The fortieth anniversary of the Allman Brothers Band's founding presents a great opportunity to reexamine the influence and impact of perhaps the most internationally famous, southern music group of our times -- alongside a wide range of artists, scholars, politicians, spiritual figures, and critics that have emerged from the New South during the late twentieth/early twenty-first century.  This symposium presents a mostly southern-bred roster of renowned and emerging artists and scholars who will both look back on and freshly address the significance of the vanguart art of the Allman Brothers and the generation of southern postmodernists inspired by them.

This is an unprecedented socio-cultural moment in the New South - also known during the past 15 years or so as the Dirty South or 'Dirty Dirty' -- and American history.  This symposium underscores the contributions and achievements Americans of southern descent have consistently made to our civilization - as well as taking an unflinching look at the region's darker legacies.  The symposium provides a unique forum to interrogate, engage and explore how one defines "the Myth of the South."  The symposium will highlight important cultural production of multiracial Americans in the Deep South post-1964.

Monday, April 20, 2009, 4:30 p.m.
McCormick 101

Bob Gruen is one of the most well-known and respected photographers in rock and roll.  From Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones; Elvis to Madonna; Bob Dylan to Bob Marley; John Lennon to Johnny Rotten, he has captured the music scene for over forty years in photographs that have gained worldwide recognition.  Bob has worked with major rock acts such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Elton John, Aerosmith, Kiss & Alice Cooper and emerging punk and new wave bands including the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Clash,  Ramones, Patti Smith Group and Blondie. As chief photographer for Rock Scene Magazine in the ‘70s, Bob specialized in candid, behind the scenes photo features. This seminal body of work reflects a profound commitment and long-standing personal friendship with the artists. His wealth of personal experiences and uncanny memory provide the most illuminating and comprehensive histories of rock youth culture.

With an aging population and with more women, the traditional caregivers, employed in wage work, the problems of adult and child care loom as an increasingly worrisome concern. Who has provided the care in the past? How has that care been secured and paid for? Who will now provide care for children, the elderly, and the ill? Who will pay for it? Who should pay for it? Most care is still managed by family members and friends. Increasingly, however, a higher proportion of personal care has become commercialized. Presenting evidence from the United States and France, the panel will explore some of the complex and compelling moral, social, and legal controversies involved in the new economics of care.

 Inaugural Americanist Research Symposium
 
PUBLIC MATTERS

March 5, 2009

Keynote Conversation
“The Work of Art & Story in an Age of Biotechnology”

Priscilla Wald & Alys Weinbaum
4:30 p.m. Betts Auditorium

*Related articles by Wald and Weinbaum*

The Lapidus Family Fund for American Jewish Studies Annual Lecture: 

And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: Music, Memory, and the Politics of Jewish-American History

Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 4:30 p.m.
Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall

For more than a quarter of a century, from his preparation of a constitution for Virginia, to his proposal to establish a government for the Northwest Territory, through his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson grappled with constitutions and the rights of citizens. Between 1801 and 1803, as the nation’s third president, he wrestled with the twin problems of the restriction by the Alien Friends Act and the Sedition Act of the rights of those who were already citizens and the expansion of citizenship through a wise and fair policy of naturalization as new territories were acquired. What did it mean to expand boundaries through the incorporation of new territories into the nation, not from lands already “belonging” to the states but from lands acquired from foreign governments (the Louisiana Purchase, or West Florida, for example)? And, even more perplexing, what did it mean to expand the community of the nation’s citizens and possibly to reformulate the principles of citizenship? Jefferson’s correspondence, his draft of a bill to establish a government for the District of Columbia, and his first Annual Message to Congress provide some answers to these questions.

The 2008 University Constitution Day Lecture: Thomas Jefferson and the Rights of Citizens

Click on the arrow to view the video.

with Roger Angell, Gerald Marzorati and Nicholas Dawidoff
Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 4:30 p.m.
McCormick 101

Thursday, April 17, 2008, 4:30 p.m.
Aaron Burr Hall 219
Presented by the Department of Anthropology and the Program in American Studies
Arlene Dávila, Professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University and Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University

ARLENE DÁVILA is a cultural anthropologist interested in urban and ethnic studies, the political economy of culture and media and consumption studies. Her work focuses on Puerto Ricans in the eastern U.S. , and Latinos nationwide. She is currently working on a collection of essays on the production and circulation of contemporary representations of Latinidad examining current debates about the so called “mainstreaming”and the future place of Latinos in the contemporary politics of race.  In the spring 2008 semester Professor Davila is teaching a student initiated course at Princeton entitled La Nueva Latina. 

