American History (Audio)

What are the future horizons for indigenous repatriation work? What are best practices in repatriation settings, and how might they inform repair work in other contexts, such as education or land returns? This panel discussion looks at the work of Chumash leaders and broader Indigenous repair work nationally and globally. Series: "Ethics, Religion and Public Life: Walter H. Capps Center Series" [H...

Jesmyn Ward has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation, proving her “fearless and toughly lyrical” voice in novels, memoir, and nonfiction. She's been called “the new Toni Morrison.” Ward is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and in 2017, she became the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul...

In this program, Lerone Martin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, discusses his recent book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, which reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a white Christian America by any means necessary. His resea...

Poet, novelist and Native American scholar N. Scott Momaday has spent decades bringing his culture and the landscape alive through his writing. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, "House Made of Dawn." His books include "The Way to Rainy Mountain," "In the Bear's House," "In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991," and "The Gourd Dancer." He is also the editor of vario...

On March 4th, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. He considered it his “greatest speech” and his “best effort." Join Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss and best-selling Lincoln biographer Dr. Ronald C. White for a fascinating look at the Second Inaugural Address. Through a powerful, fascinating voyage of discovery, one comes away with a better understa...

In this program, Emily Lin, with the UC Merced Library, explains the process of digging into archives, including a look at how archives are created, where to look and what to expect to find, and strategies and possibilities for research. Series: "Critically Human" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38279]

The Kumeyaay are native inhabitants of San Diego and Imperial counties and Baja California, Mexico. For thousands of years, the Kumeyaay people farmed the land and ocean, managed forest fires, manufactured pottery and basketry and engaged in commerce and trade. Stan Rodriguez, Ed. D., executive director of the Kumeyaay Community College, talks about the deep physical and spiritual connection the K...

Beginning in the 1950s, the United States embarked on an elaborate program to study how LSD might be used to alter the behavior of an enemy. This collaboration between academia and government conducted astonishing studies with little regard for the ethics of experimentation. Joel E. Dimsdale, MD, describes how this research program evolved and shares stark examples of its impact on science and soc...

This lecture takes on the question of why we have only two political parties in the United States and how the two party system shapes our politics. Most significantly, this lecture looks at the ways in which the politics of race - Black civil rights in particular - during the Civil War, Reconstruction, the modern Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama served to shift the two politi...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” As look at the history of American democracy, we begin with the nation’s founding contradiction: the dispossession of Natives, the enslavement of Africans and the exclusion of women in a new nation dedicated to the radical concept of universal human equality. Through a reading of the founding documents of the United States,...

Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles transformed both US and World History. These seminal liberation struggles include the important yet relatively unknown series of early twentieth-century southern African American streetcar boycotts as well as the iconic Civil Rights-Black Power Insurgency (1935-75). First, Waldo Martin examines why and how these foundational freedom struggles pr...

America’s pre-WWII anxieties, Depression-era economic disparity, and the potential for positive social movements arise in this conversation about Frank Capra (director) and Robert Riskin’s (screenwriter) film Meet John Doe (1941) between author Victoria Riskin (Robert Riskin and Fay Wray: A Hollywood Memoir) and film scholar Charles Wolfe. Riskin and Wolfe discuss the multiple endings shot for the...

UCLA history professor Brenda Stevenson studies slavery and the Antebellum South, some of our country’s most painful moments and eras. Because there is not much in the way of documentary evidence of the lives of women of color, enslaved women and women from the South, Stevenson must work as an investigator to discover their inner lives and experiences. This is often done through stories told throu...

Should your art send you to prison? Rap lyrics are increasingly turning up as evidence in courtrooms across the country. The fictional characters portrayed in violent gansta rap songs are often a far cry from the true personalities of the artists behind them, yet uninitiated audiences easily conflate artist with character and fiction with fact. On a broader scale, using rap lyrics as evidence in c...

Ron Goode, Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, led UC Davis professor, Beth Rose Middleton Manning's, students through a cultural burn. Students participated in preparing the land and igniting the fire, and contributed to a historic indigenous tradition. Cultural burning practices empower Native American communities, and could possibly be used as a tool to help alleviate devastating wild...

In this candid and heartwarming interview, Tam O'Shaughnessy, the life partner of the late astronaut Sally Ride, describes her long relationship with the first American woman in space. From their days on the teen tennis circuit in California through Sally’s historic flights on the Space Shuttle Challenger to their parallel academic careers and later, founding their own company, Tam tells how their...

Thomas Jefferson had a vision for the United States of America but race and slavery complicated his views of what kind of society was possible on the American continent. One of the foremost scholars on Jefferson, Pulitzer prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of American Legal History at Harvard University. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 31530]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed for a discussion of her work as a lawyer/historian focusing on the contradictions in the life of Thomas Jefferson. Topics covered in the conversation include how her training as a lawyer empowered her to overturn the conventional historical view of the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Professor Gordon...

As the contentious 2016 election season heads into its final weeks, California Live speakers from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley delve into the impact of race, gender and income inequality on the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Panelists are: Dean Henry E. Brady,  political science professor Sarah Anzia, social psychology professor Jack Glaser and civil rights at...

From the moment Myrlie Evers-Williams faced the murder of her husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, she became a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. For more than five decades, she has fought to carry on his legacy, never relenting in her determination to change the face of race relations in this country. She reflects here on the impact of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, A...

Former California Supreme Court Justice and UC Davis School of Law Professor Emeritus Cruz Reynoso recalls his days working alongside Cesar Chavez in the Community Service Organization and speaks to the influence of Latinos today on immigration, voting rights, police conduct and other contentious public issues. Justice Reynoso is presented by the Helen Edison Lecture Series at UC San Diego. Series...

Former UCSB professor Gerald Horne, the award-winning author of more than thirty books, discusses his book “The Counter-Revolution of 1776” which argues that for the country's forefathers, "freedom" meant the right to keep others enslaved—and that the consequences of this definition continue into the present in the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants...

A distinguished panel of community leaders and activists share anecdotes and answer questions about Chicana/o involvement in the Vietnam-era protest movement, including the 1970 National Chicano Moratorium. [Humanities] [Show ID: 29127]

Eminent California historian Kevin Starr traces the emergence of San Diego’s role in the distinctly Southern California aesthetic of “Mediterranean-ism,” as seen in the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. Series: "Helen Edison Lecture Series" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28611]

The founding fathers were political theorists of the highest order, and founded the modern era of constitutional design. But how have their propositions fared over the course of the subsequent two centuries, in which over 900 constitutions have been written? Tom Ginsburg, Professor of International Law, and Deputy Dean, University of Chicago Law School, summarizes empirical work on constitutions r...