American Academy Lecture at Freie Universität Berlin

Freedom: The Troubled History of an American Ideal

We tend to think of freedom as the struggle of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate the land, labor, and political power of others. Using the micro-history drawn from his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Freedom’s Dominion: A Sage of White Resistance to Federal Power, Jefferson Cowie helps to explain how the freedom to oppress others has meant an enduring war against federal authority and what has changed since the re-election of Donald Trump.

In cooperation with the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität zu Berlin