Stephanie Coontz Gives Opening Talk for ‘Berg’s Center for Ethics
Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap will kick off this semester’s Center for Ethics series Memory and Forgetting with on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall.Thursday, September 8, 2011 09:58 AM
Her talk, “History, Politics and the Lure of Nostalgia,” co-sponsored by the department of history and the women’s studies program, is free and open to the public.
Since the 1960s, American politics have repeatedly centered around the “Culture Wars,” in which conservatives attempt to defend a “traditional” notion of family values based on a 1950s model that is male-dominated and heterosexual. Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College, challenges the notion that the 1950s were what we pretend they were, and thus upends the idea that we can simply return to traditional values. In doing so, she undermines the nostalgia that informs much of our political discourse.
Memory and Forgetting is co-directed by Holly Cate, assistant professor of theatre, and Dr. Paul McEwan, associate professor of media and communication.
For more information on the series, please visit http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/aboutus/cfe/.
