THOUGHT
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Book a Distinguished Lecturer from the Organization of American Historians for your next event.
VMI Photo by - H. Lockwood McLaughlin
WHY A HISTORIAN?
Our OAH Distinguished Lecturers are scholars and storytellers, uniquely qualified to bring historical context to some of today's most provocative issues. They engage audiences, sharing monumental moments and unknown stories from our nation's past that influence and inform our world today.
The Distinguished Lectureship Program offers VIRTUAL OAH LECTURES (custom-recorded or live with Q&A) and traditional in-person OAH Distinguished Lectures.
I have worked with the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program since 2004 because it helps me connect the public with excellent scholars who make history accessible and relevant.
Danielle Dart, Public Programs - Minnesota Historical Society
Featured Lecturer
Kevin Kenny
Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History at New York University, where he specializes in American immigration, race, and labor in the nineteenth century. He came to New York City as an immigrant in the 1980s and completed his PhD in U.S. history at Columbia in 1994. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and at Boston College before taking up his current position at NYU. His first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), examines how traditions of Irish rural protest were transplanted into industrial America. The American Irish: A History (2000), the standard work on its topic, offers a broad interpretive survey of the field. Peaceable Kingdom Lost:...
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Featured Lecture
Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Peaceable Kingdom
William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a “holy experiment” in which he believed European colonists and Native Americans could live together in harmony. This lecture explains how Penn’s vision of a Peaceable Kingdom gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. The focal point is the Paxton Boys’ notorious attack on the Conestoga Indians in 1763 and their march on Philadelphia the following year.
"The idea that the Paxton Boys were precursors of republican revolution was brutally accurate in one sense. The American Revolution did more than destroy oligarchy and proprietary privilege in colonial Pennsylvania; it doomed the region’s Native American population."
