The West Virginia University Department of History will feature author and historian Mary Beth Norton for its annual Rush D. Holt Lecture Series. Norton will present her lecture, “The Seventh Tea Ship; or, a Tale of Shipwrecked Sailors, Combative Communities, and a Fractured Family” Thursday, Nov. 12 at 7:30 p.m. in White Hall G9 on the Downtown Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. Her books have won prizes from the Society of American Historians, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the English-Speaking Union; and her Founding Mothers & Fathers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1997.

She was named Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 2005, and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, as well as from Princeton University and the Huntington Library.

She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

“This year the history faculty nominated eight scholars who have deepened our knowledge of the past through their compelling research, professional service, public engagement and outstanding academic careers,” said Joseph Hodge, department chair in the Department of History.

“We chose Mary Beth Norton for her outstanding contribution to American history and to the field of women’s and gender history.”

Norton’s lecture, will recount the unknown story of the tea ship that, bound for Boston in late fall 1773, wrecked on Cape Cod before reaching the harbor.
The ship would meet a different fate from those brought down by taxation-protesting residents.

“This is a chance to hear an exciting and never-before-told tale about the early history of this country,” Hodge said.

The first annual Rush D. Holt Lecture was presented by the WVU history department in 2011. The lecture series was opened by the Honorable Rush D. Holt, Jr., a 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. The same endowment sponsored a biennial historical conference previously organized under the sponsorship of the WVU history department.

This year, the History Department has created four new thematic areas of strength for the graduate program, in gender and kinship; imperial and post-colonial societies; labor and political economy; and war and society.

“Professor Norton’s expertise on the interplay of gender, society and politics in early American history fits nicely with our thematic strength in gender history,” Hodge said.

The lecture is part of WVU’s yearlong celebration of the anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act into law, which created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

More details about the celebration and a calendar of events are available at http://artsandhumanities.wvu.edu/. Check back often for features, updates and showcases of WVU departments throughout the year.

-WVU-

ce/11/06/2015

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