D.C. Mondays: 200 Years of GW Student Activism

In the late 1960s, GW students famously hosted national protesters in their dorms, earning GW the nickname "Holiday Inn of the Revolution." But GW students have always engaged themselves in important issues, working to shape both campus and nation.

Before and during the Civil War, students faced off over slavery. In 1913, they participated in the Women's Suffrage March and in the 1930s protested both fascism and communism. After World War II, they lobbied to desegregate GW. Successful LGBTQ organization in the 1970s prepared students to respond to the HIV-AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, students work to reshape campus life for full inclusion of the entire student body. This talk by GW professor Phillip Troutman draws from several years of research conducted by GW students and highlights themes from the bicentennial exhibition Two Centuries of Student Stories.

 

About Phillip Troutman

Phillip Troutman is an assistant professor of writing and history at GW, and a founding member of the GW Working Group on Slavery and Its Legacies. He has published on the cultural history of enslaved African Americans and is currently completing a book entitled “Incendiary Pictures”: The Radical Visual Rhetoric of Abolition. Troutman was a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History in 2018-19 and held a 2018 National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Stipend in support of his research.

 

 

How to Participate

To participate, register online, and we will email you a link and instructions for joining the program on Zoom. Simply follow that link at the time the event starts (12 p.m. EDT). When you register, you can also request to receive a reminder email one day before the program with the link included.

 

 

About the D.C. Mondays Series

Join local authors, researchers and community members online for lively discussions about Washington, D.C.’s history, politics, culture and more.