The Hauenstein Center Collection

Gleaves Whitney is joined by Winston Elliott, Editor-and-Chief and President of the "Imaginative Conservative", and the Free Enterprise Institute, to discuss Homer's "The Odyssey".

#85: Amity Shlaes by The Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University

Author Steve Luxenberg discusses with us his new book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation.

Author David Roll comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss his newest book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic.

Danielle Allen, bestselling author of the book Our Declaration comes to our Beyond Aporia podcast to talk about the origins of the Declaration of Independence, and what it means for the country today.

President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss the current political situation in Washington, as well as the origins of one of our most beloved documents, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Bestselling author Lynne Olson comes to our new Common Ground Podcast, Beyond Aporia, to speak about her books Last Hope Island and Those Angry Days.

This week, we hear from Gerald Russello, editor of The University Bookman, a publication founded in 1960 by the traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk.

The University Bookman, like most conservative magazines and journals, is a site where, implicitly or explicitly, there is a debate about what the word “conservative” even means. A couple weeks ago, The Washington Post profiled a number of magazines on the right that have been forced, by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, to stake a claim: is Trump conservative? Is the Republican Party conservative? Who really gets to decide?

Gerald Russello provides an interesting perspective on this question because the publication he edits, the University Bookman, is really a review of books and culture. It doesn’t respond directly to the news cycle and rarely takes up specific matters of policy. I asked Gerald whether his and the publication’s bird’s eye view of Trump and the Republican Party helps him see the current debate over conservatism differently. I ask whether he thinks his publication is really political at all. Or whether it’s simply cultural—and if so, what does cultural conservativism even mean, since it too is a term bandied about so often that it could signify lot of different things. I start by asking Gerald what function Russel Kirk hoped the University Bookman would serve when he founded it in 1960, and whether that function has changed as the times have changed.

This week, we hear from Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Coleman is a public historian. As you’ll hear in her lecture, her work is to take the findings, the interpretations, of academic historians and bring them to life for the public—as she says, to make the work relevant to contemporary audiences. She says in her talk that, inevitably, new generations will make new meanings of past events: Baby Boomers will understand the causes and significance of the Civil War differently than will millennials.

In her talk, Coleman addresses some of these changes. She starts by considering the ways in which the causes of the civil war have been vastly misunderstood: she helps make sense of that old refrain you used to always hear from self-appointed civil war buffs, that the war was really about states rights after all. Coleman addresses that reading, and then talks about her work at the civil war museum.

This week, we hear from Maggie Doherty, a critic and teacher at Harvard University. Maggie writes often for publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and N Plus One; her criticism often focuses on writers and feminists around the middle of the 20th century—familiar names are Mary McCarthy and Kate Millet. Maggie’s literary criticism blends questions of politics into her writing; she manages to marry the literary and the political in her writing in a careful and very helpful way.

In our conversation, I ask Maggie about her recent articles on Mary McCArthy and Kate Millet, as well as a book she’s working on. The book is titled The Equivalents, and it’s about a group of five women writers and artists who met at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. We talk particularly about one such Radcliffe writer, Tillie Olsen, and the insights she advanced into the ways writing is really work: that is, is labor. We talk about writing as work, and the economic situation—that’s to say economic contingency and precariousness—that writers and academics face today.