Conference Announcement

Later this month is the 50th anniversary conference commemorating the release of the Pentagon Papers—“Truth, Dissent & the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg”—Friday, April 30, and Saturday, May 1—free, online, and open to all. The conference is hosted at UMass Amherst.

In addition to an extraordinary line-up of speakers, the plenary event is a conversation between Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, another famous whistleblower, moderated by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Registration is required.

The Ellsberg Archive Project is a major venture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst exploring the life and legacy of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study of the Vietnam War, to the press in 1971.

In addition to this conference, the Ellsberg Archive Project includes: --a year-long special seminar in which UMass undergraduate and graduate students worked in Ellsberg’s personal papers, recently acquired by the University of Massachusetts, and interviewed Daniel Ellsberg multiple times; --a website that will soon contain the story of Ellsberg’s life and legacy with reference to key documents and artifacts from his archive and will ultimately host conference videos that can be used for teaching and learning; --and a podcast series produced by The Ground Truth Project: The Whistleblower: Truth, Dissent & the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg, launching today.

The conference explores matters as important today as they were in 1971: truth, dissent, whistleblowing, government secrecy, the rule of law, democracy, war, the press, and much more.