Daniel Rodgers, historian of American culture and ideas and Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, emeritus, at Princeton University, will present his lecture, “Age of Fracture: The Transformation of Ideas and Society in Modern America,” on Thursday, Oct. 20 in the French House.
Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society for liberal arts and sciences, invited Rodgers to present his lecture in the French House’s Grand Salon, which serves as the headquarters for the University’s Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College.
Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholar Program offers undergraduates an opportunity to interact with some of the nation’s most distinguished scholars, according to the Phi Beta Kappa website.
Throughout the program’s history, more than 640 Visiting Scholars have visited more than 5,000 universities across the United States that are a part of The Phi Beta Kappa Society.
“This talk is going to be out of [Rodgers’] more recent book about ‘fracture,’” Honors College Dean Jonathan Earle said. “We all see fracture in our everyday lives … [Rodgers] looked at this as, not just a thing you could measure, but an idea, which I love. He’s talking about ideas on the right and the left, and he’s talking about trying to understand the world we live in kind of from an intellectual perspective.”
Rodgers’ lecture on society and its development of ideas will come two weeks after the University’s presidential symposium, “Moment or Movement: A National Dialogue on Identity, Empowerment and Justice for All,” and shortly after the University was awarded the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award by INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine.
Throughout his career, Rodgers has published four books: “The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920,” “Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence,” “Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age” and “Age of Fracture.”
Rodgers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During his career, Rodgers also held the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at University of Cambridge in England.
“‘Fracture’ now seems everywhere in our contemporary United States: in social relations, partisan politics, growing economic inequalities, and enduring culture ‘wars,’” Rodgers wrote of his lecture. “But the ‘fracture’ of our times began in the realm of ideas, as larger ideas of society, economy, selves, and political culture shattered into smaller, more individualistic ones.”
During his visit to the University, Rodgers will also teach a section of the HNRS 2000 course, “Critical Analysis: Why War?” and meet with undergraduate history majors as well as with graduate students in history and political science.
Rodgers’ lecture and its subsequent reception are free and open to public.