Harmsworth Lecture in American History 2023 - recording now available

A recording of the 2023 Harmsworth Lecture in American History is now available on the RAI YouTube channel.

This year's lecture, entitled White Supremacy in American Politics: An Origins Story, was delivered by Elizabeth Varon (Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford).

Discourses of racial supremacy, with "white supremacy" employed as a campaign slogan by the conservative Democratic Party, metastasized in American politics during Reconstruction. The election cycles of 1868-1871, Varon argues, reveal the depths of white opposition to Black voting, the limits of Republican Party egalitarianism, and the rhetorical dilemmas and strategies of Black activists in the long freedom struggle.