History Forum Archive

Episodes

April 12, 2025

Asian American Histories of the United States
with Catherine Ceniza Choy

An innovative and expansive history of Asian Americans spanning nearly two centuries.

Award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy’s Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the surge in anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the 21st century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early 21st century.

Biography

Catherine Ceniza Choy is an Asian American historian and professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to Asian American Histories of the United States, she is the author of the books Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History and Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America. Choy also co-edited the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, and is an engaged public scholar, having been featured in many national media outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and NBC News.

March 15, 2025

Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America
with Rebecca L. Davis

From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured and comprehensive history of sex and sexuality in America

In her new book Fierce Desires, Rebecca L. Davis charts the shifting and multiple roles that sex and sexuality have played in our societies and identities over more than 400 years. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Davis’s rigorous research and wide scope provides the oft-missing historical depth needed to understand how and why sexuality and gender have taken center stage in some of today’s most polarizing debates. Featuring stories across a wide spectrum of the United States, Davis demonstrates how fiercely we have valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.

Biography

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Early Career Professor of History and an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. She is a historian of marriage, religion, sexuality, and politics in the United States. In addition to Fierce Desires, she is author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, and the co-editor of Heterosexual Histories. She is also a podcast host and producer and writes the newsletter Carnal Knowledge, which explains the history behind today’s headlines about gender, sexuality, and American politics. Learn more at rebeccaldavis.com.

February 15, 2025

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Conversation of Ho-Chunk History & Survivance
with Stephen Kantrowitz & Josie Lee

Learn how the Ho-Chunk have been central to Civil War-era history and the upper Midwest, past and present.

Join historian Stephen Kantrowitz and Josie Lee, Director of the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum & Cultural Center, for a conversation on Ho-Chunk history, land, and contemporary life. Together, they will speak about Kantrowitz’s new book Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of Nineteenth-Century United States and Lee’s work in promoting, sheltering, and preserving past, present, and future Ho-Chunk ways of life. Kantrowitz’s book reconsiders the Civil War and Reconstruction eras by centering the Ho-Chunk and their strategic navigation of colonization, citizenship, and race to remain in their homelands and protect their sovereignty.

Biography

Josie Lee is an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. She is an independent curator, artist, and museum consultant with over 10 years in the museum field. Her work has been featured at the Field Museum, La Crosse County Historical Society, Overture Center for the Arts, and more. She currently serves as the director of the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum & Cultural Center. Josie holds a MA in Museology from University of Washington and is currently a doctoral student in Civil Society & Community Studies within the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Stephen Kantrowitz is Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a historian of race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.  In addition to Citizens of a Stolen Land, he is author of the acclaimed books More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. He is also an engaged public historian, working closely with two UW campus initiatives researching the university’s histories of exclusion and resistance and its Native past and present.

January 11, 2025

The Girls Who Desegregated America’s Schools
with Rachel Devlin

A new history of school desegregation in America showing how Black girls led the fight for interracial education.

Historian Rachel Devlin shows how young Black girls were at the center of the grassroots movement to desegregate America’s schools and fight racial inequity in public education. In her award-winning book A Girl Stands at the Door, Devlin takes us beyond the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and refocuses our attention on the remarkable stories of the young Black girls who led the fight. From filing desegregation lawsuits with their parents, to bravely enduring harassment and abuse while integrating formerly all-white schools, Black girls took on the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. A revelatory history that recovers the underappreciated contributions of a generation of civil rights pioneers.

Biography

Rachel Devlin is professor of History at Rutgers University and a historian of the cultural politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the Postwar United States. She is the author of the award-winning book A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools and Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture.

December 7, 2024

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
with Matthew Delmont

World War II history as you’ve likely never heard it before.

More than one million Black soldiers served in World War II, serving in segregated units while waging a dual battle against inequality in the very country for which they were laying down their lives. The stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” And yet without their sacrifices, the United States could not have won the war. In his new book Half American, Matthew Delmont tells the stories of Black military heroes and civil rights icons that fought for a Double Victory: against facism abroad and against racism at home. An essential and meticulously researched retelling of the war that honors the men and women who dared to fight not just for democracy abroad, but for their dreams of a freer and more equal America.

Biography

Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of five books: Half American, Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University. For more information on Matthew Delmont, please visit matthewdelmont.com or prhspeakers.com.

November 16, 2024

Workers, Nature, & Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country
with Steven C. Beda

A timely book with important insights into the growing cultural and political rifts around land, natural resources, and labor.

