Beverly Gage
Beverly Gage is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. history at Yale University. Her work focuses on American politics and social movements, with an emphasis on the histories of radicalism, conservatism, and liberalism, and their influences on the modern state. Her first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (2009), examines the history of terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Her current book project, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century," is a biography of the former fbi director. In addition to her teaching and research, Gage has written for numerous journals and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and the Nation. She appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour, among other programs. In 2009 Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College.
FEATURED LECTURE
J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century
OAH Lectures by Beverly Gage
The history of surveillance and political dissent in the 20th century, as seen through the life of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
A history of the FBI's interactions with the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, with an emphasis on its surveillance and harassment of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
An exploration of the little-known history of terrorism in the United States with an emphasis on the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, based on Gage's 2010 book. This lecture focuses on the invention of terrorism as a form of political protest and its role within early anti-capitalist movements in the United States. It also grapples with some of the most controversial events of its day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the federal campaign against immigrant "terrorists," the grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of American politics.