Episode 14: January 6, 2021 Insurrection
Show Notes
After the events of January 6, 2020, we invited a few friends and historians to offer their interpretations of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building. While our understanding of this historic moment will continue to evolve, we invite you to think of this conversation as a first draft of history.
Next week, we will be back with our regularly scheduled programming with part one of a two-part series on President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Guests:
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history and African & African American studies at Duke University where she teaches courses on Black Lives, the Black Freedom Struggle, and history in fiction and fact. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009), Lentz-Smith researches and writes about African Americans’ entanglements with U.S. power in the long twentieth century. Her current project traces the devastating aftermath of one young man’s encounter with the police in 1980s San Diego to explore how state violence and white supremacy reconstituted each other in response to the civil rights gains of the 1960s.
Lentz-Smith works to bring scholars into conversation with broad publics. She serves as an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, and her work has been featured in the documentaries The Jazz Ambassadors and The Great War, as well as in an exhibition for the Library of Congress and on various podcasts and radio programs. Through Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, she hosts the discussion series, “The Ethics of Now,” which brings authors, journalists, policy makers, and scholars to Durham to discuss matters of pressing importance to the North Carolina community and beyond. Lentz-Smith holds a BA in history from Harvard-Radcliffe and a PhD in history from Yale University. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family.
Selected Publications
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy.” In Rethinking Grand Strategy, edited by Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Andrew Preston. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. Forthcoming.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “’The Laws Have Hurt Me:’ Violence, Violation, and Black Women’s Struggles for Civil Rights.” Southern Cultures 26, no. 3 (Fall 2020). Forthcoming.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane, and Brooke Blower. “The Visitor’s Corner with Sia Sanneh and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.” Modern American History 1, no. 3 (November 2018): 391-97.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “Passports to Adventure: African Americans and the U.S. Security Project.” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2016): 537-43.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad joined the Center for Presidential History in September 2019. Her project examines how perceptions of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights leadership developed, hardened and continue to circulate within the black community. A key aspect of her scholarship focuses on the process by which Kennedy emerged as a civil rights hero for African Americans while Johnson—who fought for and signed into law historic civil rights legislation—has been viewed as being motivated solely by political self-interest.
Sharron received her PhD in Humanities from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2019. She holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Penn State University, and a MA in Public History from Howard University. Previously, she served as Director of Education and Public Programs at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, interpreting the life and legacy of President Kennedy. Her professional career has included appointments at history museums around the country.
Sharron has published articles on African American chefs in the White House, as well as an excerpt from her master’s research on the life and times of Thomas Dorsey, a black caterer in 19th century Philadelphia. Her research has been supported by a Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship from The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a Moody Research Grant from The Lyndon Johnson Foundation, and a UTD Dean of Graduate Education Dissertation Research Award. In 2017 she was awarded the UTD President’s Teaching Excellence Award.
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Dr. Timothy Naftali is a Clinical Associate Professor of Public Service and a Clinical Associate Professor of History, is director of NYU's undergraduate Public Policy Major. A native of Montreal and a graduate of Yale with a doctorate in history from Harvard, Naftali writes on national security and intelligence policy, international history and presidential history. Using Soviet-era documents, he and Russian academic Aleksandr Fursenko wrote the prize-winning One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964 and Khrushchev’s Cold War, the latter winning the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in 2007 and inclusion on Foreign Affairs’ 2014 list of the ten best books on the Cold War. As a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, Naftali wrote a history of US counterterrorism policy, published as Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism. Most recently, with Peter Baker, Jeffrey Engel and Jon Meacham, he wrote Impeachment: An American History.
Naftali came to NYU Wagner after serving as the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he authored the Library's nationally acclaimed exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of presidential documents and nearly 700 hours of the infamous Nixon tapes. Naftali, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, Slate and Foreign Affairs, is a CNN presidential historian. Most recently, he was featured in CNN’s The 2000s, Presidents Under Fire: The History of Impeachment and The Bush Years: Family, Duty, Power. In addition, he served as historical consultant to the CNN Original Series "Tricky Dick" and the NETFLIX series, Designated Survivor.
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