Confederate monuments are the most common form of monumental public art in the former states of the Confederacy and Kentucky. These monuments are one of the most conspicuous and contested markers of regional identity. Exploring how the monuments were funded, created and dedicated reveals important insights into how power, privilege, and identity inform the history … Continued
In the 20th Century, the power of the U.S. president expanded enormously, and each president had to learn what kind of power they had and how far they needed to stretch the limits of it. This webinar will use the once top secret White House Tapes of JFK, LBJ, and Nixon to explore three crucial … Continued
Is literature a form of sound recording? If so, how can we listen to it? This webinar presents approaches for bringing the study of sound into the literature and history classroom. We will explore specifically how interpreting sounds in historical literature like slave narratives and colonial travel writing opens up new ways of understanding the … Continued
19th century Americans generally ate locally. While luxuries like coffee, tea, and sugar connected them to the global economy, refrigeration, transportation, and income forced most people to eat seasonal and regional foods. Farmers recycled human and animal waste. The rise of the industrial city, with its immigrant populations, networked economies, and steam-powered workplaces, profoundly challenged … Continued
Capitalism depends on trust, and so always creates opportunities for economic deception. As a result of America’s embrace of innovation and openness to the slick sell, the avenues for duplicity have been especially broad in the modern United States. This webinar will examine the American experience with business fraud since the early nineteenth century — … Continued
Americans are justly proud of the role their country played in liberating Europe from Nazi tyranny. But in celebrating the success of United States soldiers, we often forget to consider the human cost of war. The liberation of Europe in 1944-45 provides an opportunity to study the American victory alongside the tragic suffering of civilians … Continued
Refashionings of a medieval past have always inspired the popular imagination. The current revival of medievalism, that is the creative interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages, is comparable to earlier ones (the Romantic period for example), but what is new is that medievalism has become a global phenomenon. The series Game of Thrones … Continued
When you think of “Africa”, What images and words first comes to mind? Are these positive or negative? Do you think of specific individuals, countries and cultures? How about the way you have learned about Africa through the education system? What messages were given to you during your school years about Africa? This webinar will … Continued
The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. In a brilliant and engrossing new book Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean shows how Nobel Prize-winning … Continued
In November 1815, a woman known only as “Anna” leapt from the third floor window of a tavern in Washington, D.C., after she was sold to Georgia traders and separated from her family. Abolitionist writers seized on her story, depicting her act as an attempted suicide. Her act prompted a Congressional inquiry into kidnapping and … Continued