Live at Public Seminar: John D’Emilio

Public Seminar celebrates the publication of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood

John D’Emilio, a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQIA+ history, will join Public Seminar Co-Executive Editor Claire Potter in a discussion of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood....

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Live at Public Seminar: John D’Emilio

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...
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Documenting the City of Refugees

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

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Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Interpretations of the Past

Historian Michael D. Hattem discusses historical memory, reckoning with the creation of “American history”, and his recent book

That put this question in my head: how, and when, did these British colonists, now Americans, stop thinking that the British past was their history? And how did they come to replace it with what we now call “American history”? That question then became the project’s overarching framework: reckoning with ...
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Interpretations of the Past

Making Poetry Fun and Daring

An interview with award-winning poet Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang is a Chinese American poet whose writing explores themes of death and grief. In her new book The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) Chang explores how we experience grief over time, and how nature experiences it along with us. Informed by the pandemic, the theme of ...
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Making Poetry Fun and Daring

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Anthropologist Ruth Behar discusses writing across genres, making ideas accessible, and a new children’s book

Behar spoke with Public Seminar about writing for young readers, how people and their stories are intertwined in both fiction and anthropology, and the importance of telling stories with ethnographic accuracy....

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When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

In other words, alternative television showed government as it was, mainlining the excitement of democracy to a dedicated and growing group of political junkies. At the same time, seeing the investigation play out live provided reassurance that Watergate was a constitutional crisis but not, as Nixon characterized it, a plot ...
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How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...
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How to Become a Queer Historian

The Future of Working from Home

Urban economist Matthew Kahn thinks the pandemic lockdown could change your life—for the better

The stubborn persistence of remote work will increasingly be on the national agenda. On April 28, 2022, Airbnb announced a new policy that would “allow employees to live and work anywhere,” and that they would partner with potential destinations “to help them attract remote workers.” Differently, New York Magazine’s Jen ...
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The Future of Working from Home

Towards Constructive Politics

What oppression is, at the end of the day, is a world that has been built in a bad way

It just isn’t true that the only problem that confronts people who are trying to learn the truth about their social system is that they haven’t talked to enough people who have less money than them, or a more marginalized racial or gender identity. That’s among the problems, but the ...
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Towards Constructive Politics

Singing America’s Racial History

A conversation with historian Emily Bingham about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home”

May 7, 2022, is the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby, nicknamed “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.” Before these three-year-old thoroughbreds burst out of the starting gate, thousands of people will don elaborate hats, drink mint juleps, and—right before the race, accompanied by the University of Louisville marching band—sing Steven ...
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Singing America’s Racial History