REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED (see below). Registrants will receive the Zoom link in an email one hour before the talk begins.

In August, 2020 Humanities New York releases its history podcast Amended. Hosted by Dr. Laura E. Free, Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Each season, Amended tackles a critical question about where the American democracy has been and where it’s going. We begin with a six-part series that commemorates and complicates what we think we know about the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited discrimination in voting on the basis of sex. Professionally produced and rigorously researched, this timely podcast features rockstar historians and brings to light the diversity and complexity that have been excluded from the popular suffrage narrative. It entertains listeners while helping them understand what has been gained, lost, and left undone by this historic constitutional amendment. Most importantly, they’ll learn why this under-recognized history matters now.

This presentation will be a hybrid listening and discussion session. Participants will listen to clips from an episode of podcast, introduced and discussed by Dr. Free. Then there’ll be lots of opportunity for conversation and reflection about what we’ve heard and what it means to us today.

As a historian of voting rights, Dr. Free uses the power of her pen and her voice to confront suffrage history with honesty. Through Amended, she is committed to creating a platform for stories that were ignored and erased by typical suffrage histories. When she’s not working on Amended, Dr. Free is Associate Professor of History at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, a member of the NYS Women’s Suffrage Commission, and an author; her most recent book is Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era.