Nancy Isenberg

How has our English heritage produced a powerful framework for treating classes as breeds, and the landless poor as expendable “waste people”? This lecture will trace the ongoing political and social controversies of our rural roots, as it shaped American democracy across time. Key themes are: westward migration and the fears of vagrant squatters and crackers; the rural poor and the rise of the eugenics movement; the New Deal’s response to the plight of tenant farmers in the Great Depression; the post-WWII rise of hillbilly havens and trailer parks; and the modern phenomenon of reclaiming the redneck as an ethnic identity.

This lecture sets in historical context Americans’ fascination with the relationship between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton from the 1790s to the musical Hamilton.

For some, the Constitution is sacred text, with immutable meaning; for others, it is the work of visionary men, rare geniuses of a lost age, who deserve our admiration. This lecture examines the way public history, popular culture, and civic religion have influenced modern debates over constitutional interpretation.

Class identity has never been about income alone, but a historically defined understanding of class geography and place. This was true in 2016 and no less today, as Donald Trump’s supporters, and his Democratic opposition, are defined (and define themselves) as two classes: worldly elites and small-town folk, urban multiculturalists and rural traditionalists, sophisticates and rubes. This lecture explores what this uncomfortable dichotomy tells us about modern global politics.

Have Americans lost their fear and loathing of the super-rich? Or, are we still driven by class resentments toward the one percent? Both feelings appear to define us. This lecture addresses how our modern obsession with wealth and fame has revived status anxiety, concern about gold-diggers and the beauty industry, and the reemergence of slick courtiers and con artists who endanger the values of expertise and merit

Can John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams teach us something essential about our political system? Why are their insights prescient and relevant to today’s political climate? Unlike many of their peers, the Presidents Adams dissected dangerous tendencies in American democracy: the worship of elected leaders, the impulse to set party identity above constitutional checks and balances, and the easy recourse to a deceptive language of inclusivity that invokes grand principles without substance.