Harmsworth Lecture in American History

The Harmsworth Lecture in American History is the inaugural lecture of the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History. It takes place every November in the Examination Schools. The Harmsworth Chair is affiliated with Queen’s College and has brought many leading historians of the United States to Oxford since its establishment in 1922.

The titles of recent Harmsworth Lectures are listed below. Links to recordings are included where available.

Recent Harmsworth Lectures

2023: White Supremacy in American Politics: An Origins Story (Elizabeth Varon)

2022: The Forgotten Constitutional Revolution: Amending American Democracy in the Early Twentieth Century (Bruce Schulman)

2021: The Unexceptional Roots of American Exceptionalism: America in the Age of Revolution (Patrick Griffin)

2019: The Origins of the American Economy (Peter Mancall)

2018: War, Race, and Anti-Imperialism in Merze Tate’s International Thought (Barbara Savage)

2017: Things Come Together: Science and the American West (Elliott West)

2016: American Revolutions: Empires and Republics in North America, 1750–1804 (Alan Taylor)

2015: Isolationism as an Urban Legend (Kristin Hoganson)

2014: Constituting ‘the People’: Law’s Empire and the American Imagination (Annette Gordon-Reed)

2013: The Underground Railroad and the Struggle Against Slavery (Richard Blackett)

2012: Paradoxes of State Power in America (Gary Gerstle)

2011: A Tale of Two Hamiltons: North American-Caribbean Crossings (Philip Morgan)

2010: Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: A Tale of Theodore Roosevelt and Environmental Alarmism in the Progressive Era (Ian Tyrrell)