President Clinton address to keynote academic conference here Oct. 5-6
President Bill Clinton will present the keynote address at an academic conference on "The Progressive Tradition: Politics, Culture and History" at Princeton Thursday and Friday, Oct. 5-6.
The conference will feature a major scholarly re-evaluation of the Progressive Era, the two-decade period of political and social reform that began in 1900. There will be panels on the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton graduate who served as the University's president, as well as on the era's long-term historical legacy.
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"Theodore Roosevelt was really the first modern activist American president," said Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor and conference co-organizer. "Woodrow Wilson, though from a different political party and with a different political philosophy, also used the presidency vigorously to meet the enormous domestic and foreign challenges of a new industrializing world."
The discussion will not be limited to debate over the presidents. "To understand the Progressive Era requires coming to terms with many great Americans, including settlement-house workers such as Jane Addams, labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers, financiers such as J.P. Morgan and civil-rights pioneers such as W.E.B. Du Bois," Wilentz said. "It also requires coming to terms with the broader political, social and cultural currents which all these figures represented."
The conference will begin with Clinton's address at 2 p.m. Thursday in Richardson Auditorium. The scholarly panels will take place on Friday in Helm Auditorium (Room 50) in McCosh Hall.
Speakers and commentators include renowned senior scholars as well as younger historians and writers. Among those scheduled to appear are: John Morton Blum, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University; Alan Brinkley, the Alan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University; John Milton Cooper, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School; Hendrik Hartog, the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of Law and Liberty at Princeton; Jackson Lears, professor of history at Rutgers University; Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.; Eric Love, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado-Boulder; Nell Irvin Painter, the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton; Daniel Rodgers, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian, author and professor emeritus at the City University of New York; Christine Stansell, professor of history at Princeton; and Henry Yu, assistant professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Although the panel discussions are open to the public, admission to Clinton's address is limited to Princeton students, faculty and staff whose names were selected in a lottery. Members of the public and the University community may view the address at simulcast locations on campus, including McCosh 10, McCosh 50, Betts Auditorium, and the Frist Campus Center's Multipurpose Rooms A, B and C. The speech also will be available on the University's cable network and local community cable (station A11 in Princeton Borough), and as a live Web cast at <www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/>.
More information about the conference is available at <www.wws.princeton.edu/~pubaff/progressive.html>.
"The Progressive Tradition: Politics, Culture and History" is co-sponsored by the Princeton Program in American Studies and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Admission is free.
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October 2, 2000 Contents • Shapiro
to step down at the top of his game • President Clinton address to keynote academic conference • Invitation
touches Berry • Orientation
packs in activities • Calendar
of events
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