Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by University of Pittsburgh’s Lara Putnam to discuss the recent No Kings protest movement.
Over the weekend, millions of Americans took to the streets at over 2,600 ‘No Kings’ protest events. Organizers describe the movements as a push to protect democracy, protesting several actions by the Trump administration, while critics called the events a stunt and anti-American.
Just how effective are protests? From the Tea Party to today, how have protest movements changed in American society? And where do we go from here? To help answer these questions, this week, Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Lara Putnam, UCIS Research Professor of History and director of the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lara Putnam is UCIS Research Professor of History and director of the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She researches social movements and political participation in local, national, and transnational dimensions. Her 2016 AHR article, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” helped advance discussion of the implications of technological change for historians’ research practice.
In recent years, Putnam has used ethnographic and oral historical methods to explore shifts in grassroots politics in rust belt Pennsylvania and beyond. Her sole-authored and collaborative publications in this vein have appeared in public-facing and scholarly venues including the 2020 volume Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, ed. Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo (Oxford University Press) as well as the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, New Republic, Vox, and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. She leads the Civic Resilience Initiative at Pitt’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security.
Second “No Kings Day” protests the largest single-day political protest ever*, with 5-6.5 million participants, Strength in Numbers
Protest Demographic Estimates, Dana Fischer on BlueSky