In his new book Strong Winds and Widow Makers, Steven C. Beda challenges popular narratives about the clashes between timber workers, environmentalists, and employers. Highlighting the voices of timber workers themselves, Beda reveals a complex and nuanced history of timber-working communities and their connections to the environment, a relationship colored by class, community, understandings of nature, forest science, politics, popular culture, and economics. This in-depth look at workers embedded in the forest reveals an ethic of stewardship built around protecting jobs, protecting the forest, and protecting an important part of their own identities.

Biography

Steven C. Beda is an associate professor of History at the University of Oregon. His first book, Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize and best debut book from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. His research focuses on Pacific Northwest history, labor history, and environmental history, specifically timber workers and the ways rural communities have adapted to the region’s changing economy.

April 20, 2024

Making America’s Public Lands
with Adam Sowards

Environmental historian Adam Sowards traces the long history of public lands in the United States from the beginning of the republic to current events. The concept of “public” has always been one of competing visions and values, from homesteaders attempting to realize the ideal of the Jeffersonian republic, to western ranchers using the open range to promote free enterprise, to wilderness activists who see these lands as wild places, free from human encumbrance. Sowards deftly navigates the complex history of nearly 640 million acres of land and its intimate relationship to ongoing debates about our national identity, values, and politics.

Biography

Adam M. Sowards is a freelance writer and editor and professor emeritus of history at the University of Idaho. An environmental historian and writer, he specializes in public lands and conservation in the US West, especially the Pacific Northwest, and their relationship with American democracy. In addition to Making America’s Public Lands, he is author of the award-winning An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest, The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation, and United States West Coast: An Environmental History.

March 30, 2024

Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies
with Robert Parkinson

In his celebrated account of the origins of American unity, John Adams described July 1776 as the moment when thirteen clocks managed to strike at the same time. So how did these American colonies overcome long odds to create a durable union capable of declaring independence from Britain? 

In this powerful history of the fifteen tense months that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, Robert G. Parkinson provides a troubling answer: racial fear. Tracing the circulation of information in the colonial news systems that linked patriot leaders and average colonists, Parkinson reveals how the system’s participants constructed a compelling drama featuring virtuous men who suddenly found themselves threatened by ruthless Indians and defiant slaves acting on behalf of the king.

February 10, 2024

Charlie Brown's America
with Blake Scott Ball

For nearly fifty years, Charles Schulz's Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture, with many arguing that it was beloved precisely because it was apolitical in a postwar period of social and political turmoil. Historian Blake Scott Ball challenges that common perception, showing us how Peanuts has always been political.

Through fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents, Ball reveals how Schulz's beloved comic strip was a daily, decades-long conversation about the rapidly changing politics of his time, including the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, and the future of a nuclear world.

January 6, 2024

American Indians & the American Dream
with Kasey Keeler

In her groundbreaking history of the urbanization and suburbanization of Native communities in Minnesota, Kasey Keeler shows how American Indians have navigated the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy to access homeownership, particularly in the suburbs. From the Homestead Act of 1862 to the housing bubble of the early 2000s and today’s Wall of Forgotten Natives, Keeler offers new ways to think about histories of place and placemaking for American Indians here in Minnesota and highlights the contradictions and limits of the ever-alluring “American Dream.”

Biography

Kasey Keeler (Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi) is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Department of Civil Society & Community Studies and the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program. She is author of American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota. Raised in Coon Rapids, she received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on two new projects, one that centers Paul Bunyan narratives in American Indian dispossession and logging across the Great Lakes and another that looks at the Homestead Act through the lens of ongoing Indigenous Dispossession.

December 16, 2023

Muslims of the Heartland
with Edward E. Curtis

Edward E. Curtis IV—scholar of Black, Muslim, and Arab American history and life—uncovers the surprising history of Muslim life in the American Midwest through multiple generations of Syrian and Lebanese American families. From the plains of the Dakotas to the factories of Motor City, Curtis’ richly detailed history reveals Syrian and Lebanese Americans at the heart of key American institutions like the assembly line, the family farm, the dance hall, and the public school. This fresh portrayal of a familiar region reveals how, for over a century, Midwestern Syrians have created a life that was Arab, Muslim, and American—all at the same time.

Biography

Edward E. Curtis IV is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts and professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He is the author/editor of 14 books, including Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest, which was awarded a 2023 National Arab American Book Prize. Curtis is also an engaged public scholar and winner of two Emmys for his work as executive producer and writer of Arab Indianapolis: A Hidden History on PBS. Curtis has contributed interviews and articles to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the Associated Press, among other media outlets.

