The Department of History at West Virginia University is hosting its third Rush D. Holt lecture at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 10, in the Mountainlair Ballrooms on the downtown campus.

This year’s speaker is noted historian James Green, professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

His talk “America’s Ireland: The National Impact of the West Virginia Mine Wars, 1912-1924,” is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

“The Rush Holt Lecture is one of the history department’s signature lectures and it features renowned historians, said Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, history department chair.

“This year’s speaker, James Green, is one of our nation’s preeminent historians of the American working-class and his new book on the West Virginia mine wars promises to reshape our understanding of the impact of this epic conflict on American democracy,” she said.

Green directs the master’s in public history program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1966 and his doctorate in history from Yale University in 1972.

He served as president of the Labor and Working Class History Association from 2002-04, and received the Sol Stetin Labor History Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation in 2009. He has lectured in the Harvard Trade Union Program since 1987.

Green is also the author of several books on labor and radical history, including “Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest (1978),” “The World of the Worker (1980)”, “Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (2000).”

He is in the process of writing a new history of the West Virginia mine wars for Grove Atlantic Press.

The first 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 Elizabeth Fones-Wolf at 304-293-9307 or Elizabeth.Fones-Wolf@mail.wvu.edu.

-WVU-

ma/10/10/13

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