John Adams Institute

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Join us for the world premiere of “Cool Machine”, the highly anticipated new novel by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning au...
08/06/2026

Join us for the world premiere of “Cool Machine”, the highly anticipated new novel by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead.

One of the most innovative and influential writers of our time, Whitehead has spent more than two decades exploring the American experience through novels that blend history, social commentary, satire, and extraordinary imagination. Renowned for reinventing his style with each book, he is one of only four writers in history to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys”.

Before the publication of “Cool Machine” later this month, Whitehead comes to Amsterdam to discuss the final installment of his acclaimed Harlem Trilogy. Set in mid-century Harlem, the novel follows Ray Carney as he navigates a city—and a country—defined by ambition, reinvention, and moral complexity.

As the United States marks 250 years since its founding, the conversation will also explore Whitehead’s wider body of work and the questions at the heart of his writing: How do stories shape our understanding of history? What can fiction reveal about a nation’s contradictions? And what does it mean to write about America today?

In conversation with Ikenna Azuike.

📆 July 2, 2026
🕢 7:30–9:00 PM
📍 Rode Hoed, Keizersgracht 102, Amsterdam

World premiere of “Cool Machine”. Book signing after the event. Book sales by the American Book Center.

The John Adams Institute is pleased to highlight an upcoming external event: What does it mean to celebrate 250 years of...
04/06/2026

The John Adams Institute is pleased to highlight an upcoming external event: What does it mean to celebrate 250 years of friendship — when friendship has rarely been a simple thing?

That question sits at the heart of the closing lecture in the series “A Firm Peace and Sincere Friendship?”, The Netherlands and the United States share the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in American history: two and a half centuries of ties shaped by wars, revolutions, and continents remade. But longevity is not harmony — and the story is far more contested, surprising, and instructive than the commemorative version suggests.

Ian Kenny traces three moments. John Adams in Amsterdam in 1780, securing recognition for a republic still doubted in Europe. The post–Second World War era, when American aid rebuilt a shattered Netherlands while U.S. pressure weighed on Dutch decisions in Indonesia. And the 1980s and 1990s, when Dutch resistance to American military policy grew even as strategic and economic ties deepened.

Across these moments runs a single thread: not simple alliance or opposition, but a relationship repeatedly renegotiated through disagreement. Friendship was never guaranteed. It was worked for.

Followed by a conversation with Kenneth Manusama on where the relationship stands in 2026 — and what, if anything, can still be taken for granted.

📅 18 June
🕗 20:00–22:15
📍 Oude of Pelgrimvaderskerk, Rotterdam
🎟️ Tickets via https://depelgrimvaderskerk.weticket.io/lezing-ian-kenny-directeur-john-adams-institute

For more than three decades, Bryan Stevenson has examined one of the central contradictions of the American story: how a...
01/06/2026

For more than three decades, Bryan Stevenson has examined one of the central contradictions of the American story: how a nation founded on ideals of liberty and equality has also been shaped by slavery, racial violence, and exclusion. Through his work as founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and creator of the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged Americans to confront the past not as distant history, but as a force that continues to shape the present.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, Stevenson asks what it means to reckon honestly with a nation’s history—and how democracy is strengthened when societies make room for difficult truths. His work traces the long struggle for civil rights and equal justice, illuminating how generations of ordinary people have expanded the promise of freedom through acts of courage, resistance, and perseverance.

With moral clarity and deep humanity, Stevenson explores memory, justice, and the unfinished work of democracy, offering a powerful reflection on the stories nations tell about themselves—and the responsibilities that come with them.

In conversation with Andrew Makkinga.

His words will be interwoven with music by Tania León, Valerie Coleman, Julia Perry, Betty Jackson King, Billy Childs, and pianist-composer Dahoud Salim, performed by musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Together, music and conversation create a dialogue about America’s past, its ideals, and the paths toward a more just and inclusive future.

📆 May 24, 2026 | 🕢 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 De Duif, Prinsengracht 756, Amsterdam

🏛️ Who’s Afraid of Julius Caesar?✍️ In this new essay for the John Adams Institute, historian Thomas Bersee explores a p...
27/05/2026

🏛️ Who’s Afraid of Julius Caesar?

✍️ In this new essay for the John Adams Institute, historian Thomas Bersee explores a political anxiety that has haunted the United States since its founding: the fear that democracy may one day produce its own Caesar.

⚖️ From the Declaration of Independence to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, the American republic has long understood itself through the lens of ancient Rome. The Founding Fathers admired the Roman Republic’s checks and balances — but they also feared the rise of strongmen, executive overreach, and the collapse of republican norms.

🌎 Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson and Cicero to Andrew Jackson, Nixon, Bush, Obama, and even a controversial Trump-era production of Julius Caesar in Central Park, this essay examines how the specter of Caesar continues to shape American political imagination.

📚 At its core lies a timeless question: how does a republic defend itself against tyranny without undermining the very principles it seeks to protect?

🔗 Read the full essay on our Medium (link in bio).

💡 Interested in publishing with the John Adams Institute? Contact [email protected]

✍️ An evening with Rachel Khong unfolded around ambition, intimacy, and the seductive instability of reinvention. She wr...
26/05/2026

✍️ An evening with Rachel Khong unfolded around ambition, intimacy, and the seductive instability of reinvention. She writes with startling precision about people trying to outrun histories still living inside them.

