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
Virtual OAH Lectures Now Offered
OAH Distinguished Lecturers are scholars and storytellers, uniquely qualified to bring historical context to today’s most important issues. Invite one of our speakers to virtually engage with your community on any U. S. history topic by booking a recorded or live online webinar with Q&A.
Thank you for your assistance in bringing yet another wonderful speaker!
Lyn Ellen Bennett, Department of History and Political Science - Utah Valley University
Featured Lecturer
Michael H. Ebner
Michael H. Ebner is the James D. Vail III Professor of History Emeritus at Lake Forest College, where he taught from 1974 to 2007. He is best known as the author of the prizewinning Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History (1988). He has taught in the U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History initiative in Florida, Minnesota, Illinois, and Virginia and also served as project director of Creating a Geographically Extended Class at Lake Forest College, underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Ebner is the recipient of awards as a mentor, as a teacher, and for public service from the American Historical Association, the Chicago Tribune, the...(Read More)
Featured Lecture
Remixed: Storylines from Metropolitan America
D. W. Meinig, renowned historical geographer, supplies a useful precis: 'America as an ever changing place, an ever changing congeries of places, and ever-changing structures of places." This lecture focuses upon four distinctive locales: Greater Princeton, NJ; Naperville, IL; Gwinnett County, GA; and Irvine, CA. The American metropolis -- today the home place for a majority of Americans -- provides the frame of reference. Stretched over a broad canvass, the four case studies -- drawing upon the geographical perspectives of Roger Keil -- proffers an emphatic and compelling revision: " . . . we are facing new realities of globalized urbanization, where central cities and fringe are remixed . . . . a different suburbia and a different city."
"Obviously the key word 'suburban' has ceded its primary role in the varied narratives comprised Re-mixed. While confusing as much as it explained in the last century, we should not hastily assign this long-running keyword to the dustbin. Keep in mind a powerful sentiment expressed by Sam Bass Warner: ". . . Americans have no urban history. They live in one of the world's most urbanized counties as if it were a wilderness in both time and space." "
