American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives

In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. And the government of Florida would use any tactic at their disposal — legal or not — to get Copleston to admit it. Using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, journalist Robert W. Fieseler unravels the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary powers. The state of Florida would prefer that this history remain buried. But for nearly a decade, the Florida Legislature founded, funded, and supported the Johns Committee — an organization using the cover of communism to viciously attack members of the NAACP and queer professors and students. Spearheaded by Charley Johns, a multi-term politician in a gerrymandered legislature, the Committee was determined to eliminate any threats to the state’s white, conservative regime. Fieseler describes the heartbreaking ramifications for citizens of Florida whose lives were imperiled, profiling marginalized residents with compassion and a determination to bring their devastating experiences to light at last. A propulsive, human-centered drama, with fascinating insight into Florida politics, American Scare is a page-turning reckoning of our racist and homophobic past — and its chilling parallels to today.

About the Speakers
Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association ‘Journalist of the Year’ and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. Fieseler’s second queer history book American Scare, a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, publishes in June 2025. A former Athenaeum writer and proud Boston resident, he now lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Michael Bronski has been active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, publisher and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous award winning books including A Queer History of the United States, You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics, coauthored with Kay Whitlock. In 2017, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

We are pleased to invite you to the 2025 Torrence C. Harder Endowed Lecture with Andrea di Robilant on This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

From the author of the best-selling A Venetian Affair comes the story of an Italian Renaissance book editor who introduced European minds to the wider world through his passion for geography. In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling wood-cut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information on Asia and the “New World” available at the time. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance. In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup by the editor Giovambattista Ramusio. Learned and self-effacing, he gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo (he fact-checked them!) to detailed reports on Northern African cultures from the Muslim scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Mohammad al-Wazzan (later known as Leo Africanus). Diverse voices spill out from these chapters as di Robilant recounts how Ramusio pursued the sources, and how he understood both the darker episodes of “exploration” involving colonial violence and the voyage stories which included accounts of people from African and Asian lands, who had a great deal to share about their cultures. The result is a far-flung and delightful homage to one of the founding fathers of modern geography.

About the Author

Andrea di Robilant was born in Italy and educated in the United States at Columbia University, where he specialized in international affairs. After a career in journalism, he now teaches creative writing at the American University in Rome. He is the author of A Venetian Affair; Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon; Irresistible North: From Venice To Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers; and Chasing the Rose and Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse.

The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland

On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance?  Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him. Valland came face to face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, passed crucial information to the Resistance network, put herself deliberately in harm’s way to protect the museum and her staff, and faced death during the last hours of Liberation Day. She also single handedly provided information to stop the last train of looted artworks—bearing paintings by Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Braque, Degas, Modigliani, and Toulouse-Lautrec—from leaving France. Vivid and atmospheric, The Art Spy moves from the glittering days of pre-War Paris, through the tension-riddled cities of Europe on the eve of war, to the harrowing years of the Nazi occupation of France when brave people such as Valland risked everything to fight monstrous evil.

About the Speakers

Michelle Young is the author of The Art Spy. She is the founder of Untapped New York, an online magazine about New York City’s secrets and hidden places. She is also the author of Secret Brooklyn, Secret New York: An Unusual Guide, Secret New York: Hidden Bars and Restaurants, and Broadway. She is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and an instructor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. She has bylines in The Guardian, Narratively, The Forward, Business Insider, Hyperallergic, Wilson Quarterly, Food & Wine Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Curbed, and The Huffington Post. She is also a Lowell Thomas Journalist Award winner. Michelle’s photography has been published by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and The Museum of Modern Art, exhibited at The Museum of the City of New York, and included in numerous books. Michelle was featured on the History Channel production The Engineering That Built the World, Netflix’s Stay Here, Smithsonian Channel’s Searching for Secrets, PBS’ 10 That Changed America, and National Geographic’s Strange Truths.

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. Her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, has received the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was supported by a Public Scholars grant from the NEH and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization. She has been an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is an emerita professor of English at Hope College. She lives near Boston.