How can a country built on the backs of enslaved people compensate for past wrongs? That is the question at the heart of Andrew Delbanco’s upcoming Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities selects a scholar to give an address, an act the NEH calls “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

This year, on the program’s 50th anniversary, Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, will explore “The Question of Reparations: Our Past, Our Present, Our Future.”

He traces the history of the debate about reparations that began before the Civil War and stretches to today, and tells Diane he hopes understanding our history can help inform the country’s choices about its future.