Community Calendar

Jean Becker and Tom Collamore, both former staffers to President George H. W. Bush, bring together the most harrowing and hilarious stories behind presidential events over the past sixty years, detailing the art of preparation that goes into these delicate, high stress operations and revealing how they have often been one step away from disaster. “Don’t Tell the President” brings together the uproarious chaos of Veep and the grandeur of The West Wing.

Reception and book signing to follow.

Historian and author of "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States," Amy E. Hughes introduces us to playwright and actor Harry Watkins for an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater.

Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in U.S. culture, both in the past and present. When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic "merit," what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? Join us to think through these and other questions.

This episode is sponsored by Christina and Robbi Karas.

The Clements Bookworm is a free monthly webinar series featuring guests discussing topics in American history.

In her book, "Agents of Survivance: Indigenous Women Teachers in the Boarding School Era," Anne Ruggles Gere complicates and enriches established accounts of the Indian boarding school era and what preceded it by looking closely at the largely ignored Indigenous women teachers in these schools.

Focusing on Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, Angel DeCora, and Ella Deloria, Gere shows how these and many other Indian women teachers subversively resisted assimilation with tribal presence, relationality, connection to land, rejection of victimhood, and maintenance of cultural traditions, art, and languages. Their vulnerable positions in schools directed by Euro-Americans necessitated that their contributions be subversive, nearly invisible. Despite this, they developed policies and practices that were passed to Indian students who in turn became teachers of the next generation of Indian students, and many of their innovations inform contemporary movements toward sovereignty for Indian education.

This episode is sponsored by the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan Lifelong Learning program and is in recognition of Native American History Month.

The Clements Bookworm is a free monthly webinar series featuring guests discussing topics in American history.

Bookseller and collector Garrett Scott joins Julia Miller and Clements Curator of Books Emi Hastings to discuss the Garrett Scott Collection of Vernacular Bindings recently acquired by the Clements Library.

Scott’s working definition of “vernacular binding” is “an alteration or addition to the book, pamphlet, or leaf, when this alteration is made by an owner whose vocation is not bookbinding or associated book arts, when this modification is meant to enhance, protect, repair, or reinforce the structure of the item.”

Panelist Julia Miller is a bookbinding scholar and conservator who authored “Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings.” As Curator of Books, Emi Hastings now oversees the Scott Collection. They will discuss different types of repairs and what these traces of ownership teach us.

This episode is sponsored by Bobbi and Sam Chappell.

The Clements Bookworm is a free monthly webinar series featuring guests discussing topics in American history.