History
June
Thursday June 15 2:00-4:00
Churchill's Greatest Speeches
Sponsored By Berry and Ruthie Edwards
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Winston Churchill's mastery of the English language informed and inspired Britain during the Second World War. His speeches and writings played an important role in the Allied victory during the war and throughout his long and storied career. This presentation will closely examine several of Churchill's speeches and reveal how Churchill used the power of prose to win the war and preserve the peace.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Tim Riley is the Director and Chief Curator for The Winston Churchill Museum at Westminster College. Tim is a graduate, cum laude, of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and also studied at Columbia University in the City of New York. He has also served as a curatorial assistant, education assistant and lectures/concerts coordinator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2006 through 2012 Tim served as director of The Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, and was appointed Director Emeritus in 2012. In April of this year Tim was installed as Churchill Fellow of Westminster College.
Friday June 16 10:00-12:00
Churchill and the Monarchy
Sponsored By Berry and Ruthie Edwards
From Queen Victoria to Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill was a strong monarchist and devoted subject of the crown. The presentation will explore Churchill's views on constitutional monarchy and his personal and professional relationships with six sovereigns and many other members of the British royal family
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Tim Riley is the Director and Chief Curator for The Winston Churchill Museum at Westminster College. Tim is a graduate, cum laude, of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and also studied at Columbia University in the City of New York. He has also served as a curatorial assistant, education assistant and lectures/concerts coordinator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2006 through 2012 Tim served as director of The Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, and was appointed Director Emeritus in 2012. In April of this year Tim was installed as Churchill Fellow of Westminster College.
Monday June 19 10:00-12:00
Goldwater Girls Grow Up
When we talk about politics of the New Right, we think of names like Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan. This course looks at the women’s work behind the successful men– the volunteers and organizers who laid the foundation of the modern Republican party in the South. The talk will trace conservative women’s contributions from volunteering in the 1960s to finally running for office themselves in later decades. Learn how unknown women created our current political landscape.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Robin M. Morris is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (UGA Press, 2022). She is a native of Atlanta and holds a BA from Queens University of Charlotte, MA from University of Mississippi, and PhD from Yale University.
Tuesday June 20 2:00-4:00
Stark Raving Mad: Contemporary Politics in Historical Perspective
In 1489 the English poet John Skelton wondered if commoners “were stark raving mad” when they lynched a wealthy nobleman over a political dispute. Certainly, the same question can be asked of Americans today. Our politics has become so polarized, angry, and seemingly irrational that the majority of Americans fear for the survival of democracy itself. Can history help us understand why United States voters and politicians alike appear to have gone stark raving mad? Join us for a nonpartisan, civil, and enlightening lecture and discussion
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Karl Campbell is a professor of history at Appalachian State University, where he teaches North Carolina and recent United States history. Originally from Ohio, Karl received his B.A. degree in history and political science from Warren Wilson College in Asheville and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from UNC Chapel Hill.
Wednesday June 21 10:00-12:00
Pirates, Patriots, Tar Heels, and Slaves: Historical Roots of Modern NC
History is not just in the past, it shapes the present and the future, too. Many of North Carolina’s defining characteristics grew from the dramatic experiences of its early history. Known as “Poor Carolina” during the colonial period, the state suffered from poverty, conflict, and violence. North Carolina claimed to be “first in freedom” during the American Revolution, only to slip back into political and economic lethargy under an oppressive system of slavery. The first three centuries of Tar Heel history were marked by humility and heroism, slavery and freedom, poverty and progress. These struggles shaped North Carolina’s historical identity and continue to impact our lives today.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Karl Campbell is a professor of history at Appalachian State University, where he teaches North Carolina and recent United States history. Originally from Ohio, Karl received his B.A. degree in history and political science from Warren Wilson College in Asheville and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from UNC Chapel Hill.
