Historical Perspectives Lecture Series returns to UW-Green Bay
GREEN BAY — The popular Historical Perspectives Lecture Series returns to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay with a lineup of three scholars discussing a range of topics.
Each lecture is free and open to the public. They are held in the University Union’s Christie Theatre, 2420 Nicolet Drive.
This year’s lecturers and topics include:
• John Summers: “C. Wright Mills and the Politics of Truth” — 10:35 a.m., Monday, Sept, 21.
Summers is a visiting scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and The Cooper Union. The author of Every Fury on Earth (2008) and the editor of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (2008), he is currently completing a biography of C. Wright Mills.
C. Wright Mills and the Politics of Truth is the first collection of Mills’ writings to be published since 1963. The Politics of Truth contains 23 out-of-print and hard-to-find writings, which show his growth from academic sociologist to an intellectual maestro in command of a mature style, a dissenter who sought to inspire the public to oppose the drift toward permanent war.
• Jonathan Holloway: “‘It Never Happened’: Race, Class and the Unbearable Burden of Memory” — 12:45 p.m., Monday, Oct. 26.
Holloway is professor of History and African American Studies, and master of Calhoun College at Yale University. He has written Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), edited Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (2005), and the co-edited the anthology, Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century (2007). He is presently working on his next monograph, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory, Identity, and Politics in Black America, 1941-2000.
At Yale, Holloway teaches courses on post-emancipation social, cultural, and intellectual history. “Day after day, lecture after lecture, Professor Holloway continues to engage his students by his infectious energy and enthusiasm for sharing the unique history that has shaped this country,” a Yale student said of Holloway at an awards banquet earlier this year, according to the Yale’s Office of Public Affairs. “He enlightens them by showing the social, cultural and intellectual fabric of our time through the lens of the rich African-American experience, while making the learning process deeply personal.”
• Jeremi Suri: “Henry Kissinger and the American Century” — 2 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 12.
Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2007, Smithsonian Magazine named him one of America’s “Top Young Innovators” in the humanities and sciences. He is also the author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century (2007), The Global Revolutions of 1968 (2007), and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003).
Henry Kissinger and the American Century is more than just a biography of the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, according to Amazon.com. “Drawing on research in more than six countries in addition to extensive interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissinger’s ideas and power and explains why he pursued the policies he did,” the website says.
The Historical Perspectives Lecture Series was first organized in 1985. It is the foremost activity for UW-Green Bay’s Center for History and Social Change. This annual series of talks features a wide variety of historians and social scientists. For more visit: http://www.uwgb.edu/centerhsc/.
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