Mark McGarvie, J.D., Ph.D., is an American historian who writes, teaches, and shares history so as to respect the integrity of the historical actors who made our history. Accordingly, he believes that the goal of studying history is understanding, not judgment. Too many scholars today condemn the past and those who lived through it without trying to understand either.
Professor McGarvie taught American history and legal history for over twenty years, retiring from the College of William and Mary in 2020. Since then, he has held academic appointments at the American Bar Foundation and the Newberry Library in Chicago. McGarvie was a Golieb Fellow in legal history at NYU School of Law, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of multiple awards for his writing. His second book, One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State, was chosen as a History Book Club "featured selection". In total, Professor McGarvie has published four books and numerous journal articles and book chapters, and lectured and taught extensively in the United States and in Europe.
Professor McGarvie is best known for his work explaining the creation of the private sector during the Constitutional era and the early republic, the first time any people conceived of and implemented a realm of private concerns beyond governmental reach. His writings in this field explore the nature of church-state separation and private sector philanthropy as resulting from the creation of a private sector. His most recent work explores the intellectual roots and historical precedents for our current culture wars, a topic he has addressed in numerous lectures in recent years.
4 topics · no fee, no honorarium, no mileage
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Professor McGarvie describes the development of pragmatism in the early 19th century as a critique of the individualistic and rights-oriented ideology of the Enlightenment. Pragmatism served as the basis for the first progressive movement, which was ultimately repudiated in the ascension of the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover Republicans in the 1920s. How are today's progressives repeating the political errors of their predecessors?
European colonialism recently has been presented, both popularly and scholastically, as an evil that decimated native populations, destroyed native cultures, precipitated extensive wars, and caused irreparable environmental harm. Avoiding judgment in favor of understanding, Professor McGarvie will develop the context for European discovery of the New World in the intellectual, technological, political, and cultural contexts of both the Native Americans and the European explorers in the 16th - 18th centuries.
Professor McGarvie is considered one of our leading authorities on the separation of church and state. His ground-breaking thesis articulated in 2004 with the publication of One Nation Under Law has gained tremendous support and led to invitations to write successor volumes and essays for both Oxford and Cambridge University Presses and to speak on the subject across the country.
In this presentation, Professor McGarvie will explain how the separation of church and state resulted from the Founders' creation of a private sector through the contract clause of the Constitution. Contract law revolutionized the relationships between citizens and their governments. Placing religion in the private sector required its separation from government and the removal of churches from performing public functions in education, poor relief, and record keeping, for which they had responsibility in the colonial era.
In the early days of the 20th century, New Women caused a media sensation in newspapers and magazines by threatening standards of sexual propriety, living alone while single, pursuing careers, and engaging in politics even before given the right to vote. These college-educated young women in their 20s forced a reconsideration of sexual roles in America that contributed to women's suffrage and the free expression existing several years later in the flapper movement.
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