U.S. Intellectual History Blog

#USIH2020 Program: Revolution & Reform

Editor's Note

Hello, historians: On behalf of the entire S-USIH 2020 Program Committee, welcome to a year of “Revolution & Reform”! Click on each panel date or title to register for the Zoom webinar, and check back here for new events and updates. Registration is FREE but it is REQUIRED for EACH event. Our FAQ’s about the conference series are here.

As an organization, we are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. We recognize that our events may potentially conflict with professional and personal schedules, family responsibilities, and religious observance. We deeply regret any conflict that may arise, and we will make recordings available for all to enjoy, pending the participants’ consent.

We’re on deck for your queries and good ideas via email ([email protected]), Facebook, and Twitter (@Ideas_History). Thank you, be well, and enjoy our conference!

#USIH2020 WEBINAR PRESENTATIONS (ALL VIA ZOOM)

MONDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

Opening Keynote Address: Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017). She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Allen is also the principal investigator for the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University. The Democratic Knowledge Project seeks to identify, strengthen, and disseminate the bodies of knowledge, skills, and capacities that democratic citizens need in order to succeed at operating their democracy. The lab currently has three projects underway: the Declaration Resources Project, the Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment Project (HULA), and the Youth and Participatory Politics Action and Reflection Frame.

MONDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2020, 7PM EST

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy

Chair: Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joel Isaac, University of Chicago

Guy Emerson Mount, Auburn University

Kevin M. Schultz, University of Illinois-Chicago

Respondent: Katrina Forrester, Harvard University, and 2020 S-USIH Book Prize Winner

 

MONDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2020, 7PM EST

Marxism in America: From the First International to the Crisis of the New Left

Chair: Edward Remus, Northeastern Illinois University Library

Pamela C. Nogales, New York University, “The International Workingmen’s Association in the United States and the American Reform Tradition”

Reid Kane Kotlas, Independent Researcher, “The Only Conservative Force: Revolution and Reform in the Debsian Socialist Tradition”

Marco Aurelio Torres, University of Chicago, “Renaissance and Counterrevolution: Mexican Art and U.S. Politics in the 1920s”

Edward Remus, Northeastern Illinois University Library, “The Other Shachtmanism: Social Democrats, USA and Cold War Social Democracy In Extremis

Spencer A. Leonard, University of Virginia, “Hal Draper’s Return to Marx and the Crisis of the American New Left”

 

MONDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2020, 7PM EST

Centering Native Voices in Intellectual History

Chair: Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Philip Deloria, Harvard University

Christine DeLucia, Williams College

Linford Fisher, Brown University

Sandy Littletree, University of Washington

David Martinez, Arizona State University

Kiara Vigil, Amherst College

 

MONDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

The Suffrage Movement in America’s Intellectual Tradition

Co-Sponsored with Mormon History Association

Chair: Katherine Kitterman, Better Days 2020

Benjamin E. Park, Sam Houston State University

Martha S. Jones, The Johns Hopkins University

Cathleen D. Cahill, Penn State University

Sara Egge, Centre College

Allison K. Lange, Wentworth Institute of Technology

SATURDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2020, 11:30AM EST

S-USIH Annual Business Meeting

Tim Lacy, President, and the Executive Committee of S-USIH

MONDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

The Intellectual Ecosystem of the Extreme Rightwing, 1945-1990

Chair: Chris Babits, Utah State University

Augusta Dell’Omo, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, “‘A Fate Worse than Apartheid’: The White International Resists U.S. Sanctions Policies, 1980-1986”

Simon Purdue, Northeastern University, “Intersectional Hate: William Luther Pierce and the Identity Politics of the Global Extreme-Right”

Anna Duensing, Yale University, “‘An American Organization, A Hundred Per Cent’: The National Renaissance Party and the Role the Global Far Right in Grassroots Massive Resistance”

 

“Safe at Home,” Kadir Nelson (2005), Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

TUESDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

The Worlds of Sport and Intellectual History

Chair: Amy Bass, Manhattanville College

Andrew McGregor, Dallas College

Paul Putz, Baylor’s Truett Seminary

Robert Greene II, Claflin University

 

SUNDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2020

Do you hear the people sing? Gather your family and friends, grab the popcorn, and join us on Twitter for a very special #HATM (Historians At The Movies) event with a revolutionary twist. Follow @HerbertHistory for details!

MONDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

Recovering the Centrality of Social Democracy in the Early Twentieth Century

Chair: Gerald Friedman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

John P. Enyeart, Bucknell University, “Social Democracy, Human Rights, and Antifascism, 1880-1940”

Rosanne Currarino, Queens University, “E.R.A. Seligman, Economic Thought, and Social Democracy, 1890-1920”

Richard Schneirov, Indiana State University, “Walter E. Weyl, John Graham Brooks, and William English Walling and American Social Democracy”

 

“Brook Farm,” Josiah Wolcott, ca. 1846. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society

MONDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

The Politics of Utopia in the Long Nineteenth Century

Chair: Leilah Danielson, Northern Arizona University

Ashley Garcia, University of Texas at Austin, “An Alternative Mode of Reform: The Program of Association in Antebellum America”

Daniel Joslyn, New York University, “When Love Came of Age: The Explosive Popularity of Mystical Socialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

Brigitte Koenig, Seton Hall University, “Envisioning Anarchy: The Search for an American Anarchist Utopia”

Christopher Arnold, Fairmount Community Library, “The Madonnas of 20th Century Mystical Materialism: Dorothy Day, Joan Baez and the Radical Christian Anti-Nationalism of the Cold War”

 

TUESDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

In Search of Discipline: The Constructed Theories of the American Carceral State

Chair: Beverly Gage, Yale University

Thomas Dumm, Amherst College, “Rethinking Origins of the American Carceral: Foucauldian Discipline and the Issue of Chattel Slavery”

Brittany Arsiniega, Furman University, “Normative Orders in Police Subculture and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1893-1905”

Anthony Gregory, Brown University, “New Deal Penology and the Rise of Carceral Liberalism”

Brendan Dooley, Mount St. Mary’s University, “Integrating Criminology through Creative Destruction: On the Career of Travis Hirschi”

 

MONDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

Religion, Conservatism, and Politics in the Long View

Chair: Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University

Elesha Coffman, Baylor University, “Andrew Carnegie’s American Dream”

Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University, “Humanism, Religion, and the Conservative Battle for the American Mind”

Michelle Nickerson, Loyola University Chicago, “God and Man at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Conference”

Daniel K. Williams, University of West Georgia, “White American Evangelicals and Political Conservatism: A Natural Alliance?”

Respondent: Gillis J. Harp, Grove City College

 

Boston Stock Exchange, November 1988

MONDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

Reform and Revolution in Business Thought and Rhetoric

Chair: Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College

Kwelina Thompson, Cornell University, “‘We Have a World to Rebuild’: Women and Small Business in New York State”

Erik Baker, Harvard University, “Social Entrepreneurship: Reform and the Origins of Privatization, 1960-1980”

Sean Delehanty, The Johns Hopkins University, “‘Give Stock a Chance’: Shareholder Value and Executive Compensation 1970-2000”

Nicholas Foster, University of Chicago, “Neo-liberal Acquiescence, or New Democrat Reform?: The Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the Limits of the Reagan Revolution”

 

Protest poster, ca. 1960s, Tufts Digital Collections and Archives

MONDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2020, 7PM EST

Resistance to Reform in United States Education, 1960s to Present

Chair: Michelle Nickerson, Loyola University, Chicago

Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University emerita, “The New York Intellectuals and the Student Movement”

Lauren Lassabe, University of New Orleans, “‘Balancing’ the Academy: The Intercollegiate Studies Institute”

Chris Broadhurst, University of New Orleans, “Faculty and Staff: The Tempered Radicals”

Seth Blumenthal, Boston University, “Going on Tour: Bill Brock, New Republicans and Campus Politics, 1968”

Bobby Cervantes, University of Kansas, “‘Eliminates the Greedy and Feeds the Needy’: The Politics of Hunger in American Schools”

MONDAY, 11 JANUARY 2021, 7PM EST

How We Teach the Presidency

Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College

Valencia Abbott, Rockingham Early College High School, Wentworth, NC

Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin

Alexis Coe, Independent Scholar

Sara Georgini, Massachusetts Historical Society

MONDAY, 25 JANUARY 2021, 7PM EST

Author-Meets-Readers: Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History

Chair: Kunal Parker, University of Miami Law School

Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut

Chad Williams, Brandeis University

Respondent: Christopher Tomlins, University of California Berkeley

 

MONDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2021, 7PM EST

Polarization: What Role for History Commentary?

