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Historians and the News: Unprecedented Events by Day, Historical Context by Night
February 15, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
$25 – $35Through her daily newsletter, “Letters from an American,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson shares with over 350,000 readers an authoritative, compassionate overview of the previous day’s news. During a time filled with fear and uncertainty, when the very underpinnings of our nation’s democracy are under attack, Professor Richardson’s newsletters have helped Americans share in the big-picture perspective that only a deep understanding of history can provide. Every night – after a full day of teaching, researching, and writing – Professor Richardson assesses the day’s news and offers up an analysis of its significance to her grateful readers across the country.
This program offers an opportunity for two nationally renowned historians to discuss their insights about current events, informed by years of scholarly analysis of the past. As committed scholars, they have worked overtime to both maintain their research and teaching while also reaching out to broader audiences. They will discuss the role that media outlets play in historians’ public history work, from contributing to newspaper sections dedicated to historical analysis like the Washington Post’s Made by History section to using social media outlets like Twitter to add to the conversation in real time.
As historians, Dr. Richardson and Dr. Nichols rely on archival institutions like OHS to do their research, and so they have graciously donated their time to develop this program to sustain the important work of OHS. Tickets would normally be $25 for members and $35 for non-members. To make this important conversation accessible to all, we ask that you contribute what you can. Your donation goes directly to the OHS Pandemic Survival Fund to help replace revenue OHS has lost as a result of COVID-19.
Virtual program via Zoom / Zoom link will be sent to ticketholders one week prior to the event.
Suggested donation: $35 / $25 OHS members
Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. The author of numerous books and articles, her history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014), examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. Her most recent book is How the South Won the Civil War (2020).
Christopher McKnight Nichols is associate professor of history at Oregon State University and Director of OSU’s Center for the Humanities. He founded and leads OSU’s Citizenship and Crisis Initiative. Nichols is an expert on the history of the United States’ relationships with the world, including isolationism, internationalism, globalization, ideas, and political history, with an emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the present. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, Nichols was honored as Oregon State University’s Honors College Professor of the Year. Nichols also is a frequent commentator on air and in print on U.S. foreign policy and politics, often appearing on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s program Think Out Loud with Dave Miller. He is an editorial board member of the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nichols is the author, co-author, or editor of six books, most notably Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age, and the forthcoming Rethinking American Grand Strategy. Nichols is a proud member of the Board of Trustees of the Oregon Historical Society and a passionate advocate for history and the humanities.