Lerone Martin: J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI's White Christian Nationalism

Lerone Martin discusses his new book, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism." Prof. Martin argues that J. Edgar Hoover molded the FBI after his own personal and deeply held religious beliefs and crafted a culture where FBI Agents were defenders of a certain type of religious faith. Hoover solidified a vision of America that was founded on white Christian values, so that any deviation of politics or thought threatened the…

Leoandra Onnie Rogers: How Parents Talked To Their Children About BLM

Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, discusses her article, “Exploring Whether and How Black and White Parents Talk with Their Children about Race: M(ai)cro Race Conversations About Black Lives Matter.” which presents the results of an online survey conducted in 2020-2021. Professor Rogers details the ways in which white and Black parents spoke to their children about Black Lives Matter. While most parents had conversations about BLM, their methods and…

Leah Litman : Bad Vibes at the Supreme Court

Leah Litman discusses her book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. In it, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law. Rather, it’s running on vibes. And by “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and minority rule. Leah Litman is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and is a co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a podcast about the Supreme Court of…

Laura Meckler: Shaker Heights History of Integration

Journalist Laura Meckler of the Washington Post discusses her book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Beginning with a historical overview of the Cleveland suburb and its uncanny ability to propel itself into the national spotlight, Ms. Meckler discusses how the suburb fought segregation and racial covenants to become one of the first integrated communities in Northeast Ohio. The desegregation of Shaker schools has been one of success and challenge, but through the…

Laura Bieger: Essay as Politics

Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies, Political Theory and Culture at the University of Groningen, where she co-directs the Research Center for Democratic Culture and Politics. In this interview, Prof. Bieger discusses her essay “The 1619 Project as Aesthetic and Social Practice

Lasana Kazembe: Mohonk Conference and Black Education

Lasana Kazembe, discusses his article, “The Steep Edge of a Dark Abyss: Mohonk, White Social Engineers, and Black Education.” Professor Kazembe discusses the key objectives of the First Mohonk Conference on "the Negro Question" and how this built the education standards for Black Americans. Emerging from the Conference sessions and speakers were themes of racial fear, social engineering, and economic exploitation that supported white supremacy rather than black integration. Lasana…

Kirstine Taylor: James Baldwin and Racial Innocence

Kirstine Taylor on her article “Racial Capitalism and the Production of Innocence.” James Baldwin's concept of "racial innocence" has been understood as a matter of practiced unconsciousness about the reality of racism in the United States. Taylor revisits his essays highlighting racial capitalism to show how segregated urban space, racialized labor relationships, and policing contribute to Baldwin's racial innocence. . Kirstine Taylor, Associate Professor of Political…

Kirstine Taylor: Evolution of Southern Criminal Punishment

Kirstine Taylor discusses her book, Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State. Prof. Taylor examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this change from chain gangs to private prisons. Kirstine Taylor, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University, on her book, Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State. November 14, 2025.

Kidada E. Williams: Surviving Reconstruction

Kidada E. Williams discusses her book, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Professor Williams begins by describing how she elevated and amplified the voices of the survivors of Klu Klux Klan terrorism. Mining Congressional Investigation reports and the Works Progress Administration interviews, the survivors recount the continued terrorism of ex-Confederates and other Southern whites intent upon destroying Freed People's success. Professor…

Khiara M. Bridges: Race and the Roberts Court

Khiara M. Bridges has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Today’s episode focus on her 2022 Harvard Law Review article, “Race in the Roberts Court”. Professor Bridges talks about Dobbs, Bruen, and the fate of Affirmative Action in relation to how each uses arguments about black history and freedom in contradictory and problematic ways. The Roberts Court's leans on racial skepticism to up end established precedent. Khiara…

Kevin Waite: Transcontinental Ambitions of the American South

Kevin Waite is an assistant professor at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Professor Waite discusses his book, West of Slavery: the Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. He explains his thesis that the Southern Slave States had ambitions and plans to extend slavery across the West. Prof. Waite explains how railroads, camels, and the hope for new international markets all played a part in the coming of the Civil War.

Kevin M. Schultz: Why Everyone Hates White Liberals

Kevin M. Schultz discusses his book Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In it Schultz lays out some of the objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian—placing these objections in a historical frame. It turns out that how one defines a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing one's own political anxieties. Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois…

Kevin C. Dunn: Land and Identity in Africa

Kevin C. Dunn, the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Hobart and William Smith Colleges talks about his book, Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony Citizenship, and Conflict. Prof. Dunn discusses how concepts of origins and land help define African politics, both consolidating and excluding ethnic groups from State rights and participation. Prof. Dunn looks at the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo and briefly at Liberia as illustrations of his…

Kelsey Klotz: Dave Brubeck's Civil Rights Advocacy

Kelsey Klotz discusses her research on the intersection of race and sound in 1950s and 1960s American music, with a focus on jazz. She published her first book "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness," which uses Brubeck’s mid-century performance of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand mid-century whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy, more fully.

