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Lecture Series To Spotlight Luminaries Of The 20th Century

By Duke Today Staff

DURHAM, N.C. - A spring lecture series by Duke University historians will shed light on some of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jane Addams, Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud are some of the people who will be discussed.

The lecture series, titled "Twentieth Century Lives," is free and open to the public. All of the talks will be held in the Richard White Lecture Hall on Duke's East Campus.

"Our aim is to explore the lives of people who played a significant role in shaping the 20th century," said Sydney Nathans, a Duke history professor and one of the series organizers. "Some of humanity's greatest advancements and most troubling setbacks occurred in the last 100 years."

Each of the Wednesday afternoon lectures will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Parking will be available on the circle in front of the Duke University Museum of Art. The lectures occur:

Jan. 23. John Richards, a leading historian of South Asia, and James Joseph, U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 1995 to 1999 who is now a professor of the practice of public policy studies at Duke, will discuss the freedom struggles of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in a talk titled "From Conscience to Power."

Feb. 6. Anne Scott, a Duke professor emeritus of history and author of six books on American women, will compare the parallel lives of Chicago reformer Jane Addams and Durham's black civil rights pioneer, Pauli Murray, in a talk titled "Women Activists in White and Black."

Feb. 27. Warren Lerner, who plans to retire this spring after 40 years of teaching to packed classes about the former Soviet Union, will discuss the impact of Stalin and Gorbachev on the Communist Revolution in a talk titled "When Revolutions Go Backwards."

March 20. William Chafe, one of the nation's leading authorities on post-1945 America, and Lawrence Goodwyn, a top historian of American populism, will compare the impact of the fast-rising Kennedy brothers with that of Lyndon B. Johnson. Their talk is titled "The Hares and the Tortoise."

April 10. Martin Miller, who most recently wrote Freud and the Bolsheviks, and

Middle Eastern historian Ylana Miller will speak on the Vienna-born founders of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud) and Zionism (Theodor Herzl). Their talk is titled "Founding Fathers: Psychoanalysis/Zionism."

April 24. John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, will share a chapter from his in-progress autobiography in a talk titled "My Life in the 20th Century."

"Twentieth Century Lives" is sponsored by the history department, the Duke Alumni Association and Duke's Institute for learning in Retirement.

For additional information about the lecture series, call (919) 684-3046 or access http://www-history.aas.duke.edu/.