When mapping the struggle for Black freedom and racial justice, historians have often emphasized the events and organizational efforts that occurred in urban areas, largely led by men. However, in order to take Black Power politics seriously in a more comprehensive fashion, we need to understand how they also emerged from and developed in rural American communities, where the voices and leadership of women were extremely influential.
In this podcast episode, Katherine Mellen Charron, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, discusses her research into the legacies of local, community-based, rural Black womenÕs activism in North Carolina. By thinking about how Black Power politics, economics, and culture were affirmed and shaped by women outside of urban centers, we are better able to honor less historically visible forms of political engagement and innovation.

The story of African American religion between Emancipation and the northern migration that began just prior to World War I is a tale of regionally distinctive communities that found several areas of common cause, not the least of which were the advent of Jim Crow and lynching as ominous new forms of racism. But an understanding of religious experience in this era must also be supplemented by the complexities of the many internal boundaries in African American life in both the north and south—class divisions, rural/urban differences, and gender issues that accompanied the dawn of freedom.

The story of African-American religion is a tale of variety and creative fusion. Enslaved Africans transported to the New World beginning in the fifteenth century brought with them a wide range of local religious beliefs and practices. This diversity reflected the many cultures and linguistic groups from which they had come. The majority came from the West Coast of Africa, but even within this area religious traditions varied greatly. Islam had also exerted a powerful presence in Africa for several centuries before the start of the slave trade. Catholicism had even established a presence in areas of Africa by the sixteenth century. Preserving African religions in North America proved to be very difficult. The harsh circumstances under which most slaves lived rendered the preservation of religious traditions difficult and often unsuccessful.

Given the secondary position of persons of African descent throughout their history in America, it could reasonably be argued that all efforts of creative writers from that group are forms of protest. The intention of protest literature was—and remains—to show inequalities among races and socio-economic groups in America and to encourage a transformation in the society that engenders such inequalities. For African Americans, that inequality began with slavery. How, in a country that professed belief in an ideal democracy, could one group of persons enslave another? What forms of moral persuasion could be used to get them to see the error of their ways? How could white Americans justify Jim Crow, inequalities in education, housing, jobs, accommodation, transportation, and a host of other things? In response to these “hows,” another “how” emerged. How could writers use their imaginations and pens to bring about change in the society? Protest literature, therefore, focused on such issues and worked to rectify them. Poetry is but one of the media through which writers address such issues, as there are forms of protest fiction, drama, essays, and anything else that African Americans wrote—and write.

Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787) and its aftermath reflected more than just problems within the Articles of Confederation government. Reaction to Massachusetts’ treatment of the rebels following the insurrection served as a reminder to those in power of the republican nature of the American government. It emphasized the importance of the right to vote as a key element of the reciprocal duties between the government and its citizens.

Benjamin Franklin thought America had an immigration problem in 1751. "Why," he lamented, "should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens?" If Franklin resented "aliens," many of them loathed people like him, whom they considered British, and they resisted the cultural and political dominance the British claimed. Who were these "aliens?" How did they relate to the British and the British to them? How did they shape the political and social life of the colonies?

Native Americans were not included in the Treaty of Paris (1783), which concluded the American Revolution. The end of fighting presented them with a difficult path as they struggled to protect their homelands from their growing insignificance within the shifting international politics of eighteenth-century America.

The cause of immediate emancipation, as the abolitionists came to define it, had a different germ of inspiration from those Enlightenment ideals that Jefferson had articulated: the rise of a fervent religious reawakening just as the new Republic was being created. That impulse sprang from two main sources: the theology and practice of Quakerism and the emergence of an aggressive, interdenominational evangelicalism. Both movements arose in England and America during the Age of Enlightenment—the eighteenth century. The pietism of the Quakers, a radically egalitarian Protestant sect, asserted the love of God for every human being, regardless of color, sex, or station in life.