🌊 In conversation with Els Quagebeur, Khong spoke about family as something both inherited and performed: love sharpened by expectation, closeness interrupted by distance, identity shaped in the space between who we are and who we learn to become for others.

🧬 In her work, migration moves like a quiet undertow—shaping desire, shame, success, and the fantasy of self-creation that sits at the heart of the American story.

📓 What lingered was the tension itself: between freedom and inheritance, reinvention and memory, belonging and the private fear of remaining unknowable.

🤝 Within this month’s series on literature and ideas, in partnership with , , , , the evening widened into a reflection on contemporary American life—its promises, its performances, and the emotional cost of constantly remaking the self.

📚”Real Americans” is available via .

📸 Gerrit Serné

With summer just around the corner, three voices come together to reflect on the ideas, stories, and commitments that sh...
25/05/2026

With summer just around the corner, three voices come together to reflect on the ideas, stories, and commitments that shape life in America today. A leading civil rights lawyer considers the promise of justice and the legacies that shape us; a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist turns to storytelling, narrative, and the American experience; and a senior national security figure reflects on values, trust, and the transatlantic alliance—together tracing how meaning is made through the stories we inherit, the systems we build, and the principles that carry us forward.

💪 “Fitness to Lead?” — a follow-up to “The Rube Goldberg Amendment”✍️ Written by Dr. Robert C.J. Krasner, retired Rear A...
12/05/2026

💪 “Fitness to Lead?” — a follow-up to “The Rube Goldberg Amendment”

✍️ Written by Dr. Robert C.J. Krasner, retired Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps and former Attending Physician to the United States Congress, this essay builds on the constitutional questions raised in our previous interview with John D. Feerick, turning from removal mechanisms to the more fundamental issue of capacity itself.

⚖️ When one individual holds authority over nuclear command, global crisis response, and national security decision-making, the question of fitness is not abstract — it is structural. Yet the systems designed to evaluate it remain fragmented, politicized, and ad hoc.

🌎 If “The Rube Goldberg Amendment” exposed the complexity of removing a president, this follow-up examines what comes even earlier in the chain: how we determine whether the office is being held in a condition capable of bearing its own weight.

🔗 Read the full article on our Medium (link in bio).

💡 Want to publish with the John Adams Institute? Reach out to [email protected]

✍️ An evening with Kaveh Akbar unfolded around his debut novel “Martyr! “ and the fragile ways a life is assembled: thro...
11/05/2026

✍️ An evening with Kaveh Akbar unfolded around his debut novel “Martyr! “ and the fragile ways a life is assembled: through migration, inheritance, rupture, and what resists simple articulation.

🕊️ Akbar spoke about Cyrus, a q***r Iranian-American poet moving through grief, addiction, faith, and the long afterlives of family history. In the novel, identity is not stable ground but something constantly made and unmade by what is carried forward and what is lost.

🛩️ At its center sits a historical rupture—the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988—an event that never resolves into the past so much as continues to echo through private lives, shaping how memory behaves.

🎨 Around Cyrus, art becomes a kind of pressure system: an Iranian artist turning her final days into DEATH-SPEAK, relationships that return as variations rather than conclusions, and a constant negotiation between expression and survival.

📓 Akbar captured that emotional logic in a single line, referencing his own personal journey: “The joy in my life has been made great by knowing pain, and the pain has been made complex by knowing joy.” The book doesn’t resolve that tension—it stays inside it.

🤝 Within the this month’s series on literature and ideas, in partnership with the , , and , the evening widened into something larger: a reflection on the American experiment at 250 years—its promise, its fractures, and the unresolved question of what it means to belong to a story still being written.

📚 Martyr! is available via .

📸 Gerrit Serné

🧠 What is consciousness—and how is it shaped by what we notice, ignore, and allow ourselves to feel?✍️ reflects on our ...
06/05/2026

🧠 What is consciousness—and how is it shaped by what we notice, ignore, and allow ourselves to feel?

✍️ reflects on our event with Michael Pollan, where we explored consciousness as something we don’t simply observe, but inhabit. From neuroscience and philosophy to psychedelics and attention itself, Pollan invites us to consider the mind not as a fixed entity, but as a constantly shifting field of experience.

📺 If the mind resembles a kind of receiver, then much of life depends on what we are tuned to—and what is tuned out. In an age where attention is continuously captured and redirected, the question becomes not only what consciousness is, but how we protect the space in which it unfolds.

🌍 This piece traces the history, fragility, and evolving science of consciousness—and asks what it means to remain fully present in a world designed to fragment attention.

🔗 Read the full article on our Medium (link in bio).

💡 Want to publish with the John Adams Institute? Reach out to [email protected]

How do the stories from the past and the stories we imagine help us understand the world—and envision what comes next? J...
05/05/2026

How do the stories from the past and the stories we imagine help us understand the world—and envision what comes next? Join us in celebrating Pulitzer Prize winners Jill Lepore and Daniel Kraus, two extraordinary voices and past guests of the John Adams Institute. Jill Lepore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Daniel Kraus for Fiction—an extraordinary recognition of work that deepens our understanding of the past and expands the possibilities of storytelling. We’re proud to have welcomed them to our stage and even prouder to celebrate this remarkable achievement.

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