Hamilton Cravens is professor of history at Iowa State University. His teaching, research, and writing revolve around the history of American culture, set within the broad framework of European and American civilization, with particular focus on the role of science and of social thought. He has written much about the influence of the evolutionary natural and social sciences in America, and is author of the forthcoming Imagining the Good Society: The Social Sciences in the American Past and Present (2010), editor of Great Depression: Peoples and Perspectives (2009), and coeditor of Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America (2009).

Lecture topics:

• Cold War Social Science: Threat to Democracy?
• Science and Race in Modern America
• American Democracy and Social Science Before 1870
• Creationism and Science in American History: Three Episodes
• The End of Expertise since the 1950s

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009