Reunion: U.S. Politics And Their Context

At 3:45 PM on Friday, your Reunion Committee is delighted to have arranged a ‘69-only session with Beverly Gage, Professor of American History and, since 2017, Director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. 

She is a bright star of the Yale faculty, not only advancing scholarship in American Studies and History, and running the prestigious Grand Strategy program, but also a winner of Yale’s Ribicoff Award for excellence in teaching.

Professor Gage has an extraordinarily broad and rich understanding of American political culture and its peculiar history – especially at its fringes. I met her as part of the faculty for a Yale-for-Life week-long seminar on the origins and consequences of the World Wars.  She is a superb educator, who places events and facts in historical context, making them not just comprehensible but visibly linked to who we are – and how we govern ourselves – today.

In her presentation for our Reunion, she will offer observations on – and an opportunity to discuss — whether the current American political “moment” is as unique – and as portentious – as the fevered tone of our public discourse seems to presume.

I’m excited about the prospect of hearing Professor Gage, and I’m confident that Class members who attend will be intrigued, enlightened, and charmed by our  session with her.  Mark your calendars: 4:00 PM, Friday.  Class of 1969 only!

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About Beverly Gage, Ph.D.

Professor of History and American Studies,

Director, Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy

Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century American history and director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. Her courses focus on American politics, statecraft, social movements, and government, broadly conceived.

Her first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Her next book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century, will be a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Gage has written for numerous journals and magazines, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and The Nation. She appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour, among other programs. In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College. In 2015, she was elected to serve as the first chair of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. Professor Gage is a graduate of Yale University (1994, BA, American Studies) and Columbia University (2004, PhD, History).

Recent publications include:

“The Political ‘Center’ Isn’t Gone — Just Disputed,” NYT Magazine, February 7, 2019

“America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising,” NYT Magazine, July 17, 2018

“An Intellectual Historian Argues His Case Against Identity Politics,” NYT Book Review, August 15, 2017

“In Firing Comey, Did Trump Unleash the Next Deep Throat?” New York Times, May 11, 2017

“A ‘Resistance’ Stands Against Trump, But What Will It Stand For?” New York Times Magazine, January 31, 2017

“Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump,” New York Times Book Review, January 17, 2017

“How ‘Elites’ Became One of the Nastiest Epithets in American Politics,” New York Times Magazine, January 8, 2017

“What an Uncensored Letter to MLK Reveals,” New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2014