After winning independence, Americans still felt insecure, dreading that a foreign power would exploit disaffected elements within the new Union. Citizens knew that their country had dangerous fault lines within. Indians and enslaved people might ally with the British or Spanish empires to overthrow the United States. Worse still, foreigners might exploit jealousies between the states to provoke disunion and civil war. Enemies without combining with foes within could shatter the Union that preserved free government and internal peace. Fear drove American leaders to expand deep into the continent to push rival empires – British and Spanish – farther away from the United States. They hoped that distance would weaken imperial efforts to rally Indians and provoke slave revolts – or promote secession by a restive region. Leaders also distrusted their own settlers, fearing that they might break away to join another empire or form their own, independent republic. Prior to the 1840s, Americans lacked confidence in any supposed “Manifest Destiny” to control the continent. On the contrary, leaders pushed expansion to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to internal divisions.

Before becoming a war against the British, the American war for independence was a civil war, a street-level conflict that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

This webinar will offer a revolutionary interpretation of the American Revolution. It will restore ordinary men and women to the story we tell ourselves about national independence. Moving the focus of interpretation away from the Founding Fathers, it will ask questions about resistance to imperial power on the community level. What were the sources of popular mobilization? How did the creation of committees of safety shape local resistance? What role did violence and intimidation play in the relations between neighbors? How did the directives of national congresses affect the actions of local insurgents?

Recognizing the urgent need for students to understand the emergence of the United States’ power and prestige in relation to world events, America on the World Stage: A Global Perspective to U.S. History (Organization of American Historians, 2008) reframes the teaching of American history in a global context. Each essay covers a specific chronological period and approaches fundamental topics and events in United States history from an international perspective, emphasizing how the development of the United States has always depended on its transactions with other nations for commodities, cultural values, and populations. For each historical period, the authors also provide practical guidance on bringing this international approach to the classroom, with suggested lesson plans and activities. America on the World Stage Teaching AmericanHistory grant is a five year project (2009-14) that brings the book of the same name to life through a seriesof interactive lectures, hands-on workshops, research and curriculum design, and summer travel courses. Our approach will be to explore the international perspectives of American history through a series of benchmark topics.

In the first days of the Constitution the United States faced multiple difficulties as it moved to negotiate with the Indian tribes of the Southeast. These independent nations resisted white invasions into their lands, and a patchwork of former treaties and agreements, multiple tribes and leaders, foreign threats on US borders, invading settlers and land speculators, and issues of state sovereignty (especially that of Georgia) rendered the times uncertain. American officials worked to develop policies to establish the federal government as the sole legitimate negotiator with the Tribes in order to construct treaties that would yield mutually acceptable goals.

The influence that medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas has had on Western thought is difficult to fully grasp. Contemporary thinking in fields from political ethics to psychology has been shaped by his writings. But Aquinas’ model of the mind—of how we perceive and contemplate the world—has been ignored or misunderstood by contemporary scholars. National Humanities Center Fellow Thérèse Cory, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is working on a new book on Aquinas’ account of the intellect and the philosophical traditions from which it emerged. In this Podcast, Cory discusses how, over the years, Aquinas has been extracted from his historical context; she advocates putting him back into conversation with his scholarly influences. By tracing the genealogy of his intellectual formation, from Aristotle to philosophers of the early Muslim world, Cory reminds us why Aquinas’ relevance extends across disciplines and centuries. Specifically, his teachings underscore the transformative power of knowing.

Arabs have largely been ignored in narratives of American history, appearing only at its shady margins. Nineteenth-century Orientalist representations, a century of stereotyped Hollywood images, and decades of militarized encounters in the Middle East have formed and fed a concept of “the Arab” as “the Other”: someone both physically and morally alien to America, harboring and villainously acting upon beliefs contrary to American core values. After 9/11, these long-standing impressions were only re-affirmed and magnified in public discourse when an Arab presence in America became symbolic of, and synonymous with, terrorism. What is most puzzling about this is that Arab Americans have been citizens of the United States for nearly 140 years, and their experiences are in many ways the very narrative of modern America and its various immigrant populations. They were/are immigrants, similar to many other ethnicities, working to make a living and contribute to their newfound communities, all the while struggling to fit into a fissured social and economic order, complicated politics, and fraught racial landscape haunted by a painful past. This webinar will shed light upon the long history of Arabs in America, and explore major themes in that history with particular focus on the early period (1880–1940).These readings support the webinar of the same title featuring Akram Fouad Khater, Professor of History, North Carolina State University.

