KNOXVILLE — T.H. Breen of Northwestern University will be on campus April 14 to discuss why and how thousands of ordinary men and women banded together to fight for liberty and freedom in the American Revolution as part of the 2011 Milton Klein Visiting Scholar Lecture.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, begins at 4 p.m. in rooms 223-224 of the University Center. A reception will follow. Parking is available for a fee in the University Center parking garage on Phillip Fulmer Way.
Breen’s lecture is titled “A Rumor that Almost Started the Revolution Two Years before the Declaration of Independence.”
During his presentation, Breen will present the argument that ordinary people throughout New England were ahead of their leaders in the Continental Congress. By mobilizing a huge insurgent army early in September 1774, they pressured the members of Congress to reassert their leadership in the resistance to Great Britain and to make more radical decisions on matters of policy than they would have done without a massive demonstration of popular protest.
Breen, a William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University, is an Early American historian interested in the history of political thought, material culture and cultural anthropology. Also a Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center and Institutions at Cambridge University, among others, and has won several awards for distinguished teaching, including one from the Northwestern Alumni Society. His publications include five monographs and portions of the highly successful undergraduate text “America: Past and Present.” He is a recent recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award from the German government and has completed a book entitled “American Insurgents — American Patriots: The Revolution of the People” (2010). He is currently serving as the director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
The Klein lecture is funded by the Milton M. Klein Studies Endowment, which was established in 1993 to support a visiting scholar series and seminars in the fields of early American history, American legal history and historiography.
Milton Klein served on the faculty of UT Knoxville as the Alumni Distinguished Service Professor of History until his retirement in 1984. In 1988 he was named UT Knoxville’s first university historian.
For more information, visit http://web.utk.edu/~history or contact Ernest Freeberg, professor of history, at 974-7090.
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C O N T A C T :
Whitney Holmes (865-974-5460, Wholmes7@utk.edu)