January 6 and the Politics of History
On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it.
As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.
Jim Downs (Author, Editor)
JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College, a 2025–26 Guggenheim Fellow, and the director of the African American History Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia. In addition to coediting Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, he has authored Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine; and Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Stephanie McCurry (Author)
STEPHANIE MCCURRY is professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of three prize winning books, including Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War and Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.
Joanne B. Freeman (Author)
JOANNE B. FREEMAN is professor of history at Yale University. She is the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and the editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings.
Elizabeth Hinton (Author)
ELIZABETH HINTON is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University. She is the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.
Jill Lepore (Author)
JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, and Book of Ages.
William Sturkey (Author)
WILLIAM STURKEY is an associate professor of history at the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White and To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.
Julian E. Zelizer (Author)
JULIAN ZELIZER is professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the award-winning author and editor of many books, including Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.