Tuesday June 27 10:00-12:00
The Scopes Trial in History and Folklore
Sponsored By Al and Martha Pearson
Historian and legal scholar Edward J. Larson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. Larson rivetingly describes the surprising and sometimes comic first skirmish in what has become an American culture war. Set in the unlikely hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925, the Scopes trial focused on evolution, but it ignited a broader, increasingly complex debate about the tension between science and religion that continues a century later – fundamentalism versus modernity, majority rule versus individual rights, school curriculum and textbook content, reproductive rights, LBGTQ+ protections, the role of government in public health, and climate science. Larson not only captures the drama of the trial and the great encounter between Clarence Darrow and the declining William Jennings Bryan; he also discusses misconceptions about the trial that have persisted. The tenor of this debate has changed little over the years.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Ed Larson holds the Darling Chair in Law and is University Professor of History at Pepperdine University. Recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, Larson received a Ph.D in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from Harvard. He taught for twenty years at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. The author of fifteen books and over eighty published articles, his books include, in
addition to Summer for the Gods, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800; Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory; and the New York Times bestsellers, The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789 and Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Larson recently published, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. His articles on science, history, or law have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Time, Atlantic Monthly, American History, Scientific American, The Nation, Wall
Street Journal, Isis, and twenty law reviews, including Virginia Law Review and Constitutional Commentary.
Wednesday June 28 10:00-12:00
Conceived in Liberty
Sponsored By Al and Martha Pearson
With his newest book, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Edward Larson enters the contentious modern debate among historians and journalists about the founding period of U.S. History. Larson examines whether the American Revolution was waged to preserve slavery and whether the Constitution was a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement. In this lecture, Larson will reexamine the words that gave birth to a nation and will explore the tensions between liberty and slavery during the Revolutionary Era in American history -- a period that witnessed both the first great emancipation of enslaved persons and a doubling down on slavery. Unlike much history of this period, Larson’s book highlights the urgency of liberty through the voices of Black Americans. The depth of the contradictions between freedom and bondage present at the founding helps explain the enduring legacy of slavery that Americans confront today.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Ed Larson holds the Darling Chair in Law and is University Professor of History at Pepperdine University. Recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, Larson received a Ph.D in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from Harvard. He taught for twenty years at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. The author of fifteen books and over eighty published articles, his books include, in
addition to Summer for the Gods, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800; Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory; and the New York Times bestsellers, The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789 and Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Larson recently published, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. His articles on science, history, or law have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Time, Atlantic Monthly, American History, Scientific American, The Nation, Wall
Street Journal, Isis, and twenty law reviews, including Virginia Law Review and Constitutional Commentary.
Thursday June 29 10:00-12:00
Shackleton: The Man and the Myth
Sponsored By Al and Martha Pearson
Ernest Shackleton today stands as the hero among heroes in the pantheon of polar expedition. Even though he never reached either pole, he is better known and more widely admired than any of those that did – particularly for his remarkable efforts to save his Endeavour crew after their boat was crushed in the Antarctic ice on his failed third and final effort to reach the South Pole. In this lecture, Larson will recount what Shackleton actually achieved in his Antarctic expeditions and how his methods (more than their results) and his remarkable response to adversity made him a thoroughly modern hero. He offers a telling study in contrast to his two main rivals in early South Polar exploration, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Ed Larson holds the Darling Chair in Law and is University Professor of History at Pepperdine University. Recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, Larson received a Ph.D in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from Harvard. He taught for twenty years at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. The author of fifteen books and over eighty published articles, his books include, in
addition to Summer for the Gods, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800; Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory; and the New York Times bestsellers, The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789 and Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Larson recently published, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. His articles on science, history, or law have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Time, Atlantic Monthly, American History, Scientific American, The Nation, Wall
Street Journal, Isis, and twenty law reviews, including Virginia Law Review and Constitutional Commentary.