November 11, 2023

Franchise
with Marcia Chaletain

In Franchise—winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in history—acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain investigates the complex interrelationship between Black communities and America’s largest, most popular fast food chain. From the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri during the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power—economic and political—and despair for African Americans. Through her innovative research and compelling storytelling, Chatelain shows how fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for racial justice.

Biography

Marcia Chatelain is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her newest book, Franchise, won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Hagley Prize in Business History, the Organization of American Historians Lawrence W. Levine Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Hooks Institute National Book Award, the Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award and the James Beard Foundation Award for Writing. She has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States as well as several awards for her teaching and university service. Her first book, South Side Girls, recasts Chicago's Great Migration through the lens of Black girls.

April 29, 2023

Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape
with Francesca Ammon

In her recounting of mid-century suburban expansion, highway building, and urban renewal, cultural historian Francesca Ammon uses the iconic image of the bulldozer to explore how postwar America came to equate destruction with progress.

Transformed from a wartime weapon into an instrument of postwar planning, the bulldozer helped realize a landscape-altering “culture of clearance” and ushered in one of the most significant transformations of American land and life.

As communities across Minnesota and the nation debate how to repair the worst of this legacy, Ammon’s insights provide a cautionary tale and hope for the future.

Biography

Francesca Russello Ammon is an associate professor of city & regional planning and historic preservation in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

April 8, 2023

Love, Death, & Rivers
with David Chang

How do two distinct peoples separated by an ocean come together to form a shared community in the midst of colonial violence and dispossession?

From western Canada to central California, the mid-19th century saw the emergence of mixed Native Hawaiian and Indigenous North American communities. Native Hawaiian historian David Chang is working with contemporary members of one such community in California to trace its history.

Drawing on sources from Hawaiian-language mourning songs to Nisenan language oral histories, Chang considers the role of memory in the making—and maintenance—of an Indigenous community across generations, emphasizing the very different ways that Native Hawaiian and Native Californian people have remembered shared places.

A surprising and refreshing perspective on the history of the West Coast and the role of memory and commemoration in navigating the multiple meanings of the lands we share.

Biography

David Aiona Chang is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

This series is made possible in part by the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund and the Maurice Stans Fund.

March 18, 2023

South To Freedom
with Alice Baumgartner

Historian Alice Baumgartner tells the surprising story of the southern route to freedom in the US-Mexico borderlands, challenging and complicating many popular assumptions about the history of slavery in North America.

Tracing how Mexico’s abolition of slavery in 1837 and increasingly radical antislavery policies spurred on the growing crisis between the states north of the border, Baumgartner reorients our understanding of the American Civil War.

Though fewer in number than those who fled north on the Underground Railroad, the stories of those who fled south to freedom are no less important, providing a revelatory and necessary perspective on pre-Civil War America and beyond.

Biography

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on 19th century North America.

This series is made possible in part by the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund and the Maurice Stans Fund.

February 18, 2023

King Philip's War & the Place of Violence in the Northeast
with Christine DeLucia

The Indigenous resistance movement and colonial conflict sometimes known as King Philip’s War shaped the American Northeast in powerful ways. Its consequences have reverberated for more than three centuries.

Historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of this period in the seventeenth century and its ongoing impacts and remembrances, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated written and public histories of New England.

Grounded in collaborative research and interpretive practices, it explores how different forms of knowledge and commemoration support communities’ enduring commitments to justice, homelands, sovereignty, and wellbeing.

Biography

Christine DeLucia is an associate professor of history at Williams College, and author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast.

This series is made possible in part by the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund and the Maurice Stans Fund.

March 26, 2022

The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
with Elizabeth Hinton

In 2021, the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and it disproportionately targets African Americans and Native Americans. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system?

Biography

Elizabeth Hinton is an Associate Professor of History and African American studies at Yale University and a Law Professor at Yale School of Law.

February 2, 2022

The Heartland: An American History
with Kristin Hoganson

What is the “heartland?” According to the Brookings Institution, it is a group of nine states including Minnesota. Reporters, many of whom have never visited it, characterize it with words like “traditional,” “conservative,” and “wholesome.” Politicians have long cast it as the place where the nation’s identity exists in its most pristine form. This so-called heartland has been an historically unheralded crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas with dense and intricate connections to the rest of the planet. How does the seeming immovable myth of the “heartland” obscure the richer historical realities of our part of the country?

