Book Breaks | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (2024)

About Book Breaks

Every Sunday at 2:00 pm ET (11:00 am PT) on Zoom

Each week our hosts interview renowned scholars and discuss their acclaimed and frequently award-winning works, followed by a Q&A with the at-home audience. Please click any of the upcoming episodes to register. You can purchase any of the books featured on our bookshop.org page, for which we receive an affiliate commission.

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Students: Submit your question for the upcoming Book Breaks guest. If your question is chosen, it will be answered live on the show and you will be named History Scholar of the Week! You and your teacher will win a $50 gift certificate to the Gilder Lehrman Gift Shop.

*Your question can be about the book or the topic in general. Please submit only one question per program. Students should be in middle or high school and at least 13 years old.

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Rachel L. Swarns

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

About the book: Why and how did religious institutions align with enslavers? In 1838, Georgetown University’s Jesuit clergy weighed the risk of bankruptcy and the likely collapse of their school against the lives of 272 people, and decided to sell the enslaved people who labored on their campus. To illuminate the full significance of this decision, journalist Rachel L. Swarns traces the history of Ann Joice, an indentured servant pressed into slavery, and Joice’s descendants.

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As a High School History teacher, I love Book Breaks for so many reasons. It allows my students to listen to some of the world’s preeminent History scholars from the comfort of their own homes. The History Scholar of the Week contest adds an element of excitement and recognition that I think young people in particular, can look forward to. In so many ways, Gilder Lehrman has made the latest and greatest scholarship so much more accessible to ordinary teachers and learners.

—Martina Madden, Stuyvesant High School in New York

Book Breaks is an important and novel instructional modality that high school history teachers should embrace. I see each Book Breaks author as a co-teacher for my class and a way for students to feel more connected to the historians who wrote their textbook–Give Me Liberty!–or helped them understand historical people, sources, and events.

—Glenn Whitman, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland

I’m a retired teacher, now serving as a volunteer researcher for several local historical societies. I know of no other Internet offering that compares in scope to Book Breaks. I look forward to an author interview every Sunday afternoon. It’s like attending a one-hour graduate seminar each week where viewers can ask questions via the chat. It would be a shame if I had to miss a Book Breaks broadcast, but no worries ... they’re all there on the Gilder Lehrman website to view again anytime.

-Don Gallagher, Jr., Retired Teacher in Pennsylvania