Browse All Records(168 total)
Daniel Rachel: Rock 'n' Roll and the Swastika
Daniel Rachel, author and musician, talks about his book, This Ain't Rock'n'Roll: Pop Music, The Swastika, and the Third Reich. What do John Lennon, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Clash, Lady Gaga, Blondie, & Pink Floyd have in common? They all flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall running around London in Nazi uniforms to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious brandishing swastikas in the pomp of punk, generations of…
Matthew Boedy: Seven Mountains Mandate and Turning Point USA
Matthew Boedy is a leading expert on the right-wing political activities of Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk. He discusses his book, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy, in which he details the development of the Christian Nationalist idea of the Seven Mountains and how that became the leading ideology of Turning Point USA. Matthew Boedy is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of…
Dorothy A. Brown: A Reparations Roadmap
Dorothy A. Brown discusses her book, Getting to Reparations: How Building A Different America Requires a Reckoning With Our Past, in it she demonstrates a clear precedent for paying reparations. She cites other times in American history reparations were paid - whether it was Italian immigrants, interned Japanese Americans, or slave owners in Washington DC. Professor Brown ends by offering a compelling and detailed legal and political strategy that could realistically achieve this…
Ahilan Arulanantham: Immigration Law and Racist Precedent
Ahilan Arulanantham discusses his article, "Reversing Racist Precedent." In the article he examines how racist precedent remains a key feature of our legal system and how racism sits at the very center of US immigration law. Immigration law is originally tainted by two cases at the heart of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Courts could create a new exception in stare decisis doctrine: cases would be denied precedential force if they were motivated by racial animus. How these changes would…
Heather Ann Thompson talks her new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. In it she explores a pivotal moment in American history when new conservative media landscape is emerging, the Reagan Revolution is recoding racism, and the social fabric of the New deal is unraveling, all which helps contextualize a vigilante shooting on a NYC subway train on Dec 22 1984. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan and…
Tyler Leeds: 1619 Project and Fox News Panic
Tyler Leeds discusses his article, “The 1619 Project Moral Panic: The Role of Cable News.” Over a two year period, Fox News-led a transformation of the New York Times' 1619 Project. By analyzing an original archive of 567 news segments, Leeds examines how a publication with anti-racist ambitions was transformed into plot threatening schoolchildren. Tyler Leeds, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware.
Rebecca Grant: Inside the Abortion Underground
Rebecca Grant discusses her book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Rights. Grant traces the reproductive freedom movement from feminist organizing before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray areas, these activists helped people travel across state lines for care, established telehealth practices,…
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.
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…
Scott R. Anderson: National Guard, ICE, and American Cities
After months of National Guard and ICE deployment around the U.S., questions remain about what these domestic deployments mean, under what legal authority are they happening and what have the lower Courts said about these issues, Scott R. Anderson details all the different aspects of these questions and more. Anderson outlines the complicated legal ways the States and Trump Administration are arguing about the scope of authority and contours of deployment of National Guard and Military under 10…
Shobana Shankar: Africa, India, and the Making of Race
Shobana Shankar discusses her book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race. Prof. Shankar explains how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. While decolonization brought Africans and Indians together to challenge Euro-American style white supremacy, discord over caste, religion, sex and skin color simmered beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity. Shobana Shankar is a professor of History at Stonybrook University, New York.
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…
Sophie Lewis: Enemy Feminisms
Sophie Lewis discusses their book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Offering a 200 year tour feminist history to uncover 19th century imperial feminists, Klan feminists, and today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. This tour paints a complicated picture of women's rights advocates that is sometimes messy, racist, and, yes, even sexist. Sophie Lewis is a writer, speaker, and teacher. She has written several books and articles on feminism and…
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…
Seth Rockman: Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery
Seth Rockman discusses his book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery which tells one of the biggest stories of early American history through everyday consumer goods: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear. In following these goods from the North where they were made to the Southern Plantations where they were used, the geography of…
Herman Bennett: African Kings, Iberian Traders, and Black Slaves
Herman Bennett talks about his book, African Kings and Black Slaves Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. It is an examination of how early modern African-European encounters offer a rethinking of these exchanges as being solely about the slave trade and racial difference. By asking how Europeans and Africans thought about sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new take on the slaves' experiences in the Americas. Herman Bennett is the Executive…
Andrea Ford: Pregnancy, Birth, and Doulas
Andrea Ford discusses her book, Near Birth: Contested Values and the work of Doulas, in which she discusses how pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual and family in various ways and forms. Andrea Ford is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.
