2023-2024
September 20- Hannah Waits (Harvard), “Missionary Positions: How American Evangelicals Learned to Love Global AIDS Work.”
October 4- Jim Campbell, “The Gospel According to the Klan: The Rev. Edgar Ray Killen and the 1964 Mississippi Burning Murders”
November 8- Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton) “’Race Laws and Chinese Segregation in the American West”
January 31- Emilie Connolly (Brandeis) “Banking on Removal: Indian Trust Fund Investments in Southern State Banks in the Era of Indian Removal”
March 20- Dylan Gottlieb, Bentley University “Making the Liberal Media: Journalism’s Class Transformation Since the 1960s”
April 17- Uta Balbier (Oxford), “’Safari for Souls’: Billy Graham, US Evangelicalism, and the Cold War in Africa”
2021-2022
Seminars this semester (Fall) will return to Room 504 in the BU History Department
October 20 Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (The New School)
“Fit Nation: How America Embraced Exercise as the Government Abandoned it”
November 17 David Mayers (Boston University)
“Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad before Pearl Harbor, 1935-1941”
February 9 Corrine Field (University of Virginia)
“‘The Oldest Lecturer in the World!’: Sojourner Truth, Racial Justice, and the Political Significance of Longevity in Nineteenth-Century America.”
April 27 Megan Elias (Boston University)
“Be His Guest: How Conrad Hilton Made Hotels Better than Homes”
2020-2021
NOTE: Spring 2021 events will be held virtually via Zoom
February 10 Chad Williams (Brandeis University)
“The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and World War I”
February 24 Andrew David (Boston University)
“Nelson Rockefeller’s Dreams of Glory: The Quest for National Legitimacy via National Security, 1952-1960”
March 31 Julia Irwin (University of South Florida)
“The Politics of Relief: Tracing the 20th Century Origins of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance”
2019-2020
September 18 Nico Slate (Carnegie Mellon University)
“Truth and Power: The Civil Rights Movement and Education”
October 16 Aaron Lecklider (UMASS-Boston)
“‘Socialism & Sex Is What I Want’: Radical Women and Homosexuality in the 1930s and 40s”
November 13 Joe Ryan-Hume (University of Glasgow)
‘Lynching the Loony’: Robert Bork and A Liberal Battle in a Conservative Age”
December 4 Sarah Phillips (Boston University)
“This Little Piggy Went to Market: Agricultural Abundance, Postwar Farm Policy, and the Neoliberal Ascent “
February 19 Marc Dollinger, San Francisco State University)
“Antisemitism, Academic Freedom, and the University: A View From the Left and the Right”
March 4 Sarah Miller-Davenport (University of Sheffield)
“The Arts in a Time of Austerity: New York’s Culture Industry as Solution to Economic Crisis”
April 29 Corinne Field (University of Virginia)
“‘The Oldest Lecturer in the World!’: Sojourner Truth, Racial Justice, and the Political Significance of Longevity in Nineteenth-Century America
2018-2019
Sept. 19–John Rodrigue, Stone Hill College “The Abolition of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Civil War”
Oct. 24–Oscar Winberg,Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland), “Advocacy Groups, Archie Bunker, and Political Television in the 1970s”
Nov. 7–Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia, “Botany, the ‘Surveilling’ Sciences, and the Politics of American Empire: The United States in the Pacific, 1898-1930”
January 23. Duco Hellema, University of Utrecht, “Reflections on The Global 1970s: Radicalism, Reform, and Crisis.”
Feb 27–Matt Pressman, Seton Hall University, “Tabloid Journalism and Right-Wing Populism: The New York Daily News in the Mid-20th Century”
March 20–Margaret O’Mara, University of Washington, “‘The Computer Never Forgets’: Lyndon Johnson, Sam Ervin, and the data privacy wars of the 1960s”
April 10 Nicholas Guyatt, University of Cambridge, “The pre-history of carceral segregation: Dartmoor Prison, 1813-1815”
2017-2018
Oct. 18 Heather Ann Thompson (University of Michigan), “Surveillance and the State-Building Origins of American Carcerality”
Nov 29, Brooke Blower (Boston University), “Hope and Betrayal in the Pacific War: The Making of an American Radio Correspondent in Southeast Asia”
Jan 31, Jayita Sarkar (Boston University), “Controlling the Global Atomic Marketplace: American Policy Against West European Nuclear Exports, 1974-1978”
February 14, John Rodrigue (Stonehill College), “The Abolition of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Civil War”
March 21, Tim Stewart-Winter (Rutgers-Newark), “‘A Man Breaks’: Policing and Politics in the 1964 Walter Jenkins Gay Sex Scandal.”
