CHR Book Launch: Sam Lebovic's "State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime"
Sam Lebovic in conversation with Nate Greenberg
Friday, December 1, 2023 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EST
Horizon Hall 6325
Please join the CHR for a book launch and discussion of Sam Lebovic's State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime.
This event features a book sale! You may also order here.
This is a fully in person event.
About the event:
Nate Greenberg (Modern and Classical Languages) and Sam Lebovic (History/Art History) will discuss the history of the Espionage Act, the challenges that secrecy poses to democracy, the politics of national security and civil liberties, the rise of conspiracy theories, and recent controversies in information security including the ongoing prosecutions of Julian Assange and Donald Trump. They will also chat about the role that historical scholarship can play in contemporary debates about politics and policy and about the process of researching and writing works of narrative history.
More about the book:
In State of Silence, political historian Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act. First passed in 1917, it was initially used to punish critics of World War I. Yet as Americans began to balk at the act’s restrictions on political dissidents and the press, the government turned its focus toward keeping its secrets under wraps. The resulting system for classifying information is absurdly cautious, staggeringly costly, and shrouded in secrecy, preventing ordinary Americans from learning what their country is doing in their name, both at home and abroad.
Shedding new light on the bloated governmental security apparatus that’s weighing our democracy down, State of Silence offers the definitive history of America’s turn toward secrecy—and its staggering human costs.
More about the speakers:
Sam Lebovic is an historian of U.S. politics, culture, civil liberties, and foreign relations. He teaches broadly in these areas; his research focuses on the ways that democratic life and the public sphere have been shaped by capitalism and imperialism in the twentieth century. Educated at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago, he held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU and Rutgers before coming to Mason in 2013. State of Silence is his third book.
His first book, Free Speech and Unfree News (Harvard, 2016), provided a new account of American press freedom in the twentieth century. It argued that the right to free speech was inadequate to produce a democratic press in an era defined by corporate media consolidation and the rise of state secrecy. Free Speech and Unfree News won the Paul Murphy Prize in Civil Liberties from the American Society for Legal History and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (for best book on the history of politics or political economy).
His second book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, was published by the University of Chicago Press in May 2022. Focusing on efforts to manage the international flow of culture from the 1940s to the 1970s – educational exchange programs, international cultural institutions, visa and passport policies – it shows how the U.S. sought to export its culture at the same time that it insulated its own public sphere from foreign influence. The result, the book reveals, was a lopsided flow of international culture: the world knew more about American culture than Americans knew about the world. Understanding the contradictory structures of postwar informational flows, the book shows, helps us rethink the histories of U.S. culture, foreign policy, and globalization.
Nathaniel Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. Focusing on the intersection of art and politics in the modern Middle East and North Africa, he is the author of several books including most recently How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (Edinburgh 2019).
