2016/2017

James C. Scott Presents - Population Control: Bondage and War

Thursday, April 13th, 4:30pm

Professor Scott will discuss a chapter titled “Population Control: Bondage and War”. While enslavement was widely practiced among nonstate peoples, he argues, the early state elaborated the institution of slavery as a means to maximize the population capable of producing a surplus of grain and other resources. Each of the earliest states - from the Mesopotamian polities to classical Athens, Sparta, and Rome - maintained a balance between expanding the state and provoking the mass flight of subjects. Institutionalize slavery, Scott suggests, was a state project designed to domesticate classes of human laborers in order to control a surplus monopolized by the political elite. “No slavery, no state” one is tempted to assert. 

The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965

Thursday, November 3, 2016, 4:30pm

Less than a week before the U.S. presidential election, the Gilder Lehrman Center will host a panel discussion titled “The Right to Vote: Protection or Suppression Since 1965.” The goal is to explore tensions between efforts to abridge and efforts to ensure the electoral franchise, focusing on the period between 1965 Voting Rights Act and the present. To place current trends in voting suppression in historical context, patterns dating to the aftermath of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era also will be addressed.

Book Talk: Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 4:30 pm