Biography

Kristin Hoganson is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

January 29, 2022

The US-Canada Border
with Benjamin Hoy

The history of the US-Canada border, today often touted as the longest undefended boundary in the world, is often told as an American-British tale of treaties, wars, and eventual peace. In truth, Britain and the United States built this border across Indigenous lands, displacing existing communities and striving to disrupt Indigenous people’s ideas of territory and belonging. While Canada and the US looked to the border as a marker of their sovereignty and diplomatic stability, Indigenous nations understood it as an obstruction and a threat to theirs. How might this multiracial, multinational history of the border inform our understanding of it today?

Biography

Benjamin Hoy is an Assistant Professor of History at University of Saskatchewan.

December 4, 2021

The Recent Roots of Present Day Homelessness
with Daniel Kerr

Since the 1870s when the term “homelessness” first appeared in print in the US, mainstream Americans have called unhoused people by different names--tramp, hobo, bum--but consistently adjudged them to be either romantic avatars of freedom or too sick or lazy to hold a job and be active participants in society. Yet the phenomenon of homelessness, especially since the late 1970s, is grounded not in the illness or perceived deficiencies of the unhoused, but in shifting job markets, social policy, real estate development, criminal justice, and corporate power. How did the changing nature of cities and urban development lead to modern homelessness in America?

Biography

Daniel Kerr is an Associate Professor of History at American University and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

November 13, 2021

When Wall Street Met Main Street
with Julia C. Ott

The financial crisis that began in 2008 has made Americans keenly aware of the enormous impact Wall Street has on the economic well-being of the nation and its citizenry. America's involvement with Wall Street began after the Crash of 1929 when the federal government, corporations, and financial institutions campaigned to universalize investment, with the goal of providing individual investors with a stake in the economy and the nation. How did financial markets and institutions—commonly perceived as marginal, elitist, and disreputable a century ago—come to be seen as the bedrock of American capitalism?

Biography

Julia C. Ott is an Assistant Professor of History at The New School for Social Research.

October 16, 2021

Pox Americana
with Elizabeth Fenn

A devastating smallpox epidemic was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, deeply affecting the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.

Military action and political uprising increased the movement of people and microbes, spreading contagion to American soldiers with no immunity, to enslaved people who had escaped to British military camps where they were promised inoculation, and to Indigenous nations in every part of the continent.

How did an epidemic of this now-eradicated virus transform North America just as the United States was struggling to become a nation?

Biography

Elizabeth Fenn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

This program is made possible by the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund.

April 20, 2021

The Roots of the Rural-Urban Divide
with Steve Conn

The rural-urban divide is one of the nation's oldest political rifts. The result has been an ever-widening debate over who—urban or rural—is a “real American.” With Professor Steve Conn from Miami University.

The 2021 season of the History Forum examines the diverse and divergent currents that have long shaped the United States and challenged its motto "E Pluribus Unum."

March 23, 2021

Shadow Nations
with N. Bruce Duthu

In this History Forum, Professor N. Bruce Duthu (United Houma Nation) examines how the US eroded Native self-governance and how sovereign Native nations and the US might work together and reclaim the pluralism on which the US was founded.

February 23, 2021

How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote & Insisted on Equality for All
with Martha Jones

Presented by the Minnesota Historical Society, historian Dr. Martha Jones examines the lives and missions of Black women in their fight for voting and other civil rights. Dr. Jones will explore the lives and work of Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others, including how they defied racism and sexism in their fight for the right to vote.

January 2021

American Revolutions
with Alan Taylor

Dr. Alan Taylor discusses the conflicting perceptions of the American Revolution as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework and the reality that it was far more violent, dangerous, and precarious.

Biography

Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize in History, most recently for The Internal Enemy, also a National Book Award finalist. He is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

October 2020

The Embattled Vote in America
with Professor Allan Lichtman

This lecture examines the battles for the vote from the founding to the present. It will show that today our voting rights are in greater jeopardy than at any time in recent years. Politicians that benefit from voter suppression and the manipulation of legislative districts, rely on bogus claims of voter fraud to deprive millions of Americans the franchise through voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, the throttling of the Census and Post Service, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges. Only a revived grassroots political movement can reverse the tide of voter suppression and guarantee to all Americans the right to vote, which grounds all other rights in our democracy. With Professor Allan Lichtman of American University.

September 2020

The Murky Past & Contested Future of the Electoral College
with Rosemarie Zagarri

How and why did the Electoral College emerge as a compromise solution after the conflicts of the Constitutional Convention of 1787? And what might be done today to remedy its structural flaws and inadequacies? Join Rosemarie Zagarri, a history professor at George Mason University, for a presentation on these topics.

Biography

Rosemarie Zagarri is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.