Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “George Washington Never Declared Independence,” an exploration of our first president’s evolving American identity, with Denver Brunsman, associate professor of history at George Washington University and scholar of the American Revolution and early American republic.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/balt-washington-never-declared .]

With our nation’s 250th anniversary approaching, it’s time for a fresh assessment of one of the key figures who got the ball rolling.
Trace the unconventional steps that George Washington took in embracing American citizenship, separate from his status as a British colonial subject, with historian Denver Brunsman, a Profs and Pints fan favorite and the author of the forthcoming book George Washington and His World: Enslaver, Revolutionary, President.

It will be the ninth time Professor Brunsman has given an annual talk tied to Presidents’ Day and George Washington’s Birthday, and each has been a blast, featuring odes to America’s first president and ending in historic toasts.

You’ll learn how George Washington missed the fiery debates that marked the political process culminating in Congress approving independence on July 2, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence two days later. That’s because he had been leading the Continental Army against British forces for the past year. As a result, Washington never signed the Declaration or, for that matter, formally declared independence.

Instead, Washington had followed a more evolutionary path to an American identity. The process began during the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763 and continued during the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, when he traded tobacco for wheat as the primary cash crop at Mount Vernon. It crystalized in his command of American forces.

The upshot was that Washington embraced a separate American identity months, even years, before most of his fellow revolutionaries. You’ll embrace learning history after hearing Denver Brunsman discuss this founding father’s fight for freedom. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: “Washington Taking Command of the American Army–At Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 3rd, 1775,” an 1876 Currier & Ives lithograph (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Ethics of Good Sex,” a philosophical and practical guide to promoting pleasure while ensuring respect, with Quill R. Kukla, professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University and author of Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-ethics-sex .]

Most discourse around sexual ethics—regardless of political orientation—focuses on how sex can go wrong and how we can avoid bad or harmful sex. Our sexual education emphasizes ensuring consent and taking “no” for an answer.

But as a society we spend almost no time discussing how to have good sex that is pleasurable for everyone involved and respects everyone’s agency. We are told to make sure that our partner says “yes,” but we are given no tools or roadmaps for what to do to have good sex, rather than minimally ethical sex, after that yes is given. We get no lessons on how to figure out what sexual activities we would actually enjoy, or for how to communicate about sex beyond asking for and giving consent.

Gain insights on how to take your discussions with sex partners to the next level with Quill Kukla, a philosopher and long-time participant in queer and kinky alternative sex communities who has written many scholarly and popular articles on sexual consent, communication, and ethics and who consults and gives workshops on safe, pleasurable, and ethical sex in the context of the Berlin club and rave scene.

We’ll examine how we can communicate about and enjoy good, pleasurable sex that respects the agency of everyone involved. Among the topics Professor Kukla will discuss: How to figure out what gives us pleasure; how to safely try out new activities that we’re not sure we will like; how to communicate well about sex with our potential partners; and how to manage power differentials within sex.

Looking ahead to future generations, Professor Kukla also will discuss how to raise children who will be capable of respecting their partners and of understanding and advocating for their own sexual desires and boundaries. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30).

Image by Canva

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Satanic Panics,” a look at waves of fear of demonic activity as an American tradition, with Luxx Mishou, cultural historian and former instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy and area community colleges.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-satanic-panics2 ]

The 1980s found the United States gripped by fear of Satanic cults targeting children. They were believed to be corrupting young ones in daycare centers and tempting teens through subliminal messages on heavy metal albums or through the quiet inclusion of demonic rituals in role-playing games. Satanic serial killers supposedly stalked the suburbs. Doctors helped patients uncover what were claimed to be repressed memories of ritualistic satanic abuse.

Parents, police, and politicians were urged to protect impressionable youths from both moral and physical danger. With Satanic cults deemed to be a real and material threat, it was a frightening time for everyone, including those who suddenly came under suspicion for doing evil deeds.

Then, suddenly, it all faded from public consciousness, just as surely as did eighties fads such mullet haircuts, leg warmers, and Cabbage Patch Kids.

Why did it all start? Why did it stop? And has this happened before or since?

Hear such questions tackled by Luxx Mishou, a cultural historian and media specialist who has long researched the devious and villainous in cultural artifacts. She’ll discuss moral panics as a longstanding cultural tradition, with each new one stemming from fear of cultural shifts and shaped by the time and place where it occurred. Among the panics we’ll look into are the Red Scare of the 1950s and the public response to the gruesome 1969 murders committed by the Manson Family.

Delving into the 1980s panic, Mishou will describe how it began with the 1980 publication of psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder’s memoir Michelle Remembers, detailing the suppressed memories of ritualistic abuse reportedly suffered by a patient. As that book quickly became a best seller, its ideas saturated American culture. A California daycare center became the focus of a three-year investigation, followed by three years of trials, based on allegations that its owner had engaged in secret ritualistic abuse of the children in its care.

Mishou will lead you through the media that convinced the public that devil worshipers were among them, and she’ll talk about how reactions to imagined threats can have very real social costs. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Japanese Ghost Stories,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-japanese-ghost-stories2 .]

Spend a late March afternoon feeling chills down your spin. Join folklorist Brittany Warman, a favorite of Profs and Pints audiences, for a look at the eerie ghost stories of Japan.

You’ll get acquainted with several spirits and creatures that populate traditional Japanese folklore, among them: The Yuki-Onna, the sinister snow woman who dances on a knife-edge between murder and mercy. A fabulously beautiful samurai daughter who demands bravery and intellect from her future husband—but actually just might be a goblin. The spirit that haunts the cherry blossom tree, whose irresistible melancholy is “the phantom light of long-expired suns.”

You’ll also learn about the incredible life of Koizumi Yakumo, the storyteller who first made these traditional tales available to western audiences and helped popularize them around the world. Born in 1850 under the name of Lafcadio Hearn to an Irish officer-surgeon and a Greek woman, he led a wildly unconventional life. He travelled from Greece to the slums of Dublin to the newspaper offices of Cincinnati to the kitchens of New Orleans before settling in Japan, where he adopted Japanese citizenship and changed his name.

His life as a permanent outsider—and the hatred of prejudice instilled in him by it—shaped him as a storyteller. He became both a conduit of Japanese culture and a champion of the chilling and uncanny.

This deep dive in his life and the ghost stories he gathered and retold will be by turns frightening, hilarious, baffling, and poignant, and will make you understand why his tales remain beloved in Japan and the world over. It’s a great opportunity to become familiar with the ghosts of a nation and the man who told them to the world. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A Japanese Yuki-Onna, or snow spirit, as depicted in the 1737 Hyakkai-Zukan, or book of demons, by Sawaki Suushi.