Thursday, March 27, 2008, 4:30 p.m.
James M. Stewart '32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street

Memoir is an increasingly popular literary genre among American writers and readers. Dawidoff, the author of both a memoir and a biographical memoir, examines the form, how it functions in the work of several superior American writers--and in his own books. In particular, he will discuss the subject within the subject, the way a range of big, general themes from a box of old family mementos to food to fly fishing have been the impetus for the authors of some of America's finest volumes of personal history. 

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of four books. One of them, The Fly Swatter, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and another, In the Country of Country, was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg was a national bestseller and appeared on many 1994 best book lists. In May, Pantheon will publish The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball. He is also the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. A graduate of Harvard University, he has been a Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri and Berlin Prize Fellow, and is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the American Scholar.   He is currently teaching a seminar titled "Americans at Work and at Play."

Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall 

Friday, February 29, 2008
3:30 p.m., McCosh 50

In celebration of the 45th anniversary of the historic racial integration of the University of Alabama (June 1963), the Program in American Studies, Center for African American Studies, and Program in Law and Public Affairs, will mark the occasion with a screening of the documentary, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment.  A panel discussion including former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who served as Deputy Attorney General under John F. Kennedy; John Doar, who prosecuted the Mississippi Burning Trial; and filmmakers, Bob Drew and D.A. Pennebaker, will be moderated by Professors Val Smith and Sean Wilentz.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
4:30 p.m., McCormick 101

Jonathan Sarna
Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University

Dr. Jonathan Sarna has written, edited, or co-edited more than twenty books, including the acclaimed American Judaism: A History. Winner of the Jewish Book Council's "Jewish Book of the Year Award" in 2004, it has been praised as being "the single best description of American Judaism during its 350 years on American soil."  If you are unable to attend his public lecture at 4:30, he will also be offering a workshop at 12 noon on the topic, "The Mystical World of Colonial American Jews."

Wednesday, October 10, 2007
 4:30 p.m., Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

Heather Hendershot
Associate Professor of Media Studies, Queens College, CUNY, and Coordinator of the Film Studies Certificate Program, CUNY Graduate Center

Convervative evangelical activists often speak of America's historically "Christian roots" and reference the 1950s as an era of strong religious sentiment and high moral standards.  That the loudest politically engaged fundamentalist voices of the Cold War years spoke out against the Civil Rights movement - on hundreds of independent TV and radio stations all over the country - is now seen as something of an embarrassment.  Thus, most figures of the Old Christian Right have been conveniently left out of the nostalgic histories spun by the New Christian Right.  Hendershot's talk will center on broadcaster Billy James Hargis, showing how he functioned as a bridge from the Cold War Christian Right to the New Christian Right of the 1970s.  Hendershot will focus in particular on Hargis's innovations in direct mail and mechanized mass mailings, his mastery of fundraising rhetoric, his successful campaign against sex education, and his skill at erasing the racist foundations of his Cold War activism.

 Princeton University Constitution Day Lecture
co-sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Stanley N. Katz

"Who's Afraid of Senator Byrd? 
The Constitution and the Uses of American History"

Monday, September 17, 2007
4:30 p.m.
Dodds Auditorium

Lee Clarke
Anschutz Distinguished Fellow

Worst Cases:
Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination

5:00 p.m., Betts Auditorium

Professor Lee Clarke is a leader in the fields of social organization and calamity.  In addition to Worst Cases, his works include Mission Improbable:  Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster (Chicago University Press, 1999), and Acceptable Risk?  Making Decisions in a Toxic Environment (University of California Press, 1989). 

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Inaugural Lecture of the Lapidus Family Fund for American Jewish Studies

Leon Wieseltier

Of What Use is Jewish History to American Jewish History?

4:30 p.m., McCormick 101
Reception to follow

Same Sex Marriage in New Jersey History and the Next 180 Days

Mary Anne Case
The Program in Law and Public Affairs Fellow
Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law
University of Chicago Law School 

Rebecca Davis
Center for the Study of Religion

Katherine Franke
The Program in Law and Public Affairs Fellow
Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture
Columbia University Law School 

Hendrik Hartog
Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty
Director, Program in American Studies

Laura Weinrib
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

Thursday, November 9, 2006, 12 noon
210 Dickinson Hall

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly twenty years in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. He was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.  He is the author of the highly acclaimed War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.  Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School, is currently writing a book on the Christian Right and its role in American society.  His latest book is Losing Moses on the Freeway:  The 10 Commandments in America.

