Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Introduction		Gordon S. Wood (3 min.) is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970; The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Knopf, 1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993; and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (Penguin, 2004) which was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Other publications include Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press, 2006), The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (Penguin, 2008), and his book in the Oxford History of the United States, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 New York Historical Society Prize in American history. Wood reviews in the New York Review of Books and The New Republic. He is a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1988.
Speaker		S.T. Lee Lecture in the Humanities: Reflections on the Founding Period Jack N. Rakove (24 min.) is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. His research interests include American politics and political theory. Prior to Stanford, he taught at Colgate University and has been a Visiting Professor at the NYU School of Law. Rakove won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for History for Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) which questioned whether originalism is a comprehensive and exhaustive means of interpreting the Constitution. He is also the author of The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Knopf, 1979), James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (revised edition, Longman, 2001), and Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Books, 1997). His latest book is Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). A member of the American Historical Association, American Political Science Association, and American Antiquarian Society, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.

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