Parker History Lecture
Sweet Land of Liberty:
The History of Civil Rights in the North and Why It Matters Now More than Ever
A Lecture by Dr. Thomas J. Sugrue
Thursday, Feb. 6 at 7 p.m.
Centennial Hall
The 2025 Davis R. Parker Memorial History Lecture features New York University's Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History Dr. Thomas J. Sugrue. He will present "Sweet Land of Liberty: The History of Civil Rights in the North and Why It Matters Now More than Ever." Dr. Sugrue, an historian of American cities and suburbs, race, civil rights, politics and public policy, is the author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
This event is free and open to the public. We hope you can join us!
About Dr. Thomas J. Sugrue
Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Educated at Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard, he is a twentieth-century U.S. historian of American cities and suburbs, race, civil rights, politics and public policy. Sugrue is past president of the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Royal Historical Society, the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the Society of American Historians.
Sugrue’s first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton University Press, 1996), won four awards, including the Bancroft Prize in History. His second book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008), is the first comprehensive history of the Black freedom struggle outside the South. Sugrue is also author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton University Press, 2010) and These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2015), with Glenda Gilmore. Sugrue has co-edited several books including W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); The New Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Neoliberal Cities (NYU Press, 2020); and The Long Year: A 2020 Reader (Columbia University Press, 2022). He regularly contributes to newspapers and other media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Geographic, and London Review of Books.
Sugrue has won fellowships and grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fletcher Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, ACLS, NEH, SSRC, and the Brookings Institution. Sugrue has won two teaching awards, is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and has given over 450 public talks worldwide in the last two decades. He has also served as an expert witness in several civil rights and voting rights cases, has appeared in several documentary films, and regularly consults with museums, foundations, and community organizations.
About the Lecture Series
After Headmaster Davis R. Parker’s death in 1989, his predecessor, Leslie R. Severinghaus, proposed the establishment of an annual lecture dedicated to Mr. Parker’s memory and recognizing his passion for American history.
The initial funding for this endowed lecture series was provided by Dr. Severinghaus and by a bequest directed from Mr. Parker’s estate established by his wife, Jane. The Parker Memorial Fund supports the lecture program and has been sustained by gifts from alumni, faculty, and friends of Mr. Parker.
Upcoming Lectures
Speaker highlights
Dr. Julian Zelizer
Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University
Dr. Elizabeth Hinton
Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law
Yale University
Dr. Timothy Snyder
Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University
Dr. Maya Jasanoff
Coolidge Professor of History, Harvard University
Dr. Alan Brinkley
Professor of History, Columbia University
Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust
Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
David Halberstam
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, & historian
Philip Caputo
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist & foreign correspondent
Dr. Paul Kennedy
J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University
Dr. Joanne B. Freeman
Professor of History & American Studies, Yale University
Dr. Daniel Ellsberg Political activist responsible for releasing The Pentagon Papers
Dr. Eric Foner
Dewitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University