The Contemporary History Institute Speaker Series presents Dr. Andrew Hartman, Department of History, Illinois State University discussing "Karl Marx and the American Academy in the Age of Reagan" on April 4 at 4:45 p.m.

In 1985, the  Washington Times  columnist Arnold Beichman wrote that Marxism was “the growth industry of the American campus.” Beichman overstated the case, but he was not entirely wrong. In the age of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, many American readers, at least, academic readers, turned to Marx. Yet as Marxism flourished in an academic register, Marx had very little purchase on American political life.  Marx was alive, but the variant of Marx that lived on would have been unrecognizable to previous generations of Marxist revolutionaries. This talk by Andrew Hartman will flesh out this ironic history of the American Marx reception in the late twentieth century.  

Andrew Hartman is Professor of History at Illinois State University and is the author of two monographs, "Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School,” published in 2008, and "A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars," published in 2015 with a second edition in 2019. He is also the co-editor of “American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times,” and is currently putting the finishing touches on his third monograph, "Karl Marx in America," which is contracted to be published by the University of Chicago Press.