Chair: Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas at Dallas

Paul Croce, Stetson University, “Beyond Acrimony, Inc.: A William James Frame for Understanding and Making Use of Recent Polarization”

Nicole Hemmer, Columbia University, “Commentary Across the Epistemological Divide”

Tim Lacy, University of Illinois College of Medicine, “Anti-Intellectualism and Polarization in Culture, Society, and Politics”

Kathleen Sands, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, “Religion, Science, and Race in the Scopes Trial of 1925: An Origin Story of Polarization in American Public Discourse”

Lisa Szefel, Pacific University Oregon, “United States of Contempt: The Emotional Threat to Democracy”

 

M.I.T. Chapel, Eero Saarinen, 1955

MONDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2021, 7PM EST

Illiberal Liberals: The Complexities of Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth-Century United States

Chair: Augusta Dell’Omo, The University of Texas at Austin

Chris Babits, Utah State University, “The Mark of Oppression: The Psychoanalytic Thought and Moralizing ‘Liberalism’ of Abram Kardiner”

David Mislin, Temple University, “Consistent Morals, Inconsistent Politics, and the Plight of Small-Town Religious Liberals in the1960s and 1970s”

Lora D. Burnett, Collin College, “The Zulus and Tolstoy in the Crimea: Or, ‘What the Hell Is Western Civilization, Anyway?’”

Comment: Benjamin L. Alpers, University of Oklahoma

Boston Athenaeum (founded 1807), Edward Clarke Cabot, 1847

TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2021, 7PM EST

How to Publish a Journal Article

Chair: Andrew Klumpp, Annals of Iowa, State Historical Society of Iowa

Angus Burgin, Modern Intellectual History, The Johns Hopkins University

Veronica Martinez-Matsuda, Cornell University

Kate Masur, Journal of the Civil War Era, Northwestern University

Josh Piker, William and Mary Quarterly, College of William & Mary

“In the Loge,” Mary Cassatt, 1878 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

MONDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2021, 7PM EST

Rethinking Reception History

Chair: Helena Rosenblatt, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Glory M. Liu, Brown University, “Adam Smith in America: Rediscoveries and Reinventions”

Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University, “Karl Marx’s America? An American Karl Marx?”

Claire Rydell Arcenas, University of Montana, “How to Write about Influence: When Thinkers Become Adjectives (and What to Do About It)”

Gregory Jones-Katz, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Deconstruction: An American Institution”

 

MONDAY, 1 MARCH 2021, 7PM EST

Intellectual History at the Confluence of Sex and Religion

Chair: Monica Mercado, Colgate University

Samira Mehta, University of Colorado, “The Rhetoric of Responsible Parenthood in Secular Debates About Contraception: A Transformation from Theology to Secular Policy”

Katherine Dugan, Springfield College, “The Kippleys, Natural Family Planning, and Catholic Sex Lives”

Suzanna Krivulskaya, California State University San Marcos, “Sex Talk: How U.S. Fundamentalists Went from Avoiding to Addressing a Touchy Subject”

Anthony Petro, Boston University, “Provoking Religion: Art and Memorialization in the U.S. Culture Wars”

Peter Cajka, University of Notre Dame, “Towards an Intellectual History of Abuse”

SUNDAY, 7 MARCH 2021, 12PM EST

U.S. Studies in an International Context

Chair: Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Jane C. Desmond, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Manpreet Kaur Kang, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (New Delhi)

Ana Maria Mauad, Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Brazil)

Ricardo D. Salvatore, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Buenos Aires)

Richard Cándida Smith, University of California, Berkeley

MONDAY, 15 MARCH 2021, 7PM EST

Prison Pedagogy: Teaching History and Ideas with Incarcerated Students

Chair: Peter Kuryla, Belmont University

Molly Reed, Cornell University

Andy Eisen, Community Education Project, Stetson University

Molly Whitted, IUPUI

TUESDAY, 16 MARCH 2021, 5PM EST (NOTE TIME CHANGE)

