Dr. Brett Gadsden will discuss his manuscript-in-progress, "From Protest to Politics: How African Americans Transformed the Presidency in the 1960s," which explores the set of historical circumstances that brought African Americans into consultative relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and other important positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and opened them to unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government.

Brett Gadsden is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University and a historian of twentieth-century United States and African American history. His first book, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism, education reform, and white reaction. He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and American Historical Association.

For accommodations, please contact marisa.chappell@oregonstate.edu.

Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion; the School of Public Policy; the School of Language, Culture, and Society; and the Center for the Humanities.