Jinhee Kim

Executive Vice President for Public Events and Engagement at the Aspen Institute, where she leads and expands flagship public convenings including the Aspen Ideas Festival. She is a two-time Emmy Award-winning content producer and live event creator, previously Chief Creative Officer at Events DC, Head of Programming for Apple in Washington, DC, and a Smithsonian media and advancement executive.

Fourth of July Speeches Cast the Declaration as an Unfinished Obligation

Bryan Doerries’s Aspen closing session used Fourth of July speeches by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the women’s-rights leaders of 1876 to argue that America’s founding language remains an obligation rather than a settled inheritance. Framed through Theater of War’s town-hall model, the session treated the Declaration of Independence as promise, evidence and indictment: a vocabulary repeatedly invoked by people excluded from its protections to demand that the republic enforce the principles it celebrates.

The Aspen InstituteJul 1, 202620 min read