Co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar and Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Politics

The Big Lie

When the January 6 Select Committee chose this phrase to headline the second day of hearings they identified Donald J. Trump and his confederates as 21st century fascists

June 13, 2022 • by Claire Potter

The message from Republican politicians and their right-wing media flacks about the televised hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, which have now completed their second day? They don’t matter. “Nothing to see here!” they are all quacking, as they have ...

History

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

June 10, 2022 • by Claire Potter

In other words, alternative television showed government as it was, mainlining the excitement of democracy to a dedicated and growing group of political junkies. At the same time, seeing the investigation play out live provided reassurance that Watergate was a constitutional crisis but not, as Nixon characterized it, a plot ...

Sex & Gender

Anti-Trans Bills Are Driving a New Moral Panic

Ohio has now passed laws regulating participation in women’s sports so severe that cisgender girls may opt not to compete at all

June 6, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Don’t be a sucker. Fight trans athletes bans....

Anti-Trans Bills Are Driving a New Moral Panic

History

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

June 1, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Marc Stein

Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...

Politics

Jesus, Guns, Babies

Kandiss Taylor’s primary campaign for Governor of Georgia reminds us that Trump didn’t make the MAGA movement: they made him

May 24, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Kandiss Taylor, the Republican primary candidate for governor of Georgia that you have never heard of, has the best campaign slogan ever: “Jesus, Guns, Babies.” Talk about clarity on where she stands! She checks all the boxes. And although her central plank is the 2020 election conspiracy theory, she also ...

Interviews

The Future of Working from Home

Urban economist Matthew Kahn thinks the pandemic lockdown could change your life—for the better

May 23, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Matthew Kahn

The stubborn persistence of remote work will increasingly be on the national agenda. On April 28, 2022, Airbnb announced a new policy that would “allow employees to live and work anywhere,” and that they would partner with potential destinations “to help them attract remote workers.” Differently, New York Magazine’s Jen ...

History

When Disasters Are Good For Museums

A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience

May 17, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Samuel J. Redman

Samuel J. Redman is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The author of two previous books about American museums and the sciences that flourished there in the 19th and early 20th century, this spring, he published his third book: ...

Interviews

Singing America’s Racial History

A conversation with historian Emily Bingham about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home”

May 6, 2022 • by Emily Bingham and Claire Potter

May 7, 2022, is the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby, nicknamed “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.” Before these three-year-old thoroughbreds burst out of the starting gate, thousands of people will don elaborate hats, drink mint juleps, and—right before the race, accompanied by the University of Louisville marching band—sing Steven ...

Sex & Gender

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Never forget that banning abortion has always been a minority position in this country, one that does not represent the will of the voters.

May 3, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Outlawing abortion is the outcome of a radical conservative minority. The success of this minority has been entirely driven by megadonors and organizations that create voter turnout through disinformation and motivating extremists. The notion that a cluster of cells that cannot survive outside a human host, one that has no ...

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Education

Becoming Un-Disciplined

What it takes to make a university community where Black faculty and students–and all of us—can thrive

April 27, 2022 • by Cathy J. Cohen and Claire Potter

Part of what I find amazing about being a professor at this moment is watching the change that’s coming, not always from institutions, but from young people and their demands on institutions. Their demands for a different type of faculty in terms of demographics. Their demands for different types of ...

Interviews

Phillis Wheatley’s Lost Years

She didn’t go far from Boston, but a keen-eyed historian glimpsed her in the archive—and that find opens up a door to both the poet’s marriage and the final years of slavery in Massachusetts

March 16, 2022 • by Cornelia H. Dayton and Claire Potter

In September 2021, University of Connecticut historian Cornelia Dayton broke the news that three “lost” years of African American poet Phillis Wheatley had been accounted for: the first three years of her marriage to John Peters, a free Black New Englander who she married in 1780. In an article published ...

Higher Ed

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

March 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...

Claire Potter

The Big Lie

When the January 6 Select Committee chose this phrase to headline the second day of hearings they identified Donald J. Trump and his confederates as 21st century fascists

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

Anti-Trans Bills Are Driving a New Moral Panic

Ohio has now passed laws regulating participation in women’s sports so severe that cisgender girls may opt not to compete at all

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

Jesus, Guns, Babies

Kandiss Taylor’s primary campaign for Governor of Georgia reminds us that Trump didn’t make the MAGA movement: they made him

The Future of Working from Home

Urban economist Matthew Kahn thinks the pandemic lockdown could change your life—for the better

When Disasters Are Good For Museums

A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience

Singing America’s Racial History

A conversation with historian Emily Bingham about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home”

Radical Republicans Are Birthing the Nation They Want—and Most Americans Don’t

Never forget that banning abortion has always been a minority position in this country, one that does not represent the will of the voters.

Becoming Un-Disciplined

What it takes to make a university community where Black faculty and students–and all of us—can thrive

Phillis Wheatley’s Lost Years

She didn’t go far from Boston, but a keen-eyed historian glimpsed her in the archive—and that find opens up a door to both the poet’s marriage and the final years of slavery in Massachusetts

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

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