Kelsey Klotz: Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whitenes

Dr. Kelsey Klotz’s book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, is scheduled to come out in January 2023 with Oxford University Press. Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness and white supremacy, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck, his critics, and his audiences. This talk will introduce some of the ways in which…

Kellie Carter Jackson: Black Resistance to White Supremacy

Kellie Carter Jackson, Professor of Africana Studies and the Chair of the Africana Studies Department Wellesley College, discusses her book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Prof. Carter Jackson explains how she sees black resistance to white supremacy falling to several categories — revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. To illustrate how each one works in history, she recounts stories of ordinary people's everyday refusals and rebellions, focusing on the activism…

Kathryn Olivarius: Yellow Fever and New Orleans

Professor Kathryn Olivarius, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, discusses her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Professor Olivarius uses yellow fever to frame how wealth, class, and race developed in the economic powerhouse antebellum city of New Orleans. Developing from three vector points of disease, acclimation, and immunocapital the social and political elite held their grip over the economics of the city by weaponizing yellow fever.…

Kathryn Gin Lum: Heathen and Race-Making in the Chirstian World

Kathryn Gin Lum is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Professor Kathryn Gin Lum discusses her book, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History ." Prof. Lum begins by explaining the Doctrine of Discovery and how the colonizers of the Americas imported the idea of the pagan or heathen. How Christian missionaries came to understand native…

Kathleen Crowther: History of Controlling Pregnancy

Kathleen M. Crowther discusses her book, Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America. She explores the deeply rooted medical and philosophical ideas that continue to reverberate in the politics of women's health and reproductive autonomy. From the idea that a detectable heartbeat is the voice of the unborn to why maternal mortality rates in the United States have risen. Abortion restrictions are based in a fetal primacy history that systematically wrote out of the…

Katharine Gerbner: Christian Slavery

Katharine Gerbner is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Professor Katharine Gerbner discusses her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race. The early role of Protestant Supremacy is challenged as debates about who can be and what it means to be baptized in the Christian Faith work…

Katharina Motyl: From “Feminist Lies” to “White Replacement”

Katharina Motyl discusses her chapter, "From “Feminist Lies” to “White Replacement”: Digital Anti-Feminist Forums as Spaces of Collective Radicalization.”Which explores how the "manosphere" draws men and boys into a world of increasingly radical far-right ideologies, through grievance and misogyny . Prof. Motyl explores how digital platforms enable the spread of extremist ideologies, transforming individual grievances into collective radicalization and influencing offline…

Kate Weisburd: The Carceral Home

Kate Weisburd discusses her article, The Carceral Home. As prison walls are replaced with parole and probation rules that govern every aspect of private life, invasive surveillance technologies are used to monitor intimate information. Where does that leave the private home's primacy as first among equals? Data collection, audio recording, and GPS technologies are expanded to punish people in open society. Professor Wesiburd explores how these issues interact with each other and complicate…

Kali Gross: Vengeance Feminism

Kali Gross discusses her book, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women's Fury in Lawless Times. Prof. Gross looks at the stories of Black women who hit back—not always figuratively, and not always legally either. Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, these women's stories illustrate how they grappled with the daily violence of their lives. Kali Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies at…

Justin Brooks: Why You Might End Up In Prison

Professor Justin Brooks, director of the LLM Program in U.S. Law in Spanish at the University of San Diego, discusses his book, You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent. Prof. Brooks explains how bad lawyering, bad science, and inadequate investigations, lead to wrongful conviction. We look into how police interrogations and juries all contribute to a broken justice system, where innocence is no protection from incarceration. Professor Brooks directs the LLM Program in U.S. Law…

Julie Farnam: Inside the January 6th Insurrection

Julie Farnam discusses her book, "Domestic Darkness: An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism" After being named Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police just days before the 2020 election. She warned Capitol Police leadership of planning and coordination online which led to the insurrection. Her report sharing that "Congress itself is the target on the 6th." Her warnings were ignored. She recounts the…

Josh Cowen: History of School Vouchers

Josh Cowen discusses his new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Prof. Cowen traces voucher history startingvwith the ideological roots as a reaction to the Brown decision to how Christian nationalists use vouchers today to weaken the free exercise clause, As challenges to vouchers continue, the defense and advocacy moved into culture war rhetoric to distract from the dismal metrics about voucher success. Josh Cowen is a professor of education…

Jonneke Koomen: Teaching Black Internationalism

Jonneke Koomen discusses her two articles, “International Relations/Black Internationalism” and “Madness in the Classroom: Thomas Sankara’s Disobedient International Relations.” Professor Koomen shows how introducing W.E.B. du Bois’ essays and speeches by Thomas Sankara places teaching about international relations into conversation with its critics. Colonialism, white supremacy, and race based economic systems served as the foundations of International Relations theory and practice, but by…

Jonathan Witmer-Rich: Cuyahoga County Bail Reform

Jonathan Witmer-Rich discusses his work on the ”Cuyahoga County Bail Task Force: Report and Recommendations.” Professor Witmer-Rich explains the bail situation in Cuyahoga County. Looking at cash bail as a means to secure future appearances and reduce risk, courts are actually preemptively incarcerating and punishing citizens who are presumed innocent. We talk about how the Ohio Supreme Court and Ohio voters responded to recommendations for felony bail reform. Jonathan Witmer-Rich is the…

Jonathan Wells: Southern Manifesto

Jonathan Daniel Wells, Ph.D., is Professor of History in the Residential College, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan.. His most recent books are Blind no More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War and The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. Prof. Wells points to the Fugitive Slave Act and Northern resistance to the Federal Law as…

Jonathan Haines: Genetics and Alzheimer's Disease

Jonathan Haines is a researcher and educator with experience in all aspects of genetic epidemiology, with a particular focus on illuminating the genetic architecture of complex diseases. We discussed his research into the genetic origins of Alzheimer's and dementia. His work seeks to include diverse and minority populations to expand the scope of what factors might contribute to disease prevention. He clarifies genetic research's purpose and use in the future. Dr. Jonathan Haines is…