historian at Brave New Films

Thom Hartmann - Founding Fathers and the Constitution

2008-06-07T09:33:53Z

Complete program at: fora.tv

Liberal author and radio host Thom Hartmann argues that the authors of the U.S. Constitution envisioned a more egalitarian society than has traditionally been believed.

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Thom Hartmann talks about "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It."

Hartmann argues that the middle class is not the natural consequence of a free-market-based economy, but rather, the intended result of policies put into place to maximize the public good. He also argues the middle class is on its deathbed, evident by the number of people who put in a solid day's work and can no longer afford to buy a house, send their kids to college, or even get sick. Hartmann is also the author of "The Prophet's Way."

Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and democracy. Hartmann is the award-winning, best-selling author of fourteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on four continents.

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Michael Oren - America's Historical Views of the Middle East

2008-07-27T11:03:30Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Historian Michael Oren examines America's long history of cultural misperceptions regarding the Middle East.

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Michael B. Oren discusses his book "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present."

For well over two centuries, American statesmen, merchants, and missionaries, both men and women, have had a profound impact on the shaping of this crucial region. Yet their story has never been told until now. Drawing on thousands of government documents and personal letters, this book reconstructs the diverse and remarkable ways in which Americans have interacted with this alluring yet often hostile land. Covering over 230 years of history, "Power, Faith, and Fantasy" is an indispensable work for anyone interested in understanding the roots of America's Middle East involvement today. - Politics and Prose

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Eric Foner - "Freedom" and American Identity

2008-08-31T17:16:55Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, discusses the importance of "freedom" to American self-identity, and examines its historical status as an evolving and contested idea.

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Eric Foner speaks on the history of freedom under the U.S. Constitution. This is the second lecture of a four-part series.

This four-part lecture series curated by Sam Haselby, Visiting Professor, and co-sponsored by the Leonard and Louise Riggio Writing and Democracy Program, the New School Writing Program, and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts aims to deepen public understanding and raise critical awareness of this charter document of the United States by bringing three of the country's leading scholars of law, history, and literature and one of America's outstanding human rights activists to address the topic of the Constitution in Crisis.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1969.

His publications include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (1993), and The Story of American Freedom (1998).

In 2000, he served as President of the American Historical Association.

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Victor Davis Hanson - Is the "War on Terror" a True War?

2008-08-03T09:24:35Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Author and nationally syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson challenges the idea that the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" is not a true war.

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Victor Davis Hanson speaks about "Iraq and Beyond." This event was part of the Hoover Institution's Spring Retreat 2007.

Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

He was a full-time farmer before joining CSU Fresno, in 1984 to initiate a classics program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.

Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991-92), a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism (2002), and an Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001) and was named alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2002).

He was also the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002-3). He received the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lectureship in 2004, and the 2006 Nimitz Lectureship in Military History at UC Berkeley in 2006.

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