UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS for 2021-2022
(stay tuned for updates)
In order to attend these virtual events, you must register for the conference. Register here.
May 2 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: TO ATTEND, CLICK HERE
Roundtable Session for USIH Book Award/Dewey Award Prize Winning Book, Andrew Jewett’s Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America
- Sarah Bridger, California Polytechnic State University
- Hunter Heyck, Oklahoma University
- Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University
- Amy Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University
- Ben Park, Sam Houston State University
- Andrew Jewett, University of Houston
- Tim Lacy, President, S-USIH, Loyola University Chicago/University of Illinois
RECENT (COMPLETED) SESSIONS
November 15, 2021, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Memory, Secrecy, and Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Tara Strauch (Centre College), chair/comment
- Keith Beutler (Missouri Baptist University), George Washington’s Hair: A Founder’s Tresses and the Politics and Meaning of Memory in The Early Republic”
- Amanda Klug (University of Tennessee), “Remembering the Constitutional Convention: The Madison Papers and the Antislavery Movement”
- Joshua A. Morrow (Ohio State University), “Catechizing the Children of the Confederacy: The Role of the Catechism and Religious Rhetoric in the Confederate Civil Religion”
- Sarah J. Purcell (Grinnell College),” Public Martyr, Private Corpse: The Secret Burial of James W. Jackson and Confederate Nationalism”
November 22, 2021, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
The Making of A Conservative Christian Constitutional Politics in the Early 20th Century
Daniel K. Williams (University of West Georgia) chair/comment
- Julia Bowes (Melbourne University), “‘A Catholic Constitutional Proselytizer’: The Career of William Dameron Guthrie”
- Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University), “Christian Constitutional Nationalism and Right-Wing Politics of Foreign Policy in the Early 20th Century”
- Austin Steelman (Stanford University), “J. Gresham Machen, the Anti-statist Constitution, and the Roots of the Conservative Coalition”
November 29, 2021, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Postwar Capitalism, Politics and Culture
chair/comment Pete Kuryla, Belmont University
- Remalian Cocar (Georgia Gwinnett College), “Acceptance: Homophile Arguments of the 1950s and 1960s”
- Nelson Lichtenstein (UC Santa Barbara), “‘Varieties of Capitalism’: In Theory and Practice”
- Joshua Wright (Harvard University), “Uncivil Irreligion: The Realist and the Satirical Attack on Mid-century “Judeo-Christian” America”
December 6, 2021, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom: FREE ANd OPEN FOR THE PUBLIC
REMEMBERING CHARLES CAPPER: Join the session here.
David Mislin (Temple University), Chair
- Amy Kittelstrom (Sonoma State)
- Nelson Lichtenstein (UC Santa Barbara)
- Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Syracuse University)
- Abigail Modaff (Harvard University)
- James Kloppenberg (Harvard University)
December 13, 2021, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
It Happened Here: Understanding Right-Wing Politics in the Trump Era
Gerald Horne (University of Houston), chair
- Edward H. Miller (Northeastern University), “A Republic, Not a Democracy: The Deep Roots of Conservative Anti-Democracy”
- Anna F. Duensing (Yale University), “The Conservative Bogeyman of “Outside Agitators” from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter”
- David Austin Walsh (University of Virginia), “Was It Fascism? Why Does It Matter?”
- John S. Huntington (Houston Community College), “The Long Conservative Counter-Revolution”
January 18, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
New Voices in U.S. Intellectual History (Henry May Award Winners): FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
To attend, click here
Sara Georgini (Massachusetts Historical Society), chair/comment
- Bobby Cervantes (University of Kansas), “Las Colonias: The Housing of Poverty in Modern
Americas” - Yasmin Dualeh (University of Cambridge), “Cultivating Diaspora: An Exploration of the Socio-
Political Thought of Arab Intellectuals in the US, 1918-1967” - Emily Hawk (Columbia University), “Thinking Through Movement: American Modern Dance and Embodied Knowledge in Higher Education”
- Alison Russell (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “The Posterity of Cherokee Women:
Indigenous Constitutions and Gendered Political Spaces”
January 24, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Interrogating the Social Relevance of the Social Sciences, 1940s to 1980s
Christopher Loss (Vanderbilt), chair
- Leah Gordon, (Brandeis University), “Debating ‘Dogmatism and Social Science’: The Inequality(1972) Controversy and the Politics of Socially Relevant Social Science”
- Jefferson Pooley (Muhlenberg College), “‘The Whole Problem is One of World Morality’:Communication Research and Social Relevance in the Early Post–World War II Period”
- Mark Solovey (University of Toronto), “Marcus Raskin’s Effort to Reconstruct Social Inquiry for the Purposes of Social Reconstruction, 1960s to 1980s”
January 31, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Roundtable on Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick, At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Dorothy Ross (Johns Hopkins University), chair
