Democracy in Crisis: Conversations with New Haven Scholars
This series of presentations and civic discussions invites a broad public of New Haven neighbors together to reflect upon the state of American democracy today—widening inequality, polarization, eroding norms, divisive media, and failing institutions in addition to centuries-long traditions of resilience, dissent, and idealism in the face of injustice and imperfection. What are the lessons of the past? And what solutions might the insights of different fields suggest? Light refreshments will be served.
October 9, 2018: “Barack Obama and the Rise of Trumpism: Reflections on Recent US History,” Matthew Jacobson, Professor of American Studies, Yale
He is the author of What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta’s Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History.
His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790–present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.