The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization is a series of
public lectures held every one or two years at
Harvard University since 1984. They are sponsored by the university's ''Program in the History of American Civilization''. They were endowed by an anonymous donor in honor of
William E. Massey, former president of the
A.T. Massey Coal Company.
Lecturers
*{{Update after, 2021, reason=Check if lecture was given in previous year.1984 -
Eudora Welty, ''One Writer's Beginnings''
*1986 -
Irving Howe, ''The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson''
*1988 -
Lawrence W. Levine
Lawrence William Levine (February 27, 1933 – October 23, 2006) was an American historian. He was born in Manhattan and died in Berkeley, California. He was noted for promoting multiculturalism and the perspectives of ordinary people in the ...
, ''Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America''
*1988 -
Conor Cruise O'Brien, ''God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism''
*1990 -
David Brion Davis, ''Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations''
*1992 -
Toni Morrison, ''
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination''
*1992 -
Gore Vidal, ''Screening History''
*1994 -
Eugene D. Genovese
Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012) was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and s ...
, ''The Southern Tradition''
*1995 -
Alfred Kazin, ''Writing Was Everything''
*1996 -
, ''The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty''
*1997 -
Richard Rorty, ''
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America''
*1999 -
Andrew Delbanco
Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the president of thTeagle Foundation He is the author of many books, including ''The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Str ...
, ''The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope''
*2000 -
Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston (; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong;Huntley, E. D. (2001). ''Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion'', p. 1. October 27, 1940) is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, wher ...
''To Be The Poet''
*2003 -
E. L. Doctorow, ''Reporting the Universe''
*2004 -
Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown, ''Architecture as Signs and Systems: For A Mannerist Time''
*2004 -
John Demos
John Putnam Demos is an American author and historian. He has written two books that discuss witch hunts and has discovered that one of his ancestors was John Putnam Senior, a member of the Putnam family that was prominent in the Salem witch trials ...
, ''Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America''
*2005 -
Jayati Ghosh, ''The Economics of the American Empire: Fierceness and Fragility''
*2008 -
Joan C. Williams
Joan C. Williams (born 1952) is an American feminist legal scholar whose work focuses on issues faced by women in the workplace. She currently serves as the Founding Director at the Center for WorkLife Law. Williams is also a Distinguished Profes ...
, ''Obama Eats Arugula: Reshaping the Electoral and Everyday Politics of Work and Family''
*2009 -
Eric Foner, ''The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery''
*2011 -
Sally Mann, ''If Memory Serves''
*2012 -
Gish Jen, ''Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self''
*2013 -
Greil Marcus, ''Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations''
*2015 -
Linda Greenhouse
Linda Joyce Greenhouse (born January 9, 1947) is an American legal journalist who is the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered ...
, ''Just a Journalist: Reflections on Journalism, Life, and the Spaces Between''
*2017 -
Winona LaDuke, ''Climate Change, Indigenous Resistance, and Forging a New Democracy: Thoughts for the Present Moment''
Notes
External links
About the Massey LecturesAmerican Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Past Massey Lectures and Books covering lectures from 1984 to 2003.
Harvard University
Lecture series