- Kevin K. Gaines (University of Virginia)
- Sarah E. Igo (Vanderbilt University)
- Casey Nelson Blake (Columbia University)
- Daniel H. Borus (University of Rochester)
- Howard Brick (University of Michigan)
February 7, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Roundtable: Public Argument, Private Learning: Revisionist Intellectual Histories of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
- Tara Bynum (University of Iowa), “The Uses of David Walker’s Anger”
- Marcy J. Dinius (DePaul University), “The Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Roots of Walker’s Appeal”
- Sarah Robbins (Yale University), “To see if any more light will be thrown on the subject”: David Walker’s Appeal to Revise”
- Chernoh M. Sesay, Jr. (DePaul University), “From Prince Hall to David Walker: Abolition, Masculinity, and Black Freemasonry”
February 15, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Philosophy and the (Public) Humanities in the United States after 1945
James Kloppenberg (Harvard University), chair/comment
- Claire Rydell Arcenas (University of Montana), “Are We Useful?: Debating the Value of Humanities in the 1940s”
- Ethan Schrum (Azusa Pacific University), “Protestantism, Interdisciplinarity, and the Analytic Turn in Princeton Philosophy, 1946-1972”
- Jonathan Strassfeld (Unemployed), “General Education: A Philosophical Problem”
February 21, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
The Archive of Private Feelings
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Harvard University), chair
- Henry M. Cowles (University of Michigan), “Tiny Habits for Pleasure and Profit”
- Jeanna Kinnebrew (Boston University), “Private Matters, Public Problems: Marriage Counseling in Boston, 1929–1959”
- Christopher M. Rudeen, (Harvard University), “A ‘Delightful Necessity’: Ernest Dichter and the‘Emotional Values’ of Fur Ownership”
- Che Yeun, (Harvard University), “The Rise and Rise of Synthetic Musks: Modern Scents and theHuman Body in Twentieth-Century America”
February 24, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Status, Discrimination, and the Market in American Law, 1960-1990
Sara Mayeux (Vanderbilt), chair
- Gregory Briker (Yale University), “Projects, Playgrounds, and the Transformation of Fair Housing”
- Deborah Dinner (Cornell University), “Difference as Proxy for Risk: Between Antidiscrimination and Actuarial Logics”
- Gabriel Levine (Princeton University), “Property and The New Property”
February 28, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Secularization and Religious Response, 1800-1930
Jonathan Den Hartog (Samford University), chair/comment
- Janine Giordano Drake (Indiana University), “Industrialization and Secularization in Comparative Context, 1880-1920”
- Keith Harper (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary), “Between the Devil and the DeepBlue…Grass? Early Kentucky Baptists and the Transition from Persecuted Sect to Social Acceptability”
- Andrea L. Turpin (Baylor University), “Separate Spheres? Gender, Religion, and Politics in the Progressive Era YMCA vs. YWCA”
- Daniel K. Williams (University of West Georgia), “Faith after Darwin: The Construction of a New Intellectual Foundation for Protestantism at Northeastern Colleges in the Late 19th Century”
March 3, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Reconsidering the Stakes of the Public and the Private: New Directions in in Postwar US Gender and Sexuality History
Stacie Taranto (Ramapo College), chair/comment
- Sarah Potter (University of Memphis), “‘Everyone knows them and talks about them’: The Public Problem of Unfaithful War Wives during World War II”
- Sarah Rowley (DePauw University), “The Personal and the Political in Journalistic Coverage of the 1976 Ray-Hays Congressional Sex Scandal”
- Erica Ryan (Rider University), “Making the Private Public: Race and Masculinity in the Fatherhood Responsibility Movement at the End of the Cold War”
- Hettie Williams (Monmouth University), “Mildred Fay Jefferson: A Black Woman Conservative Intellectual”
March 7, 2022, 3PM EST (2PM CST) online via Zoom
In and Against the Double Movement: Karl Polanyi and the Postwar American Right
- Daniel Stedman Jones (39 Essex Chambers), “Virginia Public Choice and the Neoliberal Vision of the State”
- Daniel Coleman (University of Cambridge), “Capitalism and the Historians: A Postwar NeoliberalProject”
- Emily Hull (University College London), “‘Why Not Three Cheers?’: Understanding Irving Kristol’s Critique of the Market”
- Sam Pallis (University of Cambridge), “Corrupted Capitalists: Murray Rothbard, The New Left and the Libertarian Turn to Class (1965-1969)”
March 14, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
The Ideal of ‘Art’ in the Long Twentieth Century
Richard Cándida Smith (UC-Berkeley), chair
- Audrey Wu Clark (U.S. Naval Academy), “The African American Player during the Korean War”
- Erik Hmiel (Independent Scholar), “The Fate of the Avant-Garde and the Intellectual History of Contemporary Art”
- Clay Matlin (School of Visual Arts, NYC), “The Infinite Beauty of the Other World”: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Aesthetics of Emancipation”
March 21, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Roundtable Discussion of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s Ideas That Made America
David Hollinger (UC-Berkeley), chair
- Nancy Cott (Harvard University)
- Ruben Flores (University of Rochester)
- Mark Peterson (Yale University)
- Molly Worthen (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
- Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Wisconsin Madison), response
March 28, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Race Thinking in Nonprofit, Educational, and Urban History
Claire Dunning (University of Maryland College Park), chair/comment
- Nathalie Barton (University of Chicago), “Modern Housing at a Moderate Rental: Philanthropy, Race, and Housing Reform”
- Nicholas Kryczka (University of Chicago), “Educationalizing Latinos in 1970s Chicago”
- Emily Masghati (University of Northern Iowa), “Racial Liberalism and its Paradoxes: the JuliusRosenwald Fund and Diversity Programming in Higher Education”
- Erica Sterling (Harvard University), “‘Philanthropy and Public Schools’: The Ford Foundation’sEvolving Education Reform Discourse, 1968 to 1979”
April 4, 2022, 7PM EST (6PM CST) online via Zoom
Seeing the Market Anew: Constructing Markets in Public and Private in the Early American Republic
Alex Zakaras (University of Vermont), chair/comment
- Alexi Garrett (Iona College), “Between Free and Enslaved: State-funded Carceral Control in Early National Virginia”
- Keith Harris (Purdue University), “‘A market must be the first great object’: Confronting theMarket Process in Early American Tariff Debates”
- Amanda Gibson (William & Mary University), “The Emancipation of Elizabeth Keckly: Creditworthiness and Antebellum Debt Relationships”
2021 S-USIH Nashville Kick-Off Event with Spotlight Sessions
ALL TIMES CENTRAL STANDARD (CST)
FRIDAY, October 29, 2021
Regular Sessions at Scarritt Bennett Center, 1027 18th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212, Laskey Building, Laskey Hall
All sessions will be hybrid (mix of in person and virtual panelists): Here is a Scarritt Bennett Map for in-person attendees
Registration Desk opens at 9AM (light breakfast provided)
10:45am-12:15pm
The Politics of Religion: Conservative Christian Engagements with Modern Science
David Mislin (Temple University) chair, comment
Elesha Coffman (Baylor University), “Debunking the Science of Sexuality: Conservative Christians and Margaret Mead”
Kathleen Sands, (University of Hawai’i at M?noa), “Science and Race in the Creationism Controversy”
Carl R. Weinberg (Indiana University Bloomington), “‘At his daddy’s knee’: Stephen Jay Gould, Henry Morris, and the Politics of Creationist Anticommunism”
12:15pm-1:15pm LUNCH (provided)
1:30pm-3:00pm
Fascist Dreams, Red Nightmares: New Directions in American Political and Religious
History
Molly Worthen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), chair/comment
Austin Clements (Stanford University) “The Devil and Doctor Riley: The Religious Origins of
American Anticommunism”
Katy Hull (University of Amsterdam), ““Richard Washburn Child, the Authoritarian Personality, and Fascism’s Allure”
Lerone Martin (Washington University St. Louis), “J. Edgar Hoover’s Stain Glass Window: The FBI and the Making of the Religious Right”
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: 6-7PM CST, Friday, October 29.
“SSN: The Private Lives of a Public Number”
Sarah Igo, Vanderbilt University
6:00-7:00PM Patterson Gallery C, Kimpton Aertson Hotel, Nashville 2021 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203
7:30: 9:00 RECEPTION (dinner and drinks provided)
Patterson Gallery Terrace, Kimpton Aertson Hotel, Nashville 2021 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203
SATURDAY, October 30
Regular Sessions at Scarritt Bennett Center, 1027 18th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212, Laskey Building, Laskey Hall
All sessions will be hybrid (mix of in person and virtual panelists)
OPEN at 9:00am (light breakfast provided)
9:30am-11:00am
Roundtable: Speaking The Past: Podcasts and Historical Knowledge
Samuel Backer (Johns Hopkins University), “Aesthetics, Design and Historiography in Podcasts”
Robert Cassanello (University of Central Florida), “Traveling Down the Long Tail: A Local History Podcast for a Global Listening Public”
Nicole Hemmer (Columbia University), “Podcasting and the Historian’s Career”
Jessica Ann Levy (SUNY Purchase), “WhoMakesCents: Podcasting and the Production of Capitalism Studies”
11:15am-12:45pm
Self and Society in Modern America: Protestant and Catholic Perspectives
Elesha Coffman (Baylor University), chair
Skylar Ray (Baylor University), “Psychosis as Sin: American Evangelicalism’s Public and Private Struggle with Mental Health, 1965-1995”
Peter Cajka (University of Notre Dame), “The Corporeal Turn in American Thought: Catholic and Feminist Perspectives, 1980 to 2000”
Stephen Koeth (University of Notre Dame), “From Public to Private: Catholic Parishes and Religious Practice in the Postwar Suburbs”
Rick Townsend (University of Texas at Dallas), “Racial Paradox: Private Thoughts of the Very Public William Jennings Bryan”
1:00pm-2:00pm LUNCH (provided)
2:15pm-3:45pm
Seeking Ancient Wisdom in Modern America: A Roundtable on Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae
Paul Murphy, (Grand Valley State University)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, (University of Wisconsin)
Lisa Szefel, (Pacific University)
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, (Syracuse University), response
We would like to thank everyone for their patience as we rework our program.
This year’s conference panels will be held online. Like last year’s events, most panels will happen Monday evenings through the fall and spring (November through May). Please stay tuned to this page as the schedule develops.