Featured Speaker for the month of October: N.D.B. Connolly, Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. About the Lecture: “A Time of Scorching Irony: Black Wisdom for our Current Century”

In his famous 1853 speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” Frederick Douglass described the 1850s, the doorstep of the U.S. Civil War, as an age where “scorching irony not convincing argument is needed.” Prof. Nathan Connolly suggests we are living in such times again. Exploring African American’s historical skepticism for reasoned debate within white-dominated institutions, Prof. Connolly highlights the long-standing necessity of critical black argumentation for redressing the narrowness of American politics and for averting the environmental and economic dangers visited upon those living under that system.