Our Common Purpose: Finding a Shared Historical Narrative

2020 Recipient Danielle Allen Hosts “Our Common Purpose”.

Danielle Allen (https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-9224/) winner of the Library’s 2020 Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, will host a series of exciting conversations at the Library to explore the nation’s civic life and ways that people from all political beliefs and social causes can build a stronger, more resilient country.

The series, called “Our Common Purpose—A Campaign for Civic Strength at the Library of Congress,” consists of three public events this spring that are free and open to everyone. Each event will be accompanied by a workshop for K-12 educators and public librarians, in which teachers from across the country will connect, explore, experiment and create new ways of making civic ideals come to life in their classrooms.

“We all know that this is a critical and urgent moment in our nation’s history,” Allen said. “We have faced crises as a nation before. We can continue to watch and worry and tweet at each other – or we can emerge stronger and more resilient by taking real action now to save our constitutional democracy.”

Speakers will discuss the changing interpretations of the nation’s founding documents and the principles they were founded upon. They will also explore the tension between celebrating what is good about the US and its history, while addressing the exploitation and inequality that are also part of the American legacy.

Samuel Goldman is Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom, and director of the Politics & Values Program. His first book God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. His second book, “After Nationalism,” will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in June 2021. In addition to his academic research, Goldman is literary editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Quarterly and a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

Cathy Park Hong is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University. Her 2020 book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). “Minor Feelings” won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her prose and poetry have been published in the New York Times, New Republic, the Guardian, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Professor Molina is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, as well as co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice. She continues to explore the themes of race, space, labor, immigration, gender and urban history in her forthcoming book “Placemaking at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished its Community” (University of California Press, 2022). Professor Molina is working on a new book, “The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers.”

For transcript and more information ,visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-9791

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