Event Details

History Department Research Seminar Series

The History Department is pleased to host Professor Guy Ortolano, New York University, who will present on, ‘Winston Churchill, Race, and Supernational History’.

Abstract: Practitioners of global history often depict prior historiography as stubbornly national. Since the modern profession's founding, however, popular and academic historians have worked on a variety of scales. Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples represents one prominent attempt to write such a supernational history. This paper considers the premises that organized this four-volume work, arguing that nation, language, and empire each paled by comparison to the book's organization around concepts of race.

Guy Ortolano is a Professor of History at New York University. He has published books on the history of science (The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cambridge UP, 2009) and urban history (Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town, Cambridge UP, 2019). Currently a Visiting Professor of History at King's College London, he is working on scales of historical writing since the mid-nineteenth century.