds in the Woods

Join us as we take a series of virtual audio journeys through the intellectual woods with cohosts Robert D. Newman, Tania Munz, Matthew Booker, and Brooke Andrade as they survey some of the compelling topics being studied by historians and philosophers, scholars of literature, art, and other fields who come to the Center from all over the world.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us

Since at least as far back as the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lies and coverups that brought down Richard Nixon, every presidency has further centralized and strengthened executive power, producing the political conditions for our present crisis. In American Breakdown, David Bromwich provides an essential analysis of the forces in play beneath the surface of our political system. His portraits of political leaders and overarching narrative bring to life the events and machinations that have led America to a collective breakdown.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

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NHC Virtual Book Talk: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard, historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.