American Visions

Humanities @ UR 2024 What Forms the Self? Series

Ed Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities at the University of Richmond, will read from his new book, American Visions: The United States 1800-1860 (W.W. Norton, 2023).

As the publisher website states, “Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.”

Taking up this final statement, Ayers’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Humanities Coordinator Nathan Snaza about the role and importance of humanities practices in today’s world.