April 18, David Atkinson (Purdue), “Imports, European Empires, and American Political Economy during the First World War”
2016-2017:
Wednesday, September 7
Duco Hellema (The University of Utrecht), The Radical Decade. A Global History of the 1970s
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Wendy Kline (Purdue University), “The Power and Politics of Countercultural Medicine”
Wednesday, November 16
Nicole Hemmer (University of Virginia), “Conservative Media, Liberal Bias, and the End of Objectivity”
Wednesday, January 25
Robin Scheffler (MIT), “Molecular Biologists Protest the War on Cancer: Biomedical Research and Setting the Limits of the State in the 1970s.”
Wednesday, March 1
Lou Ferleger (BU), “The Anatomy of America’s Ultimate Investments.”
Wednesday, March 22
Ruth Lawlor (Cambridge), “Sex with Girls: American GIs and Statutory Rape in the ETO”
Wednesday, April 12
Sarah Igo (Vanderbilt), “Prying Open the Politics of Privacy in Postwar America”
2015-2016:
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Stephen Whitfield (Brandeis University), “Northern Intellectuals and Race: The First Decade of ‘Dissent’ Magazine, 1954-64.”
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Megan Black (Harvard University), “A Far-Flung Interior: Territories, Strategic Minerals, and Equivocal Imperialism in the New Deal.”
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Lily Geismer (Claremont McKenna College), “Doing Good: Liberal Uses of the Market to Help the Poor, from the War on Poverty through the Clinton Era.”
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Katherine Marino (Ohio State / American Academy of Arts and Sciences),”Women’s Suffrage in the Americas and the Transnational Popular Front”
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Jon Roberts (Boston University), “‘The Citadel Itself’: American Protestants’ Defense of the Sanctity of Mind, 1820-1870”
2014-2015:
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Joseph Crespino (Emory University), “When Black Jesus Came to Atlanta.”
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Gary Gerstle (Cambridge University), “Governing America: Public Power in America from the Revolution to the Present.”
Wednesday, February 4, 2015 (RESCHEDULED)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Seeking Words of Wisdom: Aphorism, Affirmation, and Authority in Late 20th-Century American Culture.”
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Kate Jewell (Fitchburg State University), “Live from the Underground: The Rise and Fall of College Radio and the Politics of Selling Out.”
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Brent Cebul (American Academy of Arts and Sciences), “Creative Competition: Georgia Power, the TVA, and the Forging of a Rural Consumer Market.”
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Seeking Words of Wisdom: Aphorism, Affirmation, and Authority in Late 20th-Century American Culture.”
2012-2013:
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
APHI Seminar–Christopher Loss (Vanderbilt University), “Front and Center: Academic Expertise and Its Challengers in Post-45 America.”
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
APHI Election Special with Linda Killian, Wilson Center, “The Swing Vote.”
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
APHI Seminar–Robert Self (Brown University), “”A Strange but Righteous Power”: Cultural Politics in the Age of Economic Decline.”
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
APHI Seminar–Matthew Lassiter (University of Michigan),“From ‘Generation Gap’ to ‘Just Say No’: Suburban Politics and the War on Drugs from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
APHI Seminar–Benjamin Park, Cambridge University, “Grounding Nationalism: The America(s) of Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Pierce Butler.”
Wednesday, February 13, 2012
APHI seminar–Ellie Shermer (Loyola University), “The Business of Education: State Research Universities’ Public-Private Origins.”
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
APHI Seminar–Leah Wright (Wesleyan University), “The Time of the Black Elephant Has Come”: Bill Brock, Black Republicans, and the Rise of Alternative Solutions.”
PLUS TWO LANDMARKS EVENTS
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
7:00PM Photonics Building, LANDMARKS: The Cuban Missile Crisis after 50 Years with Jonathan Hansen (Harvard), Renata Keller (BU), and Jim Rasenberger (author of The Brilliant Disaster)
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
7:00PM, LANDMARKS: The Legacy of Martin Luther King with David Chappell (University of Oklahoma)
2011-2012:
September 7, 2011
Sarah Snyder, University College, London “Perhaps Without You, Our Revolution Would Not Be”: Transnational Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War
October 12, 2011
Katherine Rye Jewell, Fitchburg State University “Ending the New South: The Southern States Industrial Council and the New Right, 1945-1964″
Nov 30, 2011
Asa McKercher, Cambridge University, “Congress and Castro’s Cuba: The Early Years”.
Jan 25, 2012
Jay Sexton, Oxford University, “William H. Seward in the World”
February 8, 2012
Clayton Howard, Holy Cross “Housing and Baby Booms: Sexuality and Suburbia in the Postwar San Francisco Bay Area”
March 7, 2012
Rebecca A. Rix, Princeton University, “The Education of Louis Brandeis: His Changing Views Of The Franchise, 1890-1925″
April 4, 2012
Charles Romney, University of Arkansas, Little Rock “Habeas Corpus, Pacific Migrants, and the Colonial State in Hawai’i, 1900-1920″
2010-2011:
Trevor Burnard, University of Warwick, “Only Connect: Expanding the Spatial Borders of Early American History – the Fashion for Atlantic History and Continental History”
Nathan Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, “Of Landlords and Liberalism: Slum Profits and the America of Luther Brooks”
Olivia Sohns, Cambridge University, “Lyndon Johnson and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,”
Chris Daly, Boston University, “Covering America: “The Rise and Fall of Traditional Journalism,1980-2010″
Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University, “Nixon and the Jews”
Beverly Gage, Yale University, “G-Man: J Edgar Hoover and the American Century”
Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene University, “Revising America’s Christian History: The Religious Politics of America’s Past.”
