Oregon Historical Society Re-Launches "Historians And The News" Virtual Series With Kathleen Belew On September 8 (Photo) - 09/07/21
Portland, OR — September 4, 2021 — The Oregon Historical Society (OHS) is excited to re-launch its popular “Historians and the News” series with a conversation between University of Chicago professor Dr. Kathleen Belew and Oregon State University professor Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols on Wednesday, September 8. This free virtual program series, which has previously hosted historians Heather Cox Richardson, Erika Lee, Joanne Freeman, and Kevin Kruse, provides a space for some of the nation’s most renowned historians to discuss their insights about current events, informed by years of scholarly analysis of the past.
As the House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 has begun to hold hearings and new reporting reveals the seriousness of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, militaristic white-supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys continue to hold rallies in cities including Portland, Salem, and Los Angeles. In this installment of “Historians and the News,” Dr. Belew and Dr. Nichols will discuss how these events have historical roots in mid-twentieth century white supremacist movements.
Dr. Belew’s research explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common narrative about betrayal by the government and the weapons, uniforms, and technologies of war. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. Professor Belew’s conclusion that this movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a presence in American life, is all too clear today.
“The great success of the “Historians and the News” series underscores the powerful importance of understanding the historical dimensions of our greatest challenges today,” said Christopher Nichols. “I am especially delighted,” he remarked, “that we will have Professor Kathleen Belew joining us to help make sense of recent developments and to situate them in a longer history. We’ll be discussing the investigation of the events of January 6, political rancor and hyper-partisanship, white supremacist and militant actions across the nation in recent years, as well as their relationship to the U.S. military and to the nation’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. We’re so fortunate to have Kathleen Belew to help us re-launch this series. She is a rising star in professional history today. She’s testified before Congress, she is a frequent commentator on CNN, she is exactly the kind of historian who fits the bill for this series aimed at bringing the best insights of history to bear on contemporary issues. Belew’s groundbreaking book Bring the War Home is a must-read; it provides an essential pre-history of the white supremacist movements that have shaken American society in recent years. As with many of our guests, Professor Belew’s insights will help us all better understand the extraordinary events of the recent past and maybe even assist us in charting a better path forward into the future.”
This virtual program will take place at 6pm PT via Zoom; attendees can register in advance at https://orhs.ejoinme.org/belew. For those who are unable to attend the event live, OHS will email registrants a link to access the recording, which will be available for 30 days following the live program.
Kathleen Belew is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. Belew is an expert on recent U.S. history and spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Belew is co-editor of and contributor to A Field Guide to White Supremacy, on sale October 26, 2021. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. She has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war. She is a frequent commentator on CNN and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, CNN.com, and Dissent.
Copies of Dr. Belew’s book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, are available for sale in the OHS Museum Store. OHS members save 10% on all purchases in the museum store, and all sales support the Oregon Historical Society mission.
Christopher McKnight Nichols is associate professor of history at Oregon State University (OSU), Director of OSU’s Center for the Humanities, and was recently named the Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor by the OSU Honors College. He founded and leads OSU’s Citizenship and Crisis Initiative. Nichols is an expert on the history of the United States’ relationships with the world, including isolationism, internationalism, globalization, ideas, and political history, with an emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the present. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Nichols was honored as Oregon State University’s Honors College Professor of the Year. He is an editorial board member of the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nichols is the author, co-author, or editor of six books, most notably Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age, and the just-published Rethinking American Grand Strategy. Nichols is a proud member of the Oregon Historical Society’s board of trustees and a passionate advocate for history and the humanities.
About the Oregon Historical Society
For more than a century, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of artifacts, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms & website (www.ohs.org), educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all. We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and rich as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view.
