Spring lectures discuss themes in U.S. history

In addition to hosting the annual Mary Louise Smith Chair in Woman and Politics in February, the Catt Center co-sponsored two events in March that were part of the campus-wide America at 250 celebration.

On Feb. 10, Asma Khalid, award-winning political correspondent and host of the BBC news podcast “The Global Story,” presented “Our American Experiment – 250 Years On” to an audience of more than 200 people in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union as the 2026 Mary Louise Smith Chair in Women and Politics.

Khalid shared insights from her experiences as a political correspondent covering the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections and more recently as host of the BBC news podcast “The Global Story.”

She said that questions about who does or does not belong in the “American fabric and in the American story” have long been part of the country’s history and are a large part of the debate in the partisan political climate today.

“I think that the debate at this very, very core of what we’re seeing in this moment is that people have fundamentally different views of what it means to be an American, and who gets to be an American, and those to me are really existential questions as we turn 250 years old,” Khalid said.

Another question that Khalid discussed was whether the country can sustain a healthy democracy if it does not prioritize its relationships with other democracies around the world.

“Regardless of what comes next on the world stage, it to me is abundantly clear that the way the United States and the world order has been since World War II, that that era is over, right?” she said. “And I think as we turn 250 years old, one of the questions that we think a lot about is, can you preserve your democracy at home in isolation of what else is happening in the world?”

She ended her presentation with the personal observation that “[Americans] have said time and time again, that what you want for your neighbor is what we want for ourselves,” and with this question: “What happens if we then ultimately do not believe that our neighbor is truly our neighbor?”

On March 3, Catt Center director Karen M. Kedrowski presented “Women in the American Founding” in Room 2630 of the Memorial Union. She opened her presentation by sharing information on the lack of political rights of women during the colonial period versus the importance of women to the success of a colony.

“The women were really important during the colonial period,” Kedrowski said. “The single best predictor of whether a European colony would survive was the proportion of women in the community. The closer to 50-50, the higher likelihood that a community would survive.”

Kedrowski organized the rest of her presentation into the ways that women – both named and unnamed – supported the colonies, the Revolutionary War effort and the new country.

She told the stories of women whose work as writers and propagandists rallied support for the creation of a new government and recorded the history of that time, and whose skill in organizing fundraisers and boycotts provided financial support for the war and changed the future of several industries in the new country. She spoke of women whose work as camp followers during the war provided much-needed labor and moral support and sometimes even help on the battlefield, and whose skills in espionage provided critical strategic information. She explained how women’s labor at home while their husbands and sons were away kept families and communities afloat.

The last two stories she shared were of women whose advocacy for the rights of women would lead in the mid-1800s to what is now called first-wave feminism. In 1776, Abagail Adams, wife of a future president and mother of another future president, famously wrote to her husband to “remember the ladies.”

“John Adams, for his part, dismissed her and laughed at her. And that’s pretty clear in the next letters in this series,” said Kedrowski. “But it also takes us to this notion of the fact that there is the beginnings of fomenting, of unrest among women through the sharing of ideas that women needed a better deal than what they’d had.”

On March 4, journalist and author Elaine Weiss presented, “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement” in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union, about the citizenship schools that helped build the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

In the mid-1950s, a school teacher (Septima Poinsette Clark), a rural businessman (Esau Jenkins), and a beautician (Bernice Robinson) from South Carolina and a white Tennessean with sharecropper roots (Myles  Horton) joined forces at the Highlander Folk School, a social justice research and training center in Tennessee, where they developed the idea of citizenship schools – using education as a tool to build active citizens, build communities, and reclaim voting rights.

“These citizenship schools changed lives,” Weiss said. “A generation of Black community leaders were nurtured, and they built the grassroots foundation for the entire Civil Rights Movement.”

Weiss explained how Horton, following the model of Jane Addams and Hull House, originally established the Highlander Folk School in 1932 as a place of community education and labor union organizing for his fellow Appalachians, and that by 1954 the school had evolved to civil rights education and training.

Weiss walked the audience through the arrival of Septima Clark to Highlander in 1954 and through Highlander’s growth into a meeting place for civil rights activists and a training ground for the teachers who would lead literacy and civics classes in states across the South.

“It developed a whole network of community movement leaders, many of them women,” said Weiss. “The citizenship schools spread to 11 southern states, training tens of thousands of adult students who became voters. They gained skills and confidence and agency, to stand up and demand their rights.”