Lectures in History

Historians Lina Mann, an American University scholar of domestic service, and Sarah Fling, a researcher of White House staff and material culture, uncover the workers behind presidential life. They explore enslaved valets, immigrant coachmen, gardeners, chefs, calligraphers, butlers, tradespeople, and the chief usher’s expanding role. Stories of Ike Hoover, Jacqueline Kennedy’s preservation efforts, and White House family networks reveal a remarkable culture of continuity.

A 1966 film follows California ranch foreman Bill Bailey through a demanding day of horseback work, cattle sorting, and rugged terrain. He reflects on a family tradition of cowpunching, his Cherokee father’s legendary bronc riding, and raising daughter Kathy around horses. His wife Dion shares the rewards of ranch life, while Bill considers the fading future of the traditional cowboy, ending with a song around the evening camp.

Lori Glover, a historian and Saint Louis University professor specializing in early American social history, explores women’s lives during the Revolution. She covers boycotts, military camp labor, entrepreneurship, property rights, religion, and family survival. Stories of Rose, Lucy Banbury, Nancy Anderson, and others reveal competing ideas of independence, Native sovereignty, self-emancipation, and the tensions between liberty and slavery.

Hester Blum, a literary and material-culture scholar, and Rachael DeWitt, an environmental historian, explore the world surrounding the American Revolution. They examine wilderness, waterways, weather, forests, poetry, landscape art, slavery, Indigenous erasure, and Jeffersonian science. The discussion reveals how colonial expansion and ideas of progress reshaped nature, linking 1776 to today’s climate crisis.

Alfred McCoy, historian and scholar of Southeast Asia, examines the hidden intelligence war behind Vietnam. He explores communist infiltration, the CIA-backed coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, Tet and the Phoenix Program, and the secret war in Laos. The discussion also covers Hmong militias, Air America, opium trafficking, electronic warfare, and Vietnam’s lasting impact on U.S. strategy.

Edward Blum, a San Diego State history professor specializing in constitutional development, race, religion, and political power, explores how early state constitutions shaped the federal model. Topics include property and religious qualifications, age requirements for office, British influences, the Constitutional Convention’s debates, limits of founding-era evidence, and modern questions about age ceilings, term limits, and political eligibility.

Fannie Bialek, an assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, explores the thinkers behind early American political thought. She compares Hobbes’s fearful state of nature with Locke’s vision of freedom and equality, examines consent, sovereignty, and natural rights, and traces how assumptions about human nature shaped the Constitution and still frame debates over political freedom today.

Heather Penney, a retired Air National Guard F-16 pilot and national security specialist, recalls scrambling from Andrews Air Force Base on September 11, 2001. She describes the confusion, bureaucratic delays, rushed preparations, and daunting possibility of confronting hijacked Flight 93. She also revisits the Pentagon’s evacuation, weeks of combat air patrols, and the courage she witnessed in the aftermath.

Tazeen Ali, an assistant professor studying Islam, American religious history, and politics, explores Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an and its place in America’s founding debates. She examines religious liberty versus toleration, the Virginia Statute, Muslim citizenship, the Barbary Wars, enslaved African Muslims, and the Supreme Court’s depiction of Muhammad. Jefferson’s ideals and contradictions reveal an unfinished promise of equal belonging.

Christina Zanfagna, a Santa Clara University music professor who studies race and popular music, leads a lively lecture on how soul, funk, disco and hip-hop intertwine with racial politics. She traces hip-hop’s diasporic roots, James Brown’s funk innovations, P-Funk’s Afrofuturism, disco’s origins in Black queer clubs, and how these styles shaped sound, image, and collective struggle.