Woodrow Wilson Archives - Public Seminar

Part 6: A New Treaty?

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

October 10, 2022 • by James Carroll

In this unprecedented context, a laserlike focus on banning the bomb can be a politically viable process, surpassing the failed efforts of bygone years, and even leading to the broader mitigation of “militarism” toward which peace movements have striven without success....

Europe & Central Asia

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 26, 2022 • by James Carroll

Efforts to immediately erect guardrails around nuclear weapons, given the sorry history that followed upon their falling short, deserve to be lifted up and celebrated as examples of what can follow in the chastened aftermath of a disastrous war....

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Europe & Central Asia

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 12, 2022 • by James Carroll

Having faulted American policies myself—emphatically so from Clinton forward, when I took on that role of Boston Globe op-ed pundit—I nevertheless refused now to place blame for Putin’s war on America’s drive to protect, in the left-wing argot, its “global hegemony.”...

Democracy

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

December 8, 2021 • by Gregory Coleman, Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Award-winning historians Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston spoke (virtually) with Public Seminar editorial intern Gregory Coleman to discuss their new book Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Edited by Nichols and Preston with fellow historian Elizabeth Borgwardt, the collection of curated essays discusses what American grand strategy ...

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Politics

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

An introduction to this week’s issue on the future of constitutionalism and democracy

October 13, 2021 • by James Miller

The idea for a symposium in Public Seminar on “Constitutional Politics” grows out of a two-day conference on Liberalism & Democracy: Past, Present, Prospects. I organized these conversations at the New School in February 2019, in collaboration with Helena Rosenblatt, a historian at City University of New York Graduate Center. One of the key participants was Aziz Rana of Cornell University, ...

Constitutional Politics

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Many American states have not only frequently amended their constitutions, but, at least as importantly, have replaced existing constitutions with presumably better, updated, ones

October 12, 2021 • by Sanford Levinson

“Veneration” is a term that James Madison used in Federalist 49, to express the kind of great respect he hoped the new Constitution he had helped write would command in the debate over ratification then raging in America. Yet as Aziz Rana reminds us, many of America’s most notable political ...

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Higher Ed

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege

July 16, 2020 • by Joshua T. Katz

In Congress, on July 4, 1776, came the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Signed by 56 men, many of whom were considered national heroes just a few minutes ago, it opens with a long and elegant sentence whose first words every American child knows, or used ...

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Feature

Seeking Illumination in Dark Times

On the power of art, race and racism, and the limitations of science and politics

September 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Reading our series on the arts, provides some hope in our dark times, on this cloudy and humid Friday afternoon in New York. I have long believed that the key to liberation is illumination, that we have to see the ways things are, and see how things might possibly change, ...

Feature

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s answer to The Birth of a Nation

August 28, 2018 • by Mark Allan Williams

“Do the Right Thing.” “Jungle Fever.” “Malcolm X.” Now “BlacKkKlansman.” No maker of feature films in our time, or perhaps during any time, has placed so much of their work at the center of the social and political discourse as Spike Lee. His cinematic voice is political and his platform is ...

Woodrow Wilson

Part 6: A New Treaty?

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

An introduction to this week’s issue on the future of constitutionalism and democracy

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Many American states have not only frequently amended their constitutions, but, at least as importantly, have replaced existing constitutions with presumably better, updated, ones

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege

Seeking Illumination in Dark Times

On the power of art, race and racism, and the limitations of science and politics

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s answer to The Birth of a Nation

Newsletter

Connect With Us