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May 3, 2021
Spring 2021 Event Recordings
From our late-January kickoff event on the importance of state constitutions with Howard University’s Robinson Woodward-Burns to Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow Reeve Huston’s semester-concluding April 30 talk on “Money and the Remaking of American Democracy, 1815-1840,” catch up on all Spring 2021 Kinder Institute events here, on our YouTube page.
April 22, 2021
RECAP: “Re-thinking the Separation of Powers,” Colloquium w/ McGill University Tomlinson Prof. Jacob Levy
In contextualizing the central theme of his April 16 talk within the history of political thought, McGill University Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory Jacob Levy summoned a figure who has become something of a familiar specter in the Kinder Institute’s 2020-21 Friday Colloquium Series: Montesquieu. Specifically, he held out Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws as […]
April 12, 2021
RECAP: “Two Views of Universal Suffrage: Anticolonial and Neoliberal,” with UVA Prof. of Politics Kevin Duong
In his 1920 Black Water, W.E.B. Du Bois described universal suffrage in terms importantly different from our procedural norm. “In people,” Du Bois wrote, “we have the source of that endless life and unbound wisdom which the rulers of men must have.” Votes, for Du Bois, weren’t simply there to be counted. Rather, they were […]
March 30, 2021
RECAP: “The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” Book Talk w/ Profs. Suzanne Mettler (Cornell) and Robert Lieberman (Johns Hopkins)
After sending their recent co-authored book, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, to press about a year ago, Cornell University John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler and Johns Hopkins Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science Robert Lieberman watched as the threats to democracy that they examined escalated, culminating in the January […]
March 26, 2021
RECAP: “Viceregalism: Constitutional Crises, Heads of State, and Their History in Britain and the Postcolonial World,” with University of Edinburgh Senior Lecturer Harshan Kumarasingham
The last of the Kinder Institute’s Spring 2021 trans-Atlantic virtual visitors, University of Edinburgh Senior Lecturer in British Politics Harshan Kumarasingham addressed a predominantly American audience in his March 12 colloquium which explained the viceregal system and its function throughout the postcolonial world. Kumarasingham opened with a line from “God Save Queen” that is often […]
March 26, 2021
RECAP: “Do Leaders Make History, or Is It Beyond Their Control,” with Harvard Prof. Fredrik Logevall
The question of how historians should conceptualize the role individual agency plays in history was at the heart of the Kinder Institute and Novak Leadership Institute’s co-sponsored March 2 lecture, delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Fredrik Logevall. In the past two […]