April Author Book Talks Feature Constitutional Reform and Nazi Looted Art
Press Release · Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Washington, DC

The National Archives presents virtual noontime author book talks in April on topics including Nazi looted art in France, a 2007 landmark Supreme Court ruling in environmental law, the rise and fall of 19th-century American politics, and a panel discussion on constitutional reform.

Panel Discussion: Making a New American Constitution and the Question of Constitutional Reform
Friday, April 2, at noon, ET
Register in advance; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel
In Making a New American Constitution, law professor George William Van Cleve explores the flaws in the United States Constitution that obstruct reforms urgently needed for national unity, proposes amendments, and shows that a new constitutional convention is essential to achieve them. Joining Van Cleve will be professors David Tanenhaus and Julian Maxwell Hayter.  

Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World
Tuesday, April 6, at noon, ET
Register in advance; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel
Bruno Lohse was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler’s art looting agency in Paris, he helped supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than 30,000 artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Göring in amassing an enormous private art collection. In Göring’s Man in Paris, author Jonathan Petropoulos, who spent nearly a decade interviewing Bruno Lohse, tells the story of Lohse’s life and offers a critical examination of the postwar art world.

The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court
Thursday, April 22, at noon, ET
Register in advance; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel
When the Supreme Court announced its 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, the decision to force that agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants was immediately hailed as a landmark. But in October 1999, when Joe Mendelson hand-delivered a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new cars, the outlook was not promising. Could something as ordinary as carbon dioxide be considered a harmful pollutant? And could the EPA be forced to regulate emissions? In The Rule of Five, law professor Richard J. Lazarus tells the gripping story of the most important environmental law case ever decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix their Democracy, 1865–1915
Thursday, April 29, at noon ET
Register in advance; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel
In the decades after the Civil War, many Americans believed democracy was broken. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. In The Age of Acrimony, historian Jon Grinspan charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America’s unruly politics and reveals our divisive political system’s enduring capacity to reinvent itself.