History Archives - Public Seminar

History

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

On David Griscom’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas

October 19, 2026 • by Philip Dray

For the past 50 years, Texas has been a GOP stronghold. Despite the good efforts of figures such as Beto O’Rourke, Barbara Jordan, and Ann Richards, the state has remained firmly in the grip of big business, big oil, and a conservative legislature. But as David Griscom observes in his new book, The Myth of ...

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

Art & Design

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

On the first modern media event in fin-de-siècle France

October 15, 2026 • by Karine Macarez

In October 1899, Parisians could purchase a large color lithograph depicting a grotesque human-pig hybrid, complete with spectacles and a curly tail, wielding a paintbrush and smearing a map of France with this brown “caca international”—“international poo." The picture was a caricature of the novelist Émile Zola, or “Le roi ...

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

History

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

May 19, 2026 • by Sylvia Taschka

Was Ronald Reagan’s famous image of America as a “shining city on a hill” truly just an illusion, a Fata Morgana of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and moral leadership, a trick played on the world’s collective mind? In a podcast aired on January 14, 2026, Tucker ...

Art & Design

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

Translating the “great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight” of one modernist recognizing another

May 4, 2026 • by Chris Holdaway

Translator’s Note In May 1927, an exhibition of images embroidered in silk thread opened at La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Sixth Arrondissement, the bookshop and salon that Breton once called “the most attractive hub of ideas of the time.” The artworks were the creations of Marie Monnier (1894–1976) ...

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

History

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

A conversation with author E. M. Ippolito about the settler colonialist roots of modern displacement and urban renewal

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito and Eva Szilardi-Tierney

E. M. Ippolito’s relationship to her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a complicated one. While Ippolito’s exploration of Portsmouth’s working-class history began when she was a college student, it was her own displacement from Portsmouth that personalized her research. Learning the story of Portsmouth’s 1960s urban renewal—a federally funded ...

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

History

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief genealogy of nonviolent resistance

November 18, 2025 • by Bennett Parten

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some ...

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Economy

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

November 17, 2025 • by Quinn Slobodian

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.— Peter Boehringer Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed ...

Colonization

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

A plea for a blank slate and a new beginning

October 9, 2025 • by Kwach Abonyo

Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles. Among his most notable ...

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

History

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

October 7, 2025 • by Manousha Dhiwaghar

Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in ...

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

History

Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

September 1, 2025 • by Alex Rossen and Karen Underhill

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...