Profs and Pints - Nashville

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “The Lessons of Lebanon,” on the history and struggles of a Middle Eastern country decades in the crosshairs of world conflict, with Dylan Baun, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, scholar of Lebanon, and author of Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-lebanon-lessons ]

For the Lebanese people, history is not a memory of a distant past but the source of continued conflict and threats to life and livelihood. Central to Lebanon’s story are questions of identity. Is it a bridge to the West? A heart of the Arab world? Or a reluctant frontline in Arab opposition to Israel, its neighbor?

Join Dr. Dylan Baun, who has spent more than 15 years studying Lebanon and engaging in on-the-ground research on life there, for a talk that will give you a much richer and more nuanced understanding of that nation and the forces that have shaped life there over recent decades.

We’ll start with Lebanon’s 1943 attainment of independence from French colonial rule. You’ll learn how the political, economic, and social leaders of Lebanon's two largest communities, Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians, came together to resist the French. Their cross-confessional unity was formalized in a 1943 agreement between them calling for Lebanon to be a separate country with an Arab identity. The growth of the pan-Arab movement during the Cold War raised questions, however, about how separate Lebanon would be, giving rise to the tensions that led to Lebanon’s first civil war, which Dr. Baun chronicled in his book Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920–1958.

From there we’ll look at how 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which did not involve Lebanon, nonetheless had a major impact on Lebanese society. Many Lebanese responded to pan-Arabism’s failure in that conflict by seeking alternate ideologies supporting the liberation of Palestine. Divisions emerged pitting a Lebanese president and army that advocated staying out of regional affairs against groups, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and Progressive Socialist Party, that championed the Palestinian cause. These dynamics were at the center of the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975, the focus of Professor Baun’s book Beirut Radical.

Dr. Baun will discuss how Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon led to the founding of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, which grew in influence in the 1980s and 1990s by appealing to marginalized communities. Hezbollah’s alliance with Iran and use of terror as a tactic helped propel its rise in Lebanese politics but also provoked U.S. and Israeli blowback, which has brought Lebanon the destruction and chaos that may lead to Hezbollah’s downfall. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A 2019 protest in Beirut. Photo by Shahen Araboghlian.

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “The Rise of the Skull Readers,” on how the pseudoscience of phrenology became a force in American life, with Paul Stob, scholar of the history of ideas in America, director of Vanderbilt University’s Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership, and author of Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-skull-readers ]

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of phrenology, a newly discovered “science” premised on a simple yet revolutionary idea: The bumps on your head mirror those on your brain and serve as the keys to understanding your past, present, and future.

Today we generally hear phrenology described as a racist pseudoscience or used as a punchline in discussions of silly ideas of the past. Such dismissals, however, downplay the tremendous role phrenology played in its heyday’s intellectual discussions and blind us to how much it was seen as a force for positive change.

The reality is that phrenology’s leading proponents influenced some of the most significant reforms in American history, including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, public education, temperance, and the greater embrace of democracy. They also garnered the support of many prominent Americans—including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman—all of whom embraced phrenology as a science of liberation and hope.

Help your brain absorb a deep understanding of phrenology by coming to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom for this talk by Paul Stob, a professor of communication studies who has written extensively on quirky aspects of American life, including new sciences and reform efforts.

He’ll especially focus on how a single family, the siblings Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte Fowler, played an outsized role in phrenology’s rise. Spreading a message of hope in the decades before the Civil War, they preached a scientific gospel perfectly fitted to the problems and possibilities of a growing nation. From the displays at their popular Phrenological Cabinet in New York to their lectures across the country to the thousands of books and periodicals they shipped to their followers every month, they built an empire that touched almost all aspects of American society.

Professor Stob will explain phrenology through captivating imagery and hands-on visual aids. If you are brave enough you can receive your own free phrenology exam—just as millions of Americans did in the nineteenth century. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Porcelain phrenology head busts for sale in Clearwater, Florida (Photo by Justin Waters / Creative Commons.)