American Political History Seminar
The monthly American Political History Seminar series seeks to enrich the study of politics by increasing knowledge and understanding of important topics in American history. Over the last several years, IGS has invited both well-established and junior scholars, as well as a number of journalists, to speak on a recent publication relevant to the seminar series. The authors are invited to Berkeley to deliver an hour-long talk, followed by questions from attendees. To maximize the benefit from the visit of each author, copies of the work to be discussed are distributed in advance to faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students, in order to encourage informed and thought-provoking questions.
This seminar series will construe "American political history" broadly (to include internationally as well as nationally focused studies, and to include studies of political argument and political culture as well as of political institutions, processes, and interest groups), and will thus strive to make the Seminar of interest to faculty and graduate students from a number of units on this campus, including but not limited to law, political science, sociology, and public policy, as well as history. Any suggestions about future sessions should be sent directly to Gene Zubovich at genezubovich [at] berkeley.edu.
Time: 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.
Location: Moses Hall, Room 119 ("Harris Room"), unless otherwise indicated.
2011-12 Schedule of Speakers
David Hall: A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. October 28, 2011.
Eric Foner: The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, September 15, 2011
Past Speakers
2010-11
David Ekbladh: The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order
Margaret D. Jacobs: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
Rick Perlstein: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
James T. Kloppenberg: Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
Daniel T. Rodgers: Age of Fracture
Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
2009-10
Jennifer Burns: Goddess of the Market
Patricia Sullivan: Lift Every Voice
Daniel Geary: Radical Ambition
2008-09
Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House 2008)
A discussion with Thomas Sugrue about his book Sweet Land of Liberty.
Daniel Howe, Formerly Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford; Professor Emeritus, UCLA Department of History
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press 2007)
Daniel Howe's interpretation of the era between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War is strikingly at odds with the widely discussed interpretations of Charles Sellers and Sean Wilentz. Non-specialists in the antebellum era might find of interest the New Yorker's review of the book by Jill Lepore (online here), which alerts readers to some of Howe's more distinctive turns, and their relation to previous scholarship. Howe, a Berkeley Ph.D. who taught for many years at UCLA, has recently retired as Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. What Hath God Wrought won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and general history in April 2008.
Arne Westad, London School of Economics
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press 2006)
Our guest will be Arne Westad of the London School of Economics (where he is Professor of International History and Director of the Cold War Studies Centre). This book was published late in 2006, and is thus not as recent as is the norm for books discussed in the Seminar, but it has been chosen on account of the extraordinary swath it has cut through the field of Cold War studies, including the winning of three prizes (including the Michael Harrington Award from the "New Political Science" Organized Section of the American Political Science Association in 2006, the Akira Iriye International History Book Award for 2005 from Pacific Quest, and the 2006 Bancroft Prize).
Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California Gould Law School
Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (Oxford University Press 2008)
Our guest will be Mary Dudziak of the Law School at the University of Southern California. The book will be Dudziak's just-released (July 2008) Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey. Dudziak, a legal and constitutional scholar who is well known for her earlier book on the foreign policy context of the civil rights movement, focuses in this new book on Thurgood Marshall's intimate and sustained involvement in the creation of the nation-state of Kenya, including his drafting of its constitution and his friendships with several of its leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya.
2007-08
2006-07
Gregg Herken, Professor of History, UC Merced
Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller
Byron Shafer, Hawkins Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin
The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race and Partisan Change in the Postwar South
Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University
America's Constitution: A Biography
Richard M. Abrams, Professor of History, UC Berkeley
America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941-2001
Thad Kousser, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, UC San Diego
Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism (Cambridge University Press 2005)
David S. Brown, Associate Professor, History Department, Elizabethtown College
Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press 2006)
Jim Newton, City-County Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times
Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made
Robin Einhorn, Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
American Taxation, American Slavery (University of Chicago Press 2006)
2005-06
Thomas J. Reese, Visiting Scholar, Santa Clara University
A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops
Walter J. Stone, Professor and Chair of Political Science, UC Davis
Three's A Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence
David B. Robertson, Professor, University of Missouri-St. Louis
The Constitution and America's Destiny
Ernest R. May, Charles Warren Professor of American History (Harvard)
Collaborator on The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
Victor Navasky, Editorial Director and Publisher of The Nation, and Director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University
A Matter of Opinion
Richard Parker, Senior Fellow, Shorenstein Center, and Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government
John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics [book site]
Charles O. Jones, Hawkins Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Wisconsin
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
The Presidency in a Separated System (Second Edition)
Geoffrey Kabaservice, Practice Manager, The Advisory Board Company
The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment
2004-05
Michael Janeway, Columbia University
The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ
Morris Fiorina, Stanford University
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America
Matthew Dickinson, Middlebury College
Bitter Harvest: FDR, Presidential Power and the Growth of the Presidential Branch
Alan Ware, Oxford University
The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North
Daniel Farber, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley
Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Quest for Constitutional Foundations
Robert Collins, University of Missouri
More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America