By Franklin Crawford
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon F. Litwack, professor of American History at the University of California-Berkeley, will deliver three Carl Becker lectures Tuesday, Nov. 9, Wednesday, Nov. 10, and Thursday, Nov. 11.
The lecture series, titled "Stormy Monday: Black Southerners in the Twentieth Century," is free and open to the public, and each talk will be delivered at 4:30 p.m. in Room 165 of McGraw Hall on campus. Dates and subjects of talks are as follows:
Litwack has earned a worldwide reputation for historical scholarship in African American studies and as an enormously popular and influential teacher. His seminal work, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (Knopf, 1979), received the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1980 as well as an American Book Award in 1981 and the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize in 1980. His other major works include Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Knopf, 1998) and North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961), among others.
"His first book practically opened a brand-new field," said Nick Salvatore, Cornell professor of industrial and labor relations and American studies, who earned his Ph.D. under Litwack at UC-Berkeley. "He focuses on the issue of race in American life with keen intelligence and incredibly deep research and writes of it with passion. He's a wonderful teacher and a great lecturer and is easily one of the top historians writing about American history of his generation."
Litwack has taught at Berkeley for almost 40 years. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1958 to 1964 and also at the University of South Carolina, Louisiana State University and the University of Mississippi. In addition, he has shared his scholarship abroad at universities in Moscow, Beijing, Sydney and Helsinki.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Litwack has received numerous teaching honors, including a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Division of Social Sciences in 1995. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians and is currently a candidate for president of the American Historical Association, both major professional associations.
The Becker Lectures in History series is the most important event sponsored by the Department of History. Now in its third decade, the series brings distinguished historians from all areas of specialization to Cornell for a series of lectures each year. It is named for Carl Becker, who taught at Cornell from 1917 until 1941, when he became the university's official historian.
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