Little Platoon Seminar: Tocqueville in Politics

Olivier Zunz is James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Changing Face of Inequality (1982); Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (1990); Naissance de l’Amérique industrielle: Détroit, 1880–1920 (1992); Why the American Century? (1998); Philanthropy in America: A History (2012); and The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022). His work includes editing The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics, with Alan S. Kahan (2002); Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (2004); Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (2011); and Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (2016). He is also editor of Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, with Charles Tilly, David William Cohen, William B. Taylor, and William T. Rowe (1985); The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940, with David Ward (1992); and Social Contracts under Stress (2002). Professor Zunz has been a Guggenheim Fellow and visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France, among other appointments abroad. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia.

James W. Muller is a professor emeritus of political science at University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he taught from 1983-2023. He serves as chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the International Churchill Society. Educated at Harvard University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, he is a by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He served as a White House fellow in 1983–84 and won the Alaska Governor’s Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities in 2008.

In 2020 Professor Muller completed his definitive edition of The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan by Winston Churchill after more than 30 years of meticulous work. This is the first time in over a century that the story has been told and published in its entirety. Muller’s book, published by St. Augustine’s Press in two volumes, is the first unabridged edition to appear since Churchill himself published the first edition in 1899.

Prior to his most recent accomplishment, Professor Muller edited two books about Winston Churchill, Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 1999), and new editions of two of Churchill’s interwar books, Thoughts and Adventures (ISI Books, 2009) and Great Contemporaries (ISI Books, 2012).

Dr. Nabors joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, in 2011 and now serves as the chairman of the department. Educated at Claremont McKenna College, the University of Chicago, and the University of Oregon, he has taught American government and political philosophy at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon. His current scholarly research is focused on the changing character of American government leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (University of Missouri Press, 2017), was recognized by the American Political Science Association as the best book of the year in American political thought. 

Prior to becoming a professor, Dr. Nabors was a high technology business executive in Portland, Oregon. He has remained actively engaged in supporting economic and civic development in his communities.

Dr. Nabors is from Fair Haven, New Jersey.