Events

History of 1968, part II

Nixon on the campaign trail

History of 1968, part II

Marc Selverstone, Guian McKee

Thursday, December 13, 2018
1:00PM - 3:00PM (EST)
Event Details

Join us for an exciting new seminar on the late months of 1968—a time of political and civil unrest in the United States, marked by growing anti-war sentiment, flaring racial tensions, and a presidential election. 

Led by the Miller Center's Marc Selverstone, an expert on Vietnam and the Nixon and Lyndon Johnson administrations, and Guian McKee, a domestic-policy expert who has worked extensively on the 1960s and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the seminar will explore this turbulent time in American life. It will feature clips from the Miller Center's presidential recordings program and will foster a group discussion about this critical period in U.S. history—including a look at the Chicago Democratic convention, Nixon’s election that fall, and the presidential transition. (The first of these seminars, which was offered in April 2018, focused on Johnson’s key decisions regarding the Vietnam War, the devastating assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the president's decision not to seek reelection. You can watch that seminar here.)
 
There are only 30 seats total, so sign up below to reserve a seat.

When
Thursday, December 13, 2018
1:00PM - 3:00PM (EST)
Where
The Miller Center
2201 Old Ivy Rd
Charlottesville, VA 22903
Speakers
Marc Selverstone

Marc Selverstone

Selverstone is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a Master’s in international affairs from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the secret White House tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press.

Guian McKee

Guian McKee

McKee is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002, and he is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. At the Miller Center, McKee works extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program.

McKee’s research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s. This project led to his extensive work on the Lyndon Johnson White House recordings focused on the War on Poverty, as well as on the wider development of the Great Society.