Jeans Lecture

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 8, 2008
Dr. Steven Wagner
(417) 625-9587
 

JOPLIN, MO (SNS) - The fourteenth annual Jeans Lecture in History will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 24 in Webster Hall Auditorium.
           

The speaker will be T. H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. Breen's address is titled “It Rained Dead Cats and Dogs the Day the Revolution Began:  Political Ideology and Popular Mobilization on the Eve of American Independence.”
           

Breen received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968.  He is interested in the history of political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. A Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center as well as the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford University.
           

His publications include five monographs, among them Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (recipient of the T. Saloutos Prize) and Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (winner of the Historical Preservation Book Prize), as well as portions of the highly successful undergraduate text, America: Past and Present. Breen has most recently published Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, with Oxford University Press, and won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book in 2004 on the American Revolution.
           

A recent recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award from the German government and a Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute, he is now working on a new book tentatively entitled The Collapse of an American Empire: Revolutionary Political Culture, 1774-1776.
           

The Jeans Lecture in History is named in honor of Dr. Virgil and Virginia Jeans, longtime residents of Joplin.  They were lifelong learners and placed high value on education. At their deaths, contributions in their memory were made to the Missouri Southern Foundation, and it is that support that funds the lecture series.  Funding is also provided by the Social Science Department.

 

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