Though it lasted for only a brief period, the Ghurid dynasty provides a fascinating lens through which to consider the religious and political forces that shaped Central Asia during the medieval period. Fellow Alka Patel has spent years in the region examining architectural structures and archival materials to help better understand the Ghurids, situated as they were between the Persianate and Indic worlds, straddling and connecting the traditions of Islamic and Hindu cultures. Patel, an associate professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, is currently writing what she describes as an “architectural biography” closely examining the archaeological remnants of the Ghurid dynasty.
In this podcast, she explains how the Ghurids’ brief, pivotal moment in the history of Central Asia helped inform life in the region for centuries to come, and how the methodologies of art history, such as the close analysis of style and iconography, can assist in identifying architectural structures’ social and temporal context. Even if architecture itself remains stationary, Patel explains how buildings are the result of many people and ideas over time, elucidating the matrices of history.

Since at least the early years of the twentieth century, scholars have taken an interest in the artistic and intellectual productions of so-called “outsiders,” or individuals whose unconventional perspectives and aesthetic expression have often been assumed to result from serious mental illness. These artistic creations and written works are generally defined by idiosyncratic characteristics; they can seem to be obscure, obsessive, inconsistent, and even disconnected from reality itself. Matt ffytche believes that these aesthetic objects—and the ways that “outsider” artists have been classified—deserve to be reconsidered.
In this podcast, he reflects on the problem of classifying individuals (and their art) as “outsiders” even while particular artists embraced the phrase’s anti-normative implications. By asking us to question how and why instances of cultural inclusion vs. exclusion occur, ffytche’s scholarship bears relevance to topics extending far beyond twentieth-century art.

Beyond their inspirational and devotional power, what other functions do religious works of art serve? From antiquity through the medieval period, ​​practitioners ​of many religious traditions ​throughout central Asia used ​works of art to teach​ followers religious histories, parables, and central tenets of their faith.​ How does this use inform our appreciation of these works and what can we learn from examining these religious practices?
​​Zsuzsanna ​​Gulácsi is professor of ​art history, Asian studies, and comparative religious studies at ​Northern Arizona University​. She has written extensively on art and religion across Asia in the late ancient and medieval periods. ​​Gulácsi was previously a Fellow at the Center in 2006–07 and has returned this year to work on a new project comparing the use of art by various religions in the region to attract and instruct converts.

The New Negro Movement, better known as the Harlem Renaissance, was many things to many people: an effort to place African American issues on the national agenda; a moment in which African Americans exerted unprecedented influence on popular culture; a conscious drive to recast African American identity; a glorification of the African American folk temperament; a "primitive," spiritual, back-to-nature antidote to an up-tight, mechanical, urban civilization.
While these definitions found their chief expression in literature, they were also powerfully embodied in the visual arts. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as contemporary design of the 1920s, African American religion, and dreams of an African past, New Negro artists created a fresh vision of African American life. How did they depict rich and poor, rural and urban, "proper" and "primitive?" What role did Harlem play in creation of New Negro art? And how does that art interpret the African American encounter with twentieth century modernity?

This seminar explores the historical contexts leading to the eruption of the uprisings known as the Arab Spring in early 2011. After a brief introduction to politics in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, we turn to the flowering of music, art, graffiti, poetry, film, and digital media that gave expression to the revolutionary unrest. This seminar looks at how this cultural production functioned as a catalyst for political change, as art flourished as the authoritarian state’s censorship on political and artistic expression broke down. The second part of the seminar turns to the aftermath of the revolutions and the democratic processes and movements that emerged out of the Arab Spring. We focus on the influence of religion, religious parties, and religious movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria—in the post-uprising elections, governments, and constitutions. Although the 2011 uprisings initially seemed to be lit by the same spark, they had very different outcomes in these different cases.