Free Speech in American Society

In the contemporary USA, free speech is often understood as a legal doctrine or a branch of Constitutional Law. But it can also be understood as a tradition, a way of life, part of American culture. In this seminar, we will explore the hypothesis that America’s free speech tradition has been shaped primarily by people who aren’t lawyers or lawmakers: by beatniks, pamphleteers, abolitionists, Red Power activists, queers, feminists and Free Lovers, poets, preachers, and hackers. People from all these groups have shaped America’s free speech tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day, although they’re usually omitted from Constitution-centered histories of free speech because they weren’t lawyers or parties to lawsuits.

This course provides a transnational, cultural perspective on free speech history that decenters the First Amendment from its quasi-sacrosanct place in the historiography of American liberty. Instead of looking at legal arguments and decisions, we will survey the very wide range of social contexts in which struggles over free speech have taken place in American history, from the  Pueblo Revolt in seventeenth-century New Mexico to the rise of MAGA in our own time. We’ll seek to understand how, starting in the twentieth century, “free speech” and “the First Amendment” became practically synonymous, with the result that most contemporary Americans know very little about the history of free expression in this country. And we’ll ask what (if anything) gives America’s four-hundred-year-old free speech tradition its unity and coherence.