July
Thursday July 6 2:00-4:00
Right-Wing Politics and Populism in Modern France
Like many countries around the world, France has seen a right-wing populist movement gain ground in traditional political spaces. More people are backing parties and candidates that were once considered outside the norms of French politics. But what's old and what's new in this development? This presentation will review the history of the Right in Modern France to reveal its legacies in action today.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Max Owre is the Executive Director of Carolina Public Humanities. A graduate of the University of Vermont, he obtained his PhD in modern European history from UNC-CH in 2008. Max is a lecturer in the History Department, teaching courses in European, world and colonial history since 2007. Max is a principal organizer, and frequent host and moderator of CPH Events. He also lectures frequently for CPH on various topics in French and European history.
Friday July 7 10:00-12:00
The Secular State and its Discontents: Religious Freedom in France
The French Republic takes pride in its secular nature. However, the Republic’s policies have often been hostile to religion—from its early contests with the Catholic Church to its more recent laws regarding Muslim citizens and subjects. This presentation will examine the French model of secularism, known as laïcté, to help explain the Republic’s stance on the religious expression of its subjects and the problems that arise when it’s implemented in society. It will also compare the French model to the intersection of religion and secularism in the United States
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Max Owre is the Executive Director of Carolina Public Humanities. A graduate of the University of Vermont, he obtained his PhD in modern European history from UNC-CH in 2008. Max is a lecturer in the History Department, teaching courses in European, world and colonial history since 2007. Max is a principal organizer, and frequent host and moderator of CPH Events. He also lectures frequently for CPH on various topics in French and European history.
Wednesday July 19 2:00-4:00
Why and How the Atlantic Revolutions of the Late 18th Century Remain Important for American Democracy Now
This presentation will focus on the revolutionary upheavals that spread across the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century, creating independent nations and advocating new conceptions of human rights that continue to influence the modern world. We’ll discuss how the ideas of this revolutionary era still resonate in our own time, when democratic institutions are facing new challenges across the Atlantic world and beyond.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Lloyd Kramer is a professor of history and the Director of Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is coauthor of A History of Europe in the Modern World, which is now in its 12th edition. Kramer’s interests focus on Modern European History with an emphasis on nineteenth-century France.
Thursday July 20 10:00-12:00
Why and How Fascists and Nazis Destroyed Democracies in Italy and Germany
This presentation will focus on the anti-democratic movements that emerged after World War I in Italy and Germany, where the ideas of the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions were widely rejected. We’ll discuss the popularity of autocratic leaders, the methods that anti-democratic forces used to consolidate power in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the ways in which democracies become vulnerable to anti-democratic ideas and leaders.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Lloyd Kramer is a professor of history and the Director of Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is coauthor of A History of Europe in the Modern World, which is now in its 12th edition. Kramer’s interests focus on Modern European History with an emphasis on nineteenth-century France.
Monday July 24 2:00-4:00
How "Modern" Was the Old South?
Southern slaveholders went to great lengths to portray themselves as custodians of a backward-looking, noble society, one that drew its strength from the past and fought against the recklessness of the modern future of free wage labor and democracy. In their architecture, literature, and in the institution of slavery itself, they fashioned themselves as feudal lords, heirs to a past they admired and cherished. Beneath this facade, however, was a modern, highly exploitative system of labor, one that gave rise to one of the most “progressive” societies in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. This lecture explores how, beneath the gloss of genteel aristocracy, the Old South pioneered some of the most modern, even capitalistic innovations in the world.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Mark Smith is an American historian, Director of the Institute for Southern Studies, and a Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is a scholar of environmental disasters, southern history, and of sensory history, which he described to an interviewer as stressing “the role of the senses” – including sight and vision – in shaping people’s experience in the past.
Tuesday July 25 10:00-12:00
America's First Civil War
Roughly twenty percent of American colonists were “Loyalists” during the American Revolution. Who were these e people and why did they elect to remain loyal to the Mother Country? The risks they took were great but no greater than those taken by Americans who chose to rebel. What motivated those who wanted to leave the British Empire? What was at stake in their decision? This presentation outlines the motivations, risks, and possible rewards for both sides and frames the American Revolution as America’s first Civil War.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Mark Smith is an American historian, Director of the Institute for Southern Studies, and a Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is a scholar of environmental disasters, southern history, and of sensory history, which he described to an interviewer as stressing “the role of the senses” – including sight and vision – in shaping people’s experience in the past.
