Klement Lecture

The Klement Lecture brings to campus distinguished scholars in American history. Established in 1992 to honor Prof. Frank L. Klement, the lecture series was devoted originally to the history of the U.S. Civil War, but it now includes all fields of American history. Prof. Klement received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1946 and joined the history department at Marquette University in 1948. He served at Marquette for twenty-seven years before his retirement at the rank of professor emeritus, and he died in 1994 at the age of 86. Prof. Klement’s scholarship focused on the Civil War era, focusing on northern dissent. He is best remembered for his monographs The Copperheads in the Middle West (1960) and The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1970). Earlier lectures in the Klement series can be ordered from Marquette University Press, and Kent State University Press published several lectures in the 2008 volume More than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era, edited by Kristen Foster and James Marten.

 

28th Annual Prof. Frank L. Klement Lecture

"Body & Spirit: Preachers, Radicals, and the Politics of the Latinx Civil Movement"

The 28th lecture in this distinguished series will be held on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 5:00pm in the Raynor Library Conference Center.

In the late 1960s, Chicago was a city reeling from its urban renewal binge, riots at the Democratic National Convention, the assassinations of several radical activists, and a progressive religious community on the verge of being dismantled. Frustrated by the overwhelming power of Chicago’s political machine, the Puerto Rican radical group known as the Young Lords took action and occupied two religious institutions in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood in the summer of 1969: McCormick Seminary and the Armitage Methodist Church. What started out as a small occupation movement, that few believed could make any difference, not only temporarily halted the urban renewal plans in place for Lincoln Park, they kicked off a national movement of Latina/o radicals occupying churches and disrupting church services as a way to protest urban renewal, police brutality, and anti-Black and anti-Latino racism. This lecture examines these occupations, the contested relationships between preachers and radicals, and what these movements can teach us about the politics of the Latinx Civil Rights Movement.


Dr. Wendy Bellion

Dr. Felipe Hinojosa

Professor | History Department
John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America
Baylor University

 

Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Felipe Hinojosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2009. His research areas include Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, and Social Movements. Prof. Hinojosa serves on the Advisory Board for the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, and online moderated forum Latinx Talk. His work has appeared in Zócalo Public SquareWestern Historical QuarterlyAmerican Catholic StudiesMennonite Quarterly Review, and in edited collections on Latina/o Studies. Dr. Hinojosa’s first book, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) was awarded the 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award for the best book in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. His new book, Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2021) is set in four major cities (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston) where in 1969 and 1970 Latino radical activists clashed with religious leaders as they occupied churches to protest urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Free and open to the public

Sponsored by the Marquette University Department of History
For more information, call 414.288.7217

 

Previous Klement Lectures

2011 - 2022

2021-2022

Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware

“The Horse’s Tail: Iconoclasm in Revolutionary New York”

2019-2020

Caroline E. Janney, University of Virgina

"Communities of Memory: Remembering the Civil War

2018-2019

Ned Blackhawk, Yale University

“American Indians and the Remaking of U.S. Colonial History” 

2017-2018

Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania

Watch Kathleen Brown deliver "Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument Over Humanity."

2016-2017

Stephen Berry, University of Georgia

Watch Stephen Berry deliver "Drinking Yourself to Death in the Grand Age of Temperance: Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Self-Destruction.”

2015-2016

Gray Brechin, University of California, Berkeley

"Recovering from Depression: The Living New Deal Project Uncovers a Lost Civilization Built Eighty Years Ago, And What We Can Learn from It Today.”

2014-2015

Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut

Watch Frank Costigliola deliver “From Cambridge Avenue to Containment: Milwaukee in the Diaries of George F. Kennan”​

2012-2013

Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania

Watch Steven Hahn deliver "The Dimensions of Freedom: Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of the New American State."

2011-2012

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Watch W. Fitzhugh Brundage deliver "The American Tradition of Torture"

2010-2011

Kevin Boyle, Ohio State University

Watch Kevin Boyle deliver "The Splendid Dead: An American Ordeal"

2001 - 2010

2009-2010

Allen Guelzo, Gettysburg College

"Colonel Utley’s Emancipation; or, How Abraham Lincoln Offered to Pay for a Slave”

2008-2009

Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder

"The Ownership of the Public Lands: The Romance of Local Control meets the Romance of Expertise"

2007-2008

Nina Silber, Boston University

"Why Northern Women Matter for Understanding the Civil War"

2006-2007

Stephen Engle, Florida Atlantic University

"All the President's Statesmen: Union Governors and the Civil War"

2005-2006

Lesley J. Gordon, Akron University

"'I Never was a Coward': Questions of Bravery in a Civil War Regiment"

2004-2005

William Blair, Pennsylvania State University

"Why didn't the North hang some rebels? The postwar debate over punishment for treason"

2003-2004

Joan Waugh, UCLA

"Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: A History of the Union Cause"

2002-2003

J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida

"'Touched with Fire?': Two Philadelphia Novelists Remember the Civil War"

2001-2002

David Blight, Yale University

"Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: A Relationship in Language, Politics, and Memory"

2000-2001

George Rable, University of Alabama

"News from Fredericksburg"

1992 - 2000

1999-2000

Catherine Clinton, The Citadel

"Public Women and the Confederacy"

1998-1999

Phillip Paludan, University of Kansas

"War and Home: The Civil War Encounter"

1997-1998

Edward L. Ayers,  University of Virginia

"Momentous Events in Small Places: The Coming of the Civil War in Two American Communities"

1996-1997

John Y. Simon, Southern Illinois University

"Grant and Halleck: Contrasts in Command"

1995-1996

Gary W. Gallagher, Pennsylvania State University

"Jubal A. Early, The Lost Cause, and Civil War History"

1994-1995

Robert W. Johannsen, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign

"The 'Wicked Rebellion' and the Republic: Henry Tuckerman's Civil War"

1993-1994

Richard Nelson Current, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

"What Is An American? Abraham Lincoln and 'Multiculturalism'"

1992-1993

Mark E. Neely, Jr., St. Louis University

"Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties"