Winter Symposium

The 2026 HOTCUS Winter Symposium was held at the University of Liverpool on Friday, 27 February.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Symposium examining how the founding document has been remembered, contested, and reinterpreted across the twentieth century. Organised by Dr Cheryl Hudson (Liverpool) on Friday 27 February, the event brought together a mix of established scholars and postgraduate researchers from across the UK and internationally.

The symposium opened with a keynote lecture “American Hypocrisy,” delivered by Dr Emma Stone MacKinnon from Cambridge University. In a provocative analysis of the political thought of Gunnar Myrdal and Malcolm X, her paper explored how both men invoked national ideals to expose tensions with lived realities.

Across the day, panels examined the Declaration’s role in historical memory, and its global and domestic afterlives. Papers ranged from Loyalist refugees and Watergate-era constitutional rhetoric to voting rights movements and Cold War religious invocations of the founding.

A concluding roundtable reflected on the continuing power of the Declaration as a political language through which Americans interpret their past, contest their present, and imagine their future.

Previous Winter Symposiums

Professor Audra J. Wolfe delivers the Keynote at the 2019 Winter Symposium (University of Lincoln.

2025: The United States and World War II: Impacts and Legacies at Home and Abroad (University of Gloucestershire, 21 February 2024)

2024: The uses and abuses of ‘neoliberalism’ in modern US history (University College London, 16 February 2024)

2023: 1 963: A Watershed Year? (Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 24 February 2023)

2022: The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age (Liverpool John Moores University, 12 March 2022)

2020: Food, Health, and Welfare in U.S. History (Keele University, 22 February 2020)

2019: “Nuclear States”: Science, Technology, and American Society in the Atomic Age (University of Lincoln, 16 February 2019)

2018: The State of the State: What is American Political History Now? (University of Nottingham, 17 February 2018)

2017: War and Conflict in Twentieth-Century American Society and Culture (Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library, 18 February 2017)

2016: “Ordinary People”: Grassroots Organizing and Protest Movements in Twentieth Century America (University of Dundee, 13 February 2016)

2015: Memory and History in the Twentieth-Century United States (Canterbury Christ Church University, 21 February 2015)

2014: Dixie’s Great War: The American South and World War I (Portsmouth University, 28 February 2014)

2013: Religion and Politics in the United States (King’s College London, 22 February 2013)

2012: Punishment in the American Century (University of Southampton, 3 February 2012)

2011: Immigration and the Federal Government (University of Sunderland, 25 February 2011)

2010: American Music and Popular Culture (University of Reading, 4 March 2010)

2009: Beyond Otherness: The Politics of Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States (University of Sheffield, 27 February 2009)