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Conversations Bureau

The following topics in our Conversations Bureau are currently available. Please click on the title for additional information or to request a Conversation. More topics will be added soon.

Dred Scott and the Origins of American Citizenship

This conversation focuses on questions of slavery and citizenship during the first century of American statehood. It is centered on the Supreme Court case of Dred Scot v. Sanford, but reaches back to the Declaration of Independence and forward to the 14th Amendment.

From Plessy to Brown: Resolving the Promise of Equal Protection under the Law

This conversation focuses on questions of equality and separation between Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. Its primary bookends are the Supreme Court decisions in Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, the cases that solidified and tore down the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate, but equal” respectively.

Region, Race, and Memory: Inheriting the Civil War

This conversation will focus on how people have remembered the Civil War, and whether their identity has shaped those memories, and, thus, the meaning of the Civil War to different individuals. The two major pieces under discussion are Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”

The Emancipation Proclamation and James Baldwin: A 20th Century Disquisition on Equality

This conversation will focus on the Emancipation Proclamation and equality. The two major pieces under discussion are Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation and a "letter" written by James Baldwin nearly one hundred years later. Other documents within provide context for both Lincoln's decree and Baldwin's analysis.