January 6 and the Politics of History

Jim Downs (Author, Editor) JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College, a 2025–26 Guggenheim Fellow, and the director of the African American History Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia. In addition to coediting Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, he has authored Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine; and Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction.Stephanie McCurry (Author) STEPHANIE MCCURRY is professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of three prize winning books, including Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War and Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.Joanne B. Freeman (Author) JOANNE B. FREEMAN is professor of history at Yale University. She is the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and the editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings.Elizabeth Hinton (Author) ELIZABETH HINTON is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University. She is the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.Jill Lepore (Author) JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, and Book of Ages.William Sturkey (Author) WILLIAM STURKEY is an associate professor of history at the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White and To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.Julian E. Zelizer (Author) JULIAN ZELIZER is professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the award-winning author and editor of many books, including Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

I want to applaud the organizers of the forum, including Jim Downs and Catherine Clinton, for hosting such a humane and lively conversation on a topic that wrenches the heart of every informed citizen. This important book makes plain that January 6 was a singular and portentous event whose implications we ignore at our peril.