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, San Diego State University, “Alexander Hamilton and the Thirteen Countries: Monarchy, Empire, and the Alternatives”
Kristal Enter, Cambridge University, “Federal Intervention and University Integration, 1945-1968″
2009-2010:
Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis “Morrill’s Acts: Education, Migration, Reconstruction?”
Suzanna Reiss, University of Hawaii, “’A Most Important Weapon of Economic Warfare’: WWII, Pharmaceuticals, and the Logic of International Drug Control”
Miriam Pawel, Journalist and Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, “The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Movement
Ruth Martin, Cambridge University, “Defending the Unpopular: The Continuing Impact of Anti-Communism in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Due Process Campaign, 1967-77
Jonathan Soffer, NYU Polytechnic Institute, “Adapting to Neoliberalism: Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City”
Dan Amsterdam, Univ. of Pennsylvania and AAAS Fellow, “The Roaring Metropolis: Business, Civic Welfare, and State Expansion in 1920s America”
Celeste-Marie Bernier, University of Nottingham (UK), “A ‘Work of Art?’: Frederick Douglass, Slave Heroism and the Transatlantic Imagination”
Amy Renton, Cambridge University (UK), “Physical Disability and its Discourse in the the Era of the American Revolution’”
2008-2009:
Dan Williams, University of West Georgia, “How Did the GOP Become ‘God’s Own Party’?: Evangelical Pastors, Republican Politicians, and the Making of America’s Christian Right.”
James T. Campbell, Stanford University, “Broadcasting the New South Africa and Other Adventures in the Americanization of South Africa.”
Gretchen Heefner, Yale University, “The Radical Plains: Antinuclear Protest, the Reagan Revolution and the Double Life of Prairie Populism.”
Sam James, Cambridge University, Brendan McConville, Boston University
“A Deal With the Devil: Ideology, Diplomacy, and the Dilemmas of History in Revolutionary America.”
Brian Balogh, University of Virginia, “Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America”
Emily Floeck, Cambridge University, “Institutionalizing the Sino-American Bilateral Relationship under Ford.”
Meg Jacobs, MIT and Julian Zelizer, Princeton University, “The Reagan Revolution: A Reconsideration”
2007-2008:
Bonnie Miller, U-Mass Boston, “The Early Weeks of the Spanish-American War: Visual Depictions of Hawaiian Annexation and the Attraction of Empire.”
Cathie Martin, Boston University, Radcliffe Institute, “The Political Origins of Coordinated Capitalism: Business Organizations, Party Systems and State Structures in the Age of Innocence.
Kathleen Dalton, Boston University, “Nighthawks in 1942: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and Their Friends William and Caroline Phillips.”
Clemens Häusler, Cambridge University, “Atlantic Conversations in a Confident Age: Social Policy Exchanges Between American Liberals, British Labourites and German Social Democrats in the 1960′s and early 1970′s.
Lily Geismer, University of Michigan, “Suburban Civil Rights: Fair Housing, Voluntary Busing and Grassroots Liberalism in Postwar Massachusetts”
Michael Vorenberg, Brown University, “Civil War Era State-Building: The Human Cost””
Robert Self, Brown University, “Sexual Citizenship and the Privacy Quandary in Sixties and Seventies America”
Charlotte Carrington, Cambridge University, “Secular Dissent in Seventeenth-Century New England”
2006-2007:
David Quigley, Boston College, “Grant’s World Tour: An American Abroad at Reconstruction’s End”
Andrew Bacevich, Boston University, “Elusive Bargain: The Pattern of U.S. Civil-Military Relations since 1945”
Louis Hyman, Harvard University, “Discovering Consumer Credit: Commercial Banks, Personal Loan Departments and The Federal Housing Administration”
Bethany Moreton, Bowdoin College, “Six Flags over Capitalism: Wal-Mart, Students in Free Enterprise, and the Conservative Ascendancy, 1976-1994.”
Marty Rojas, University of Rhode Island, “Codifying Friendship: The Plan of treaties 1776” EVENT CO-SPONSORED WITH THE EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES AT THE MASS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Marjorie Spruill, University of South Carolina, “Gender and America’s Right Turn: The 1977 IWY Conferences and the Polarization of American Politics”
Robin Vendome, Cambridge University, “Mapping Modern America: The Aims and Uses of the Earth Sciences, c.1870 – 1890.”