Event Details

End: November 8, 2018
Contact: zjackson@historians.org

National media have widely described the upcoming midterm elections as “historic.” Historians can provide unique perspectives on the outcome of these elections informed by a deep understanding of American political history.

On Thursday, November 8, at 12 p.m. EST, join the American Historical Association as we bring together five prominent historians who study elections, democracy, and politics to discuss the meaning and implications of the midterm election outcomes.

Historians Heather Cox Richardson, John Lawrence, Claire Potter, Tyler Stovall, and Julian Zelizer will react to the results of the midterm elections and engage in a conversational roundtable to delve into American electoral politics, keeping a firm eye on the past and using a historical perspective to think about what the future holds.

Register to attend this free webinar (limit 100 attendees) or watch it on Facebook Live. The webinar will last approximately 50 minutes. If you are an attendee you can ask questions directly though Zoom. You can also ask questions by typing your comments in the Facebook livestream, or tweeting your questions with the hashtag #ahamidterms.

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John A. Lawrence is a visiting professor at the University of California's Washington Center. He worked in the House of Representatives for 38 years, the last 8 as chief of staff to Speaker and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. He is the author of Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2018).

Claire Potter is professor of history at the New School for Social Research and executive editor of Public Seminar. Potter is an expert in United States political history after 1970, the history of gender and sexuality, mass culture, and media. She is currently working on a book called Click Bait Nation: The Origins of American iPolitics (forthcoming, Basic Books). She is program committee chair for the upcoming 2019 AHA annual meeting in Chicago.

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College. Richardson is a noted scholar of 19th- and 20th-Century American political and economic history. Her most recent book, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2014) has been widely praised. Her new book, forthcoming 2019, examines the historical patterns behind America's ongoing conflict between oligarchy and democracy.

Tyler Stovall is past president of the American Historical Association and distinguished professor of history and dean of the humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Stovall is the author of several books and numerous articles in the field of modern French history, specializing in transnational history, labor, colonialism, and race.

Julian E. Zelizer is Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He is an expert on American political history and co-host of the Politics and Polls podcast, produced by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs. Zelizer’s new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (W.W. Norton & Company), will be out in early 2019.