Due to inclement weather and travel advisories, the second annual Rush D. Holt Lecture has been rescheduled. The event, originally scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 30, will now be held on Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m., in Ming Hsieh Hall on West Virginia University’s downtown campus.
This year’s speaker is historian Nancy MacLean, professor of history at Duke University.
In her talk, “The Quest for Jobs and Justice since the 1950s,” MacLean highlights the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs that was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans.
MacLean will tell the story of how grassroots activists fought for jobs at all levels with fair treatment as a requisite of full citizenship. Their struggles transformed American culture, even as they ultimately faltered in the face of economic transformation and powerful opposition. Showing how much citizen action achieved, MacLean will also highlight the unfinished agenda bequeathed to today’s generation.
Before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2010, MacLean taught at Northwestern University for many years, serving as department chair from 2006-09 and was named Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities. Her award-winning scholarship focuses on the role of the law and social movements in changing American culture and policy.
MacLean is the author of several books, “Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace,” “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan,” “The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents,” and, co-authored with historian Donald T. Critchlow, “Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present.”
She has won many prizes and fellowships from institutions including the American Academy of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center and the Russell Sage Foundation. She was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians in 2010. MacLean is currently working on the history of the push to privatize public services and decision-making.
The first annual Rush D. Holt Lecture was presented by the WVU Department of History in 2011. Inaugurating the lecture series was the Honorable Rush D. Holt, Jr., a U.S. Congressman from New Jersey and son of former U.S. Sen. Rush D. Holt of West Virginia, after whom the series is named. The lecture series is supported by the family of Senator Holt through the Senator Rush D. Holt Endowment established in 1998 through a private gift to the WVU Foundation, Inc. The same endowment sponsors a biennial historical conference.
For more information, contact Dr. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, at 304-293-2421 or Elizabeth.Fones-Wolf@mail.wvu.edu
-WVU-
gd/10/22/12
Check http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/ daily for the latest news from the University.
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.