Tuesday, February 20, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EST Leader: Mary Caton Lingold, Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University 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 American past, and specifically early African American experiences. The webinar also introduces a growing digital resource, The Sonic Dictionary, that is being created by university students to enhance the vocabulary of sonic experience.
Can A President Do That?: The Secret White House Tapes and Presidential Power
Thursday, February 22, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EST Leader: Kent Germany, Associate Professor of History, Director of Undergraduate studies, University of South Carolina In the 20th century, the power of the United States 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 crises that shaped answers to the question, “Can a President Do That?” 1) the Cuban Missile Crisis; 2) the FBI, Surveillance, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act; 3) Watergate and the Nixon's argument to David Frost that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Confederate Monuments and Contested Civic Space in the United States, 1865 to the 21st Century
Wednesday, February 28, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EST Leader: Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor; Department Chair, History, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillNHC Fellow 1995–96 Teacher Leader: Kevin Levin, Civil War historian and former history teacher 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 that graces the built spaces and landscapes in which we live. Although the webinar will focus on Confederate monuments, the historical questions provoked by these monuments are equally relevant to the study of the commemoration of other historical events, from the “conquest” of the American West to the Vietnam War. This webinar will use easily accessible materials, from the immediate postwar era to the present day, on Confederate monuments to discuss the commemoration of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the recent controversies regarding the monuments. When were the monuments erected and what were the stated intentions of the people who erected them? How were the designs for the monuments selected and who participated in the design process? What does the evolution of the design of the monuments tell us about the meanings assigned to the Civil War and the Confederacy? Why are there Confederate monuments in Washington state, Arizona, and other communities far beyond the boundaries of the former Confederacy? Were their contemporaries who opposed the erection of the monuments or who erected monuments that offered a different perspective? When did the contemporary debate over the monuments begin and why?
Thursday, March 8, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EST Leader: Heather Thompson, Professor of History, University of Michigan As the twentieth century came to a close and the twenty-first began, something occurred in the United States that was both internationally unparalleled and historically unprecedented. Between 1970 and 2017 more people were incarcerated in this country than were imprisoned anywhere else in the world, and at no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment. This webinar will offer an overview of the origins of mass incarceration, as well as its implications for our nation’s cities and communities, our economy, and our very democracy. Via this webinar we will locate not only why we chose this policy path and what the fall out from that decision has been, but we will also consider where are we might be headed today with regard to matters of policing and prisons.
Secrecy and Democracy: The History of the FBI and CIA
Thursday, March 15, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EDT Leader: Kathryn Olmstead, Professor of History, University of California, Davis Many Americans are fascinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but we know very little about their histories. This webinar will use recently declassified documents to analyze the histories of both agencies and of the controversies that they’ve inspired. What were the original purposes of each agency, and how have they changed over time? How did Americans learn about some of the most controversial programs (illegal surveillance by the FBI, assassination plots and drug testing by the CIA), and how did they react to these revelations? We will talk about how these real historical events help us understand the challenges of making sure America’s secret agencies are accountable to the public.
From Democracy to Authoritarianism: The Death of the Roman Republic
Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EDT Leader: Michael Fontaine, Assistant Professor of Classics, Cornell University Teacher Leader: Skye Shirley, Latin teacher Comparisons between ancient Rome and the United States are suddenly all around us. Why, and what do they portend? Right around the time Jesus was born, ancient Rome’s 500-year-old republic failed. Its traditions of representative elections, checks and balances, tolerance, and freedoms of movement and expression were swept away, never to recover. In their place rose the Roman Empire, an increasingly authoritarian and Orwellian structure that saw state-sponsored persecutions of minorities, artists, and dissidents at home, endless foreign wars abroad, and, eventually, even the requirement for all citizens to believe certain theological propositions. How did Rome transform in this way, and why did it never go back? This webinar will highlight political institutions, imperial expansion, the breakdown of republican institutions, the civil wars, and a few personalities whose names, 2000 years on, are still familiar to us all.
Confronting the Past: Russian Fiction in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EDT Leader: Julia Trubikhina, Adjunct Associate Professor, Division of Russian and Slavic Languages, Hunter College, City University of New York Russian fiction of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period is deeply rooted in trauma and memory, both collective and personal; characters search for ways to transcend, or even to understand, a complex and contended history. Drawing mostly on the texts collected online on World Without Borders Campus, this webinar will present strategies for contextualizing cultural traditions and histories while still attending closely to specific texts. While the West, during the Cold War, often saw Russia “monolithically,” the view from inside the former Soviet Union provides a different perspective that extends both backward, into the past, and—through a better understanding of Russia’s present—forward, into the future.
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EDT Leader: Luis Martínez-Fernández, Professor of History, University of Central Florida The Cuban Revolution that began in 1959 ranks high among the most momentous and impactful historical process in the history of the Americas. As a subject of study, the Revolution elicits passion and controversy, and much of what is said, written, and taught about it is highly politicized. This webinar explores innovative ways of looking at—and teaching—the Cuban Revolution that go beyond the usual topics (Castro’s personality and ideology, the Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis). These include questions such as: why Cuba and not Mexico or Argentina? How did a small island nation attain such global preeminence as an ideological, military, artistic, and intellectual player? And, how does Cuba’s history as a sugar-based economy explain its contemporary situation? This webinar will include hands-on examination of stimulating primary sources that can be put to good use in the classroom (and online teaching-learning environments); among these are editorial cartoons, political slogans and posters, propaganda film clips, and historical artifacts such as ration books and tourist brochures.
Thursday, April 26, 2018 7:00–8:30 pm EDT Leader: Alex Woloch, Professor of English, Stanford University The year 1984 is now almost as far back in our past as it was far into Orwell’s future when he published his novel in 1948. But the book, unlike the year, has not simply dated. On the contrary, it seemed to surge back into contemporary relevance in the last year, briefly topping the bestseller list just after the 2017 presidential inauguration. Orwell’s novel, then, continues to hold political and literary significance, far outside of the Cold War context of its early reception. In his essay “Why I Write,” Orwell wrote: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.” In this webinar, we’ll consider Orwell’s novel as an example of such political art. How do we understand 1984 as a deliberately crafted work of writing? How can we connect it to Orwell’s previous fifteen years as a prolific and experimental writer? What literary strategies and imaginative techniques underlie the tricky art of engaging politics through writing?