Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, […]

On November 17, 2021, in 213-0 vote, the U.S. Catholic bishops assigned September 5 as the feast date to St. Teresa of Kolkata, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Since 1972, the Missionaries of Charity have served in the United States, and Mother Teresa has long been revered in a significant number of U.S. […]

Everyone knows the name Amelia Earhart. But