At the Junction: The Local, Regional, and National in US History

A century ago, nearly three decades after enunciating the frontier thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner turned his attention to a different question: ‘Sections and Nation’. Facing abundant evidence of national economic, cultural, and political integration, Turner insisted on the continued vitality and enduring influence of local, state and regional forces in American life. In the twenty-first century, historians have continued to interrogate how national, subnational, and transnational forces interact—writing about ‘the politics of scale’, ‘glocalization’, the ‘global [US] heartland’, and the ‘middle tier’ of American federalism. In that spirit, this symposium will examine the relations between and among different scales and levels of American economy, politics, culture and society. It will feature a keynote address by Edward Ayers, the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Four panels will address questions of scale in relation to natural resources and power, the media, the glocal United states, and cities. A concluding panel discussion will be led by Brent Cebul (Penn), Julia Guarneri (Cambridge), Andrew Heath (Sheffield) and Sarah Phillips (BU).

Programme

Registration (free)- CLOSED