Thursday, April 20, 2006
4:30 p.m., Robertson Hall, Bowl 2

Fred Inglis, the eminent British critic, is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies at the University of Sheffield and Leverhulme Fellow 2004-6.  He has written extensively for The Nation, the New Statesman, THES, and the London Independent, and contributes regularly to BBC Radio.  He has been a member of the Institutes of Advanced Study in Princeton and in the Netherlands, of the European University Institute in Florence, and was Visiting Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute in 2002-3.  His principal publications include, most recently, The Delicious History of the Holiday (2000); Clifford Geertz:  Culture, Custom, Ethics 2000);  People’s Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics (2002); and Culture: Key Concepts in the Social Sciences (2004). 

Professor Inglis was educated, after service with the draft in the British Airborne, at the University of Cambridge, England and subsequently was awarded his two doctorates at the University of Bristol.  He has been four times a (defeated) Parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party.

Monday, April 24, 2006, 4:30 p.m.
106 McCormick Hall

Curated for the Program in American Studies by
Sheila Curran Bernard
Anschutz Distinguished Fellow, Fall 2005-6

Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
With filmmaker Susan Froemke
Wednesday, September 28
7:00 – 9:00 p.m., Betts Auditorium

Nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, this documentary feature is a powerful and timely exploration of poverty and education in the Mississippi Delta. The film was directed by Susan Froemke, winner of numerous awards including four Emmys and a Grammy, and by Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles.
Sponsored by the Programs in American Studies and African American Studies

Eugene O’Neill
With filmmaker Ric Burns
Wednesday, November 9
7:30-8:45 p.m., McCormick 101

Ric Burns (The Civil War;  New York: A Documentary Film) will present excerpts of his newest work, Eugene O’Neill, a two-hour special that will air on PBS’s American Experience next spring. The film – a collaboration between Burns and O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb – makes use of interviews and readings from a number of the world’s foremost O’Neill scholars, historians, writers, critics and theatre artists. (O’Neill spent a year at Princeton, 1906-7.)
Sponsored by the Program in American Studies, the Program in Theater and Dance, The Program in Visual Arts, and the Department of English

Benjamin Franklin
With filmmakers Muffie Meyer and Ronald Blumer
Wednesday, November 16
7:30 – 8:45 p.m., McCormick 101

Founded in 1978 by Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, Middlemarch Films has won acclaim for its historical filmmaking, including the innovative use of dramatic recreation in series such as Liberty! The American Revolution and Benjamin Franklin. A three-part miniseries for PBS, Franklin won a 2003 Emmy for best documentary special. Producer/director Muffie Meyer and writer/co-producer Ronald Blumer will present excerpts of the series and discuss its production.
Sponsored by the Program in American Studies, The Department of Art & Archaeology, and the Department of History

Eyes on the Prize
With filmmakers Sheila Curran Bernard and Sam Pollard, and Professor Stanley N. Katz
Monday, November 21
7:30-8:45 p.m.

An acclaimed 14-hour television history of America’s civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize was broadcast over two seasons, in 1987 and 1990. As a team employed by Blackside, Inc. in Boston, Pollard and Bernard created two films for the second season: Two Societies and Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More, which won national Emmys for both writing and editing.  They will present clips from both films and discuss the series’ creation, recent changes in archival documentary storytelling, and current efforts to renew underlying rights so that Eyes can be re-broadcast.
Sponsored by the Programs in American Studies and African American Studies, and the Department of History

Willard and Margaret Thorp Lecture in American Studies

March 22, 2005
4:30 p.m.       28 McCosh Hall

  A Celebration in Words and Music

JOYCE CAROL OATES
PAUL MULDOON
SEAN WILENTZ

Sponsored by the Council of the Humanities, the Program in Creative Writing,
And the Program in American Studies

Carlin Romano 
America the Philosophical

In his book-in-progress, America the Philosophical, Carlin Romano argues that “The surprising little secret of our ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily Disneyfied society is that America in the infancy of the 21^st Century emerges as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19^th-Century Germany and any other competitor for the past three millennia.  The openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the comprehensiveness of its recording of established truths, the widespread rejection of claims imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, the embrace of Internet communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world:  all corroborate that fact.”  This lecture will present and discuss the core vision of the book.  

