Lisa McGirr is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University as well as the Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. This year, McGirr is serving as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. McGirr’s research interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus especially on collective action, state building, and conservative movements. McGirr has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. She is the author of the War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W.W. Norton, 2016) and Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2001; 2015). She is the co-author (with Eric Foner and Kathleen DuVal) of a U.S. history college textbook, Give Me Liberty! An American History, currently in its seventh edition (2021).  McGirr is now completing a book entitled American Authoritarians from which this lecture is drawn.