Join the Kenan Institute for Ethics and host Adriane Lentz-Smith for a conversation with historian, author, and “The Gilded Age” historical consultant and co-executive producer Erica Armstrong Dunbar on telling the stories of our nation’s complex past. What does history look like through the eyes of those whose stories are rarely told? Through her historical […]

Join us for conversation with Professor Mark Peterson (Yale) about his new book The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand Year History. This book charts the history and aims of the American constitution from its origins in an agrarian past to the grave crisis we face today. Peterson traces the American constitutional […]

Join us for conversation with Professor Sarah Pearsall (Johns Hopkins University) about her new book Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution In this powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. […]

Join us for conversation with Professor Woody Holton (South Carolina) about his recent book Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with […]

Duke Professor of History Phil Stern in discussion with Karin Wulf, the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library (JCB), and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of gender, family and politics in eighteenth-century British America, Karin Wulf earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. […]

Join acclaimed historian and author Erica Armstrong Dunbar for a thought-provoking conversation about her award-winning book, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.” In dialogue with Duke historian Tamika Nunley, Dunbar will explore the remarkable story of Ona Judge, the complexities of slavery in the nation’s founding, and the enduring […]

In conjunction with The Declaration of Independence Display we invite you to join us for a special event! Famously, in December 1773, over a hundred colonists snuck onto ships in Boston Harbor after nightfall, destroying chests of tea worth nearly $2 million today. Often portrayed as a local tax protest that helped spark a Revolution, […]

Throughout the academic year 2026-2027 and in honor of Trinity Humanities & Arts “Belonging?” and Duke’s We the People: Project 250, the Department of Religious Studies will be addressing the possibilities and predicaments of religious belonging, with particular attention to “religious freedom” as a peculiarly American value and preoccupation. Join us for the first event […]