Cedric Merlin Powell: Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court
Cedric Powell is the Wyatt, discusses his article, “The Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court” in which he argues that the supposed colorblind rhetoric masks an agenda to strip precedent, history and reality away from Supreme Court decisions. By looking at the Civil Rights and Civil War Amendment cases, Powell shows how the Roberts Court applies a standard of neutrality to vacate diversity and equality while removing race from its Constitutional consideration. This deception seeks to…
Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon and Anti-Colonialism
Adam Shatz discuss his book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Shatz brings to life Fanon as a man shaped by philosophy, psychiatry, and the anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Africa. While also detailing how his two books, Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, combined Fanon's empathy and anger to produce consistently resonate works of struggle and liberation. Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to many…
Rina Bliss: Genetics and Race
Rina Bliss discusses her book, What's Real about Race?: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society. Professor Bliss begins by posing the question, what is the true relationship between genetics and race? While genetics proves race does not exist, racism persists. By looking into the history of racial science and eugenics, Professor Bliss explains how these false distinctions continue to haunt the emerging genomic organizations and it's findings. Dr. Rina Bliss is Associate…
Andrew Lawler: Lord Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation
Andrew Lawler discusses his new book, “Perfect Frenzy: a Royal Governor, his Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution.” It is the story of the colony of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution and Lord Dunmore, infamous British villain. But what is fact and what is fiction? Lord Dunmore issued the first Emancipation Proclamation and freed hundreds of slaves, but did he fire bomb Norfolk? What is certain is Dunmore ignited the passions of the Revolutionaries and…
Amanda Moore: Alt-Right, Nazis, and Trump Staffing
Amanda Moore is a freelance journalist covering the far right. We discuss her year undercover in the Alt-Right and her continued work exposing Nazis. Moore's work has centered on far-right influencer Nick Fuentes's misogyny and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Most recently, she's monitoring the J6 insurrectionists and the continued appeal of those who's convictions were commuted and not pardoned. The fans of Fuentes and other far-right groups influence is beginning to be felt as they…
Tonja Jacobi: Interrupting the Supreme Court
Tonja Jacobi discusses her article "Supreme Court Interruptions and Interventions: The Changing Role of the Chief Justice." Recent scholarship has focused on how often the Supreme Court Justices get interrupted, especially when female Justices are speaking. To fix this, the Court changed how hearings are run. This article looks at whether these interruptions—and the gender gap in who gets interrupted—have gotten better, and if the new rules helped. Tonja Jacobi is a Professor of Law…
Bennett Parten: Sherman's March of Emancipation
Bennett Parten discusses his book, Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation. The book tells the story of Sherman's March through the south as a social history of the refugee crisis brought on by the war and the Emancipation Proclamation. As freed slaves rushed toward the Union forces, they brought with them challenges and opportunities that helped end the war and shape Reconstruction. Here is our conversation from April 17,…
Elaine Weiss: Highlander Folk School and the Civil Rights Movement
Elaine Weiss discusses her book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. It is the story Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. The school became a focal point inspiring Rosa Parks, Pete Seeger, and originating Citizenship Schools. It is also the story of Sempitma Clark, an unsung hero and tireless teacher of the civil right movement. Here is our discussion from…
Annie Menzel: White Innocence and Black Infant Mortality
Annie Menzel discusses her book, Fatal Denial Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality. Drawing on her own experience as a midwife as inspiration, Prof. Menzel lays out the history of white innocence, flawed racial science, and the cult of true babyhood all contribute to real violence to black maternal outcomes. As overt racist practices gave way to more systemic biases, they seamlessly perpetuated black infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves. While the…
Robert Craig: Private Prisons After Dobbs
Robert Craig discusses his article, “Fundamental Rights and Private Prisons after Dobbs: Shifting Sands and Opportunities.” He details the history of private prisons next to the history of state-run prisons. Additionally, the competing interest of for-profit prison incentivizes extended incarceration and cost cutting practices that set the stage for a legal argument based on Plyler and Dobbs which challenges private prisons on basis of ordered liberty and constitutional violation. Robert…
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…
Alexia Rauen: When Immigrants Call the Police
Alexia Rauen discusses the article she co-authored, "Experiences of immigrant survivors of violence with law enforcement." She explains how immigrant victims of domestic violence viewed their interactions with responding police officers. Based on interviews with survivors, she found that experiences with police varied widely based on factors such as immigration status, English proficiency, and gender. Alexia Rauen is the Co-Executive Director at Advocates for Immigrant Survivors…
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…