Learn About Radical Social Movements in the Village and the Battle for Free Speech

Village Preservation presents programs that offer insight into the rich history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. Sometimes that history provides keen insight into the issues of today. What issues are you interested in affecting in today’s society? Labor, peace, birth control, civil liberties, women’s rights? Central to every one of these movements was a connecting thread: free speech — the right to dissent, to criticize, to protest.

On Tuesday, October 25th Village Preservation is gathering some of the leading experts in this area to discuss how these issues were addressed in our neighborhoods. Co-sponsored by the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University (chaired by Amy Aronson), this free webinar will take us through a history that still impacts our daily lives. Gathering via zoom, we’ll be able to discuss these important topics with experts from around the country, and share the history of these movements with those in our neighborhoods and far beyond.

Here’s more about some of the experts:

Moderated by recent ACLU president Susan Herman, panelists will particularly focus on the struggle for reproductive rights and labor union organizing, and will shed light on the insights that these histories offer into the current political moment.

Susan Herman is the inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Like Ginsburg, she served as General Counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. In October 2008, Herman was elected as the seventh President of the ACLU, a position she held until stepping down in January 2021. She has published articles in scholarly journals, popular press, and online forums, and written several books, including Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (2011), which was awarded the Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. Herman has also written Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs for the ACLU and other organizations on a range of constitutional criminal procedure issues. 

Ellen Chesler is a Columbia University-trained historian who has spent much of her professional career in government and philanthropy, bringing both practical and intellectual perspectives to her writing and advocacy on behalf of women’s rights. Currently a Senior Fellow at CUNY’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Affairs, she is the co-editor of several anthologies, and the author of more than 100 essays and reviews, as well as of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, which remains in print 30 years after its first publication in 1992.

Lara Vapnek is Professor of History at St. John’s University, in Queens, New York. She is the author of two books, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (2015) and Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (2009), as well as many articles exploring the intersections between gender, race, class, and political activism. Vapnek is a Fellow to the New York Academy of History and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is currently writing a book examining the history of infant feeding in the United States from the 1850s through the present.

Geof Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. Geof joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1973. Over the years, he has served as Dean of the Law School (1987-1994) and as Provost of the University of Chicago (1994-2002). A leading constitutional scholar, Stone is the author or co-author of many books on constitutional law, including Social Media, Freedom of Speech and The Future of Our Democracy (2022) and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), which won eight national book awards. He is a former Chair of the Board of the American Constitution Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, Stone chaired the faculty committee that drafted The University of Chicago’s Statement on Free Expression, which has since been adopted by more than eighty colleges and universities across the nation.

Register today for this free event, and join us to learn about our neighborhoods’ impact on radical movements and free speech.