Join Brown University, the University Library, and the John Carter Brown Library for two events launching Brown 2026, a two-year long, campus-wide initiative observing the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Through Brown 2026, the University aims to demonstrate the important role of research and teaching universities in fostering open and democratic societies.

Launch Events on January 24, 2025

From 2 to 3:30 p.m. on Friday, January 24 in room 303 at the John Hay Library, we will host a symposium: Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams: Insights into the History of the American Right from The Divided America Project Archive.

At 5 p.m. on the same day at the John Carter Brown Library, Professor Eric Slauter of the University of Chicago will deliver an illustrated lecture entitled, “A Portable History of the Pocket Constitution.” A conversation with the Honorable Gregg Amore, Rhode Island Secretary of State, will follow.

Hybrid Format and Registration for Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams

Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams: Insights into the History of the American Right from The Divided America Project Archive will be presented in hybrid format. Please register if you plan to attend on Zoom.

Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams: Insights into the History of the American Right from The Divided America Project Archive

This panel considers the significance of the John Hay Library’s Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda, a uniquely deep and extensive archive documenting the ideological ferment of post-war America at a granular level. Under the banner of the Divided America Project, and with generous support from the Arcadia Fund and the National Historic Records Preservation Commission, the John Hay Library has nearly completed digitizing the collection, which will provide public access to more than a million images of printed materials produced by local, regional, and national issues-focused groups in the U.S. from the 1950s to the 1990s. Rare for university-based collections of this kind, Hall-Hoag is particularly strong in documents from a wide range of right-wing groups. The scholars assembled for this panel will reflect on how this collection and its broad accessibility can inform our understandings of how ideas from political extremes find their way into the mainstream, the long history of right wing extremism in the U.S., and the value of collections like Hall-Hoag for engaging civic memory and public discourse. Materials from the collection focusing on religious groups will be on display in the John Hay Library’s Harriette Hemmasi Exhibition Gallery and in an online exhibit, and other Hall-Hoag documents will be available for viewing following the panel.

Program

Following welcome remarks by Joseph S. Meisel, Joukowsky Family University Librarian, two library staff members — Andrew Majcher, Head of Digital Services and Records Management, and Ariel Flowers, Divided America Project Archivist, four guest panelists will engage in a discussion.

Panelists

• Seth Cotlar ’90, Professor of History, Willamette University (moderator)
• Marsha Barrett, Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• John S. Huntington, Professor of History, Houston Community College
• Jennifer Mittelstadt, Professor of History, Rutgers University

Seth Cotlar ’90

Seth Cotlar is a Professor of History at Willamette University. After graduating from Brown with a History concentration, he went on to get a PhD in US History at Northwestern University. His current research project is entitled “Rightlandia: Walter Huss and the Long History of the Far Right in Oregon, 1955-2005.” Huss was an anti-communist crusader with ties to white nationalists, Christian supremacists, and neo-Nazis who, in 1978, was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party. Cotlar teaches courses on the history of the far right and the history of American Conservatism. His first book was Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2011), which won the James Broussard Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He also co-edited Historian in Chief: How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future (University of Virginia Press, 2019) with Richard Ellis.

Marsha Barrett

Marsha Barrett is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the political and social history of the United States during the twentieth century. Barrett’s book, Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism, examines Rockefeller’s career as a means for understanding the fate of moderate Republicanism and the broader transformation of the political landscape after the passage of 1960s federal civil rights legislation. Her research has appeared in publications including the Journal of Policy History, New York History, Politico, and Time.

John S. Huntington

John S. Huntington is a history professor at Houston Community College. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Houston in 2016, and earned a B.A. and M.A. in History from Texas Tech University in 2009 and 2006, respectively. His research on American politics has been published in academic journals, such as the Western Historical Quarterly and Radical Americas, and in popular outlets like Politico and the Washington Post. When not teaching or writing, Dr. Huntington can be found traveling with his wife and doting on his dog.

Jennifer Mittelstadt

Jennifer Mittelstadt is Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she studies the twentieth-century United States, with broad interests in the state and social policy, politics, women and gender, social movements, the military, and foreign affairs.  She is the author and editor of four books, including the single-authored monographs From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (University of North Carolina, 2005) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). She is co-editor of the series Power, Politics and the World at University of Pennsylvania Press.  Her work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and she has served as the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College. 

Brown 2026

Brown 2026 draws on Brown’s strength as a rigorous, multidisciplinary research institution and as a community of learning that seeks to confront important questions that have faced democracies in the past and that will continue to face them in the future. To learn more:  https://brown2026democracy.brown.edu/research-teaching

Accessibility

If you need a disability-related accommodation, please reach out to John_Shamgochian@brown.edu as far in advance of the event as possible. Thank you.