Sep 15, 2010 -
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe will be the 2010 Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecturer at 麻豆视频 University on October 26. He will speak on 鈥淲hat Hath God Wrought: Manifest Destiny and the Communications Revolution of Nineteenth-Century America鈥� at 7:15 p.m. in 麻豆视频 University鈥檚 G. M. Savage Memorial Chapel. This lecture is free and open to the public. In addition, Professor Howe will lecture to the 麻豆视频 University community at 1:40 p.m. in Harvey Auditorium on 鈥淲hat Hath God Wrought: Religion, Reform, and the Communications Revolution of Nineteenth-Century America.鈥�
Dr. Howe is Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA and Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University. He is the author or editor of six books, and he has written more than fifty historical articles and essays. His best known work is What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007). For that book, he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in History, the 2008 SHEAR Book Prize for the year鈥檚 best work on the history and culture of the early American Republic, and the 2008 New York Historical Society American Book Prize. The book was also a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. Other books that Professor Howe has authored include: Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (1997); The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1980); Victorian America (1976); and The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (1970). In 1973, he edited The American Whigs: An Anthology, which was one of six volumes in an anthology series he co-edited under the general heading 鈥淪ourcebooks in American Social Thought.鈥�
As an historian, Professor Howe has also been active in other ways. He has served on the editorial boards of the journals Religion and American Culture, Journal of the Early Republic, American Nineteenth Century History, and Modern Intellectual History. In 2000-2001, he was the president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in Great Britain.
Professor Howe graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature. After receiving an M.A. in history from Oxford University, he earned a Ph.D. in the same discipline at the University of California, Berkeley. He then had a long, successful teaching career at the University of California, Los Angeles. He renewed his connection with Oxford in 1989-1990 when he served as Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History and a Fellow of Queen鈥檚 College there. In 1992, he became a permanent faculty member at Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine鈥檚 College, where his association continued until 2002.
Past Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecturers have included Dr. Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Martin Marty of the University of Chicago, Dr. Jay Winter of Yale University, Dr. Charles Maier of Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood of Brown University, Dr. Edward Ayers of the University of Richmond, Dr. Jeremy Black of Exeter University in the United Kingdom, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University.