US History Archives - Public Seminar

History

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

What the fate of the monument to Edward Coles in Edwardsville, Illinois, can tell us about the ironies of hoping that statues might tell a new American story

July 29, 2020 • by Jeffrey Manuel

Recently, renewed efforts have been made to diversify the kinds of Americans commemorated by public monuments. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by David Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass; as the title of the piece put it, “There’s a Chance to Tell a ...

Michigan Claims English as Official Language

The Forgotten and Ignored History of U.S. Support for Official Translations

April 26, 2018 • by Rosina Lozano

On February 22 Michigan's house “with no warning” voted in favor of House Bill 4053, which would make English the state’s official language for all public records and public meetings. Republican representative Aaron Miller called it a “great day” and did not see the bill as exclusionary: “We’re not turning ...

The Korean War Today: A Roundtable on the U.S. and the Two Koreas

Livestreaming the Marilyn B. Young Memorial Lecture.

February 22, 2018 • by Christopher Howard-Woods

On Friday, February 23rd, 2018 at 6:00 pm, Public Seminar will be livestreaming the Marilyn B. Young lecture, described below, on our Facebook page. Marilyn B. Young (1937-2017) was an influential historian of U.S. foreign policy, a feminist, and a prominent public critic of America’s endless wars in the twentieth and ...