2025 Bernard Bailyn Lecture

La Trobe University’s Department of Archaeology and History is pleased to present the 2025 Bernard Bailyn Lecture in North American History.

Our speaker this year is Dr. Alan McPherson, Thomas J. Freaney, Jr. Professor of History, Temple University, Philadelphia. He will present ‘The Omen: Iran-Contra and Trump’s Assault on American Democracy.’

Register to join us on campus or online

This public lecture is free to attend in-person at La Trobe's Bundoora campus in Melbourne, Australia or online in a simultaneous webinar. Those who register for the webinar will receive a web link in a confirmation email and reminders.

Abstract

A president defying Congress. Disrespect for the law. Attacks on the press. Evasion in the courts. The privatization of war. Quid pro quos with foreign nations. The mounting dangers to American democracy have long been with us. But all these perils first emerged together during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush era. This opaque foreign policy mess has receded from history, a minor speedbump at the triumphant end of the Cold War. With American democracy in increasing jeopardy from the inside, however, Iran-Contra must be reassessed as a major step down the dark path of Donald Trump’s illiberalism. At the time, many warned of the broad attack on democratic norms, yet no one paid a real price or learned a lesson. Those failures left the country more divided than ever before and ill-equipped for the more severe assaults from Trump and his ilk.

Alan McPherson is Freaney Professor of History and the Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University in Philadelphia. He obtained his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 and taught at Howard University (2001-2008) and the University of Oklahoma (2008-2017). He was a fellow at Harvard and twice a Fulbright Fellow, to the Dominican Republic and Argentina. He is the prize-winning author of twelve books and dozens of articles and chapters, mostly on U.S.-Latin American relations. Among his works are Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Harvard), The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (Oxford), and Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice (North Carolina). His new book is The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (North Carolina).