Co-sponsored with The University of Chicago Press

Early America Imagines the Future

Chair: Emma Hart, University of Pennsylvania

Emily Pawley, Dickinson College

Kenyon Gradert, Auburn University

Evan Haefeli, Texas A & M University

Camp Woodland in N.Y., ca. 1946 (University of Nebraska at Omaha)

MONDAY, 22 MARCH 2021, 7PM EST

“Folklore in the Metropolis”: Benjamin Botkin, Tony Schwartz, Norman Studer, and the Search for Cultural Renewal

Chair: Michael Kramer, SUNY Brockport

Benjamin Serby, Columbia University, “Folk Cosmopolitanism: Tony Schwartz’s New York Recordings, 1945-1960”

Rivka Maizlish, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Folklore as Democratic Education: Norman Studer’s ‘World as Neighborhood’”

TUESDAY, 30 MARCH 2021, 7PM EST

Co-sponsored with University of Pennsylvania Press

The Politics of Black Freedom

Chair: Adam X. McNeil, Rutgers University

Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College

Brandon Byrd, Vanderbilt University

Christopher Bonner, University of Maryland, College Park

SUNDAY, 11 APRIL 2021, 12PM EST

Transatlantic Cultures: Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18th-21st Centuries

Chair: Richard Cándida Smith, University of California, Berkeley

Anaïs Fléchet, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Moustapha Sall, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar

Gabriela Pellegrino Soares, Universidade de São Paulo

Cyrille Suire, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), Thomas Cole, 1836 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

TUESDAY, 13 APRIL 2021, 7PM EST

Living, Knowing, Sharing: Introducing Traditional Ecological Knowledge to Scholars and Students

Chair: Jason Herbert, Seminole Heritage Services, Inc.

Patty Loew, Northwestern University

Marty Reinhardt, Northern Michigan University

Lea Zeise, Office of Environmental Resource Management, United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc.

Jewel Parker, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

MONDAY, 19 APRIL 2021, 7PM EST

Revolution and Counterrevolution in the 1790s

Co-sponsored with The University of Virginia Press

Chair: Charlene Boyer Lewis, Kalamazoo College

Patrick Griffin, University of Notre Dame

Sandra Moats, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

Marlene Daut, University of Virginia

#USIH2020 BLOG PUBLICATIONS

FALL 2020

Jordan Watkins, Brigham Young University, “Mormons and the Making of Constitutions on the Margins”

Federal Theatre Project, Negro Theatre, Sign Painting department, 1936 (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division. The New York Public Library)

African-American Intellectuals and Their Critics

Chair & Comment: Bryn Upton, McDaniel College

Ross English, The New School for Social Research, “The Paradigm of White Wealth: Racial Capitalism and the Myth of Income in Early 20th Century America”

Kelly Lyons, Boston College, “Left-Wing Nationalism and Racist Backlash: The Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939”

Carl Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School, “Martin Luther King, the Non-Aligned World and US Global Hegemony”

SPRING 2021

Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, Skidmore College, “The Art of Reform: Henry Adams’s Democracy

Wendy Wong Schirmer, Temple University, “The Jay Treaty Debate, Political ‘Slavery,’ and the Politics of Slavery in the Early Republic”

#USIH2020 TEACHING INTELLECTUAL HISTORY WORKSHOPS & RESOURCES

FALL 2020

Benjamin Wright, The University of Texas at Dallas, The American Yawp: The Society for U.S. Intellectual History Primary Source Reader 

SPRING 2021

Benjamin L. Alpers, University of Oklahoma, Reacting to the Past Workshop

SATURDAY, 27 MARCH 2021, 12PM-3PM EST

Beyond the Text: Reading Objects and Images

Whitney Nell Stewart, The University of Texas at Dallas, Workshop Leader

Participants will discuss the use and relevance of material and visual culture to intellectual history, and work together to create a “How to” guide for students to analyze objects and images in the classroom. The workshop will be led by scholars and practitioners of material and visual culture, including historians, art historians, curators, and education directors at museums and historic sites. Panelists include:

Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware

Jennifer Hammond and Joey Milillo, Bayou Bend Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Michelle Everidge, Witte Museum

Aston Gonzalez, Salisbury University

Jonathan M. Square, Harvard University

Elizabeth Humphrey, Bowdoin College Museum of Art