Lectures, panel discussions, interviews, and conversations on Howard's work involving Africa, Asia, global history and journalism. Click any video to watch.
Rethinking how the modern world was made.
History is anything but a settled matter. The questions I have pursued across five decades of reporting and writing — about Africa’s centrality to the modern world, about China’s ambitions, about race and power, about who gets to tell the story, about the debts American culture owes to Black Americans — remain urgently unresolved. I bring questions like these to audiences as arguments to be engaged with, not merely as conclusions to be received.
Drawing on my books about Africa, Asia, the African diaspora, and American culture, and on decades of firsthand reporting around the world, I approach these subjects as both a reporter and a historian. My talks connect what I have witnessed in the field with what I have learned from the archive, asking how power works, how societies remember and forget, what gets erased, and how the stories we inherit shape the world we see.
The neighborhood that made Thelonious Monk — and what its erasure tells us about America
Before New York built its shrine to “high culture,” Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill: twelve blocks of densely alive Black community, one of the most creatively fertile neighborhoods in American cultural history. Thelonious Monk grew up there. Robert Moses tore it down. This talk draws on The Jungles to ask what was lost, who decided it was expendable, and what the erasure of San Juan Hill reveals about the way America has long written its own story.
And what that means for how we read the present
The standard story of modernity begins almost exclusively in Europe, and it is wrong. Africa and the commerce in Black bodies across the Atlantic were the hidden engines of European expansion, global capitalism, and the invention of the West. This talk draws on Born in Blackness to make that case — and to ask what it means that we have marginalized or excluded Africa from the story for so long.
From the age of revolutions to the unfinished present
From the Haitian Revolution to Kwame Nkrumah and the fight for independence in Africa and civil rights in America, the struggle for Black freedom has been one of the great driving forces in modern history, as well as one of the least understood. This talk draws on The Second Emancipation and Born in Blackness to trace that arc and to explore where it leads.
Historical roots, present ambitions, and what the West keeps misreading
China’s rise is not an anomaly. It is a restoration. Drawing on Everything Under the Heavens and over a decade of reporting from across Asia, this talk places Beijing’s current ambitions in the long sweep of Chinese history — and explains why Western policymakers keep being surprised by a country that has been telling us, quite often explicitly, how it sees its interests and its place in the world.
I do not do unpaid speaking appearances or writing. If you are interested in inviting my participation or contribution, please specify the length, format, date, and fee associated with your invitation in your initial correspondence.