Carlin Romano is Literary Critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and a newly elected Fellow at the New York University Institute for the Humanities.

Do Politics and Business Mix?
From Andrew Mellon to Dick Cheney

David Cannadine is the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy¸ which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors’ Award; Aspects of Aristocracy; G. M. Trevelyan; The Pleasures of the Past; History in Our Time; and Class in Britain. He is currently working on a book on the life of Andrew Mellon. Professor Cannadine writes regularly for newspapers and reviews in London and New York, and is a well-known broadcaster on radio and television.

Thursday, October 7, 2004, 7:30 p.m.
Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

A Recantation
Reflections on Joan Didion's California

Wendy Lesser
Anschutz Distinguished Fellow
Founder and Editor, The Threepenny Review

Tuesday, September 21, 7:30 p.m.
Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

Maurice Ferré is the Anschutz Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the American Studies Program of Princeton University for 2003-04. From 1973 through 1985, he served as the thirty-seventh Mayor of the City of Miami. His extensive public service has also included presidential advisory appointments and terms in the Florida legislature and on the Dade County Board of Commissioners. His work has been recognized with numerous national honors at home and abroad. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mayor Ferré has completed research and written extensively on the question of Hispanic accommodation and assimilation in the United States, which remains the major focus of his work. His current Anschutz seminar is entitled, "The Changing American Identity: a Hispanic/Latino View"

Wednesday, April 7, 2004, 4:30 p.m.
106 McCormick Hall

The Danny Kalb Trio
with Bob Jones and Mark Ambrosino

Danny Kalb, the blues and folk performing legend, has been a leading force in American music for more than forty years. In 1965, he founded the ground-breaking band, The Blues Project, whose albums and concerts, alongside Bob Dylan's, marked the electrification of the folk revival.
    Wherever and whenever something was happening back then, from New York's Cafe au Go Go to the Fillmore in San Francisco, Danny Kalb was there -- and making it happen. Since then, he has gone on to a distinguished career both as a solo artist and playing with his ensemble, featuring a new richness and darkness in tone. Howard Solomon, respected veteran of the blues and rock scene, ranks Kalb's work "up there with the best of all the blues legends," including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Thursday, December 4, 2003, 5:00 p.m
Betts Auditorium
free and open to the public

Tangled Roots
A Workshop on American Folk and Field Recordings

Saturday, November 23, 2002
210-211 Dickinson Hall, 9:30-5:30  

Dean Blackwood, co-founder of Revenant Records
Robert Cantwell, University of North Carolina, historian of the folk revival
Marybeth Hamilton, University of London, historian of the Delta blues 
Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train and The Old, Weird America
Heather O’Donnell, Princeton University, Society of Fellows
Dick Spottswood, discographer, folklorist, WAMU radio 
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, History and American Studies 

Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray & Tony Glover
Blues, Rags, & Hollers
“Every time they play the lights shine” – Bob Dylan
Friday, November 22, 8 PM
Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall

The Handsome Family 
Odessa, Milk & Scissors, Through the Trees, In the Air and Twilight
"One of the Ten Best Records You Didn’t Hear This Year” – Spin, 2001
Saturday, November 23, 8 PM
Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall

Co-sponsored by the Program in African-American Studies, 
the Department of Anthropology, the Department of English, 
the Department of History, the Department of Music, 
and the Council of the Humanities 

Monday, April 22, 2002, 8:00 p.m.
101 McCormick Hall

"Anti Racism beyond Black and White:
Post 9-11 New York"

Organized by the International Center, and Co-sponsored by:
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Council
Chinese Students Association
Consortium of International Center Students Organizations
Third World Center
Students for Informed Dialogue
The Ombuds Office
The National Conference for Community and Justice, New Jersey Region

After the World Trade Center, the New York metropolitan region looks and feels different. The physical landscape of the region, once again, has changed. And so has its cultural politics. Over the next few months, the rebuilding of lower Manhattan has become paramount, pushing aside all other issues. Yet, this globalized local space embodies all these dynamics. Anti-racism, to paraphrase DuBois, is key to the 21^st Century.

April 4, 2002, 4:30 p.m.,
McCosh 28

October 5 and 6, 2000

Keynote address by President Bill Clinton

Webcast of Conference, including President's address

Conference Website

Thursday, November 15, 2001, 7:00 p.m.

Wood Auditorium (10 McCosh)