News, Media & Publications

For the Kinder Institute’s annual Town & Gown Dinner Lecture, Rice University William P. Hobby Professor of History John Boles gave an April 10 talk on the ideas and events that shaped the trajectory of Jefferson’s evolving ideas about constitutionalism.

On March 20, 2018, in the Smith Forum at Reynolds Journalism Institute, “Open Mind” host Alexander Heffner spoke to a capacity crowd about current incivility in public discourse, and especially in the “anti-social media complex,” and ways that we might go about “amusing our democracy back to life.” Following the talk, the Kinder Institute and […]

Drawing on research from his new book, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Western Washington University Professor and Chair of History Johann Neem’s February 15 lecture at the Kinder Instituted explored the historic purposes for the development of public education—educating citizens, developing human capabilities, and forging a nation—in order […]

On January 31, the Kinder Institute hosted University of Oklahoma Professor of Political Science Keith Gaddie on campus for a talk that uses recent litigation in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina to raise questions concerning the constitutionality of gerrymandering and to explore the potential for different empirical and constitutional tests that might tame egregious abuses […]

Working against the narrative of the American Revolution as a high-minded, orderly event, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and University of Virginia Jefferson Foundation Chair in History Alan Taylor’s October 4 talk at the Kinder Institute wove a new national creation story, tracing the history of the conflict with Great Britain from the turbulent conditions that boiled […]

For the second installment of the Kinder Institute’s Constitution Week Lecture Series, Boston College Founders Professor of Law Mary Sarah Bilder gave a talk on her recent research into Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which uses digital technologies and rigorous textual analysis to reveal invisible, and previously unsuspected, layers of revision in Madison’s […]