FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, at 3:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall: Thomas S. Kidd (Baylor University), “God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.” The Donald S. Metz Lecture in American Christian History.

Thomas Kidd is a premier scholar and the author of a variety of books on religion in colonial America.  His The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, was published by Yale in 2007. University of Notre Dame historian Mark Noll described the book as “Well researched, clearly written and authoritatively argued. There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically.” Kidd also published The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents, with Bedford Books in 2007. His American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Walter Russell Mead thus praised American Christians and Islam in Foreign Affairs: “This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of American popular attitudes toward Islam from the eighteenth century onward.”

Kidd is currently writing God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (for Basic Books), on which his ENC Metz Lecture is based, and Patrick Henry: A Biography (for Basic Books).

Kidd has also published articles in The William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Church History, and Religion and American Culture. He was selected for the 2004-05 Young Scholars in American Religion program, and won a 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, at 7:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall: Gordon Wood (Brown University), "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815." The Donald A. Yerxa Lecture in History. 

Wood is the author of the Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different was published in 2006. The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History was published in 2008. His book in the Oxford History of the United States, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, 2009. Professor Wood regularly writes reviews for the New York Review of Books and The New Republc. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, AT 7:00PM: Jill Lepore (Harvard University),
"Poor Richard's Poor Jane."

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. Her books include The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), Winner of the Bancroft Prize; Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (1999); A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002); New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an Eighteenth-Century City (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Blindspot, a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky (2008). She is currently writing a biography of Benjamin Franklin and his sister, Jane Mecom. Lepore is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.