Jefferson Davis Archives - Public Seminar

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Pythagorean Mysticism

Three observations on “Authority and Freedom”

March 2, 2022 • by Paul Berman

Art has always been an instrument of social oppression, except on occasion when it has been an instrument of resistance. Such is art’s meaning. And, in order to resist oppression, we ought to go about judging art on the basis of which side it supports, the side of vice, or ...

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Lessons from the 1871 congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings

November 2, 2020 • by Andrew Wainer

“The truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935 In 1871, in the midst of escalating racial violence that killed up to 30,000 in the post-Civil War South, Congress launched one ...

Authoritarianism and Civilization

Du Bois, Davis, and Trump

November 17, 2016 • by Neil Roberts

In 1890 the young W.E.B. Du Bois delivered the Harvard University Commencement address “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” Du Bois focused on a central figure of nineteenth-century America as he prophesied the meanings of freedom, democracy, and what American life -- or more accurately, civilization -- would look ...