As we mark the first quarter-millenium anniversary of our perennially young country, Americans are once again asking, with particular urgency: who are we? This is far from the first time that we have faced a moment of disunity, alienation or definitional confusion. Indeed, the history of the United States is littered with moments of real soul-searching, thinking and rethinking in public about who exactly we are, and who we want to be. Far from the caricature of an anti-intellectual brood of money-makers, American society has given rise to a number of vibrant, ambitious, public-minded intellectual-social-cultural movements that aimed to answer that question in different ways.
The Public Culture Project, housed in America’s oldest university, aims to celebrate our semiquincentennial by reexamining a handful of these movements, taking seriously their framings of the American project, and asking whether they contain resources we might want to reclaim, in navigating our own moment of questioning. On November 13th, the Public Culture Project will host a trio of conversations, all dealing with important streams of thinking and creativity in the American story. The first will be on the topic of communitarianism in America, and will feature EJ Dionne of the New York Times, and Harvard’s own Michael Sandel. The second will be on American conservatism, and will feature CBS’s Ross Douthat, Benjamin Teitelbaum from CU Boulder, and Harvard’s own Danielle Allen and Eric Nelson. The final event will center around the arts in America’s self-understanding, most especially music, and will feature Lesley Rosenthal of Julliard, and a musical performance.