Monday July 31 10:00-12:00
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire
A great white angel spreading her wings across the Moreno Valley: this is how one visitor described the memorial standing atop a windswept prominence in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos, New Mexico. A de-facto national Vietnam veterans memorial, built by one family more than a decade before the Wall in Washington, DC, and without aid or recognition from the US government, the chapel at Angel Fire is a testament to one young American’s sacrifice—but also to the profound determination of his family to find meaning in their loss. In The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire, Steven Trout tells the story of Marine Lieutenant David Westphall, who was killed near Con Thien on May 22, 1968, and of the Westphall family’s subsequent struggle to create and maintain a one-of-a-kind memorial chapel dedicated to the memory of all Americans lost in the Vietnam War and to the cause of world peace.
Focused primarily on a life lost amid our nation’s most controversial conflict and on the Westphalls’ desperate battle to keep their chapel open between 1971 and 1982, the book’s brisk and moving narrative traces the memorial’s evolution from a personal act of family remembrance to its emergence as an iconic pilgrimage destination for thousands of Vietnam veterans. Documenting the chapel’s shifting messages over time, which include a momentary (and controversial) recognition of the dead on both sides of the war, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire spotlights one American soldier’s tragic story and the monument to hope and peace that it inspired.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Steven Trout is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama. His books include On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 and Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War.
August
Wednesday August 9 2:00-4:00
The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership and the Revolutionary War
The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders must have been to blame, but were they? Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Andrew O’Shaughnessy is the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is the Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). He has previously published The Men Who Lost America. British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), which received eight national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize and The Society of Military History Book Prize
Thursday August 10 10:00-12:00
"The Illimitable Freedom of the Mind:" Thomas Jefferson and Education
Jefferson regarded education as essential to the survival of an elective republican government. The talk reviews his remarkable pioneering efforts in public education and why they remain relevant. He saw education as essential to the survival of a democracy and regarded mass elementary education as the first priority. He advanced what would have become the first public school system in the world. The talk explains why he was only able to establish a university and why he regarded it as one of this three greatest achievements in life.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Andrew O’Shaughnessy is the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is the Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). He has previously published The Men Who Lost America. British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), which received eight national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize and The Society of Military History Book Prize
Wednesday August 16 2:00-4:00
Ten Myths About America's Founding Documents
Over the centuries, all three of the United States’ founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights—have, like undersea treasures, become encrusted with a thick coating . . . of mythology. Americans think of the Declaration of Independence as a bold protest against government by kings and queens, though it never actually denounces monarchy. Today most people’s favorite clause from the Declaration of Independence is “created equal,” but delegates to the Continental Congress who signed it cared less about individual rights than states’ rights. Over the next hundred years, though, black and white Americans opposing slavery and males, as well as females supporting women’s rights, transformed it into a universal declaration of human rights. Few people today realize that one of the most pressing motivations for the men like Madison and Washington who wrote the Constitution was to roll back what Hamilton called the “excess of democracy” unleashed by the American Revolution. Today the most beloved clauses of the Constitution are in the Bill of Rights, which the framers of the original Constitution not only didn’t write but resolutely opposed. We owe our most precious freedoms to the men and women who hated the original Constitution and agreed to it only after being promised a Bill of Rights.
Location: CLE Lecture Hall
Presenter: Woody Holton is the Peter and Bonnie McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches and researches Early American history, especially the American Revolution, with a focus on economic history and on African Americans, Native Americans, and women. He is the
author of several previous books, including Abigail Adams, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize; his second book, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, was a finalist for the National Book Award.