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Are politics inimical to Black life? That was the question that concluded the abstract for Brown University political theorist Ainsley LeSure’s March 18 talk at the Kinder Institute, which she began by placing her work in conversation with those in the field of Black Studies who would answer this question, ‘yes.’ At its core, the […]

In the introduction to his 2021 biography of John R. Kelso, Brown University historian Christopher Grasso describes his subject as possessing Whitman-like multiplicity. As Prof. Grasso’s March 11 talk at the Kinder Institute made abundantly clear, as capacious as Whitman was, this introduction might still be an understatement. Born in a backwoods cabin in Southwest […]

Most of us think that demagoguery is, by definition, bad. Relatedly, scholars almost invariably treat demagoguery as a divisive practice that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the public good. In Demagogues in American Politics, Charles U. Zug offers a historical analysis of the role of […]

The second volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States rose to great power status in the nineteenth century and how the rest of the world has shaped the United States. Mixing top-down and bottom-up perspectives, insider and outsider views, cultural, social, political, military, environmental, legal, technological, and […]

For at least a decade, the lecture to undergraduates has gone like this: In an age of constitutional innovation, Massachusetts provided the spark with the ratification of its 1780 state constitution; the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia happily appropriated this practice post-drafting; and from then on out, ratification was the American way. As […]

In discussing the overarching goal for the recently published African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), co-editor and University of Washington Associate Professor of Political Science Jack Turner III pointed to how the tradition in the field has long been to divide Black thinkers into taxonomies of ideology: feminism, Marxism, […]