Event Audio

For her book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol conducted grassroots interviews and visited local Tea Party gatherings throughout America. She discusses the past and future of the Tea Party movement and examines its dominant belief that benefits like Social Security and Medicare should be reserved for “real Americans” who have paid their dues by working and paying taxes.

Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University.

Presented as this year’s Park University Hauptman Lecture.

Julia Hill spent nearly 60 years at the forefront of the battle for civil rights and equality. Now she participates in a public conversation with educator Mary Ann Wynkoop, discussing her own story as a Kansas City woman who made a difference.

Hill recently retired from the board of the local NAACP, which she once led. Her history as an activist includes protesting against segregated lunch counters in downtown department stores and presiding over the Kansas City School Board.

As 1862 began the U.S. government was overwhelmed, the Treasury was broke, and the Confederacy was winning on the battlefield. A year later, under the leadership of an unschooled country lawyer, the tide had turned.

Drawing from his book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, journalist/historian David Von Drehle explains how Lincoln fashioned a victory and set the blueprint for modern America.

Von Drehle has written for the Washington Post and Time magazine; among his books is Why They Fought: The Real Reason for the Civil War.

In Canada, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford introduces us to teenager Del Parsons, who after his parents’ imprisonment for bank robbery flees his Montana home, beginning a new life on the Saskatchewan prairie.

Ford reads from Canada and holds a conversation with UMKC Writer-in-Residence Whitney Terrell, organizer of the Writers at Work series. Ford is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land.

Co-sponsored by the Writers at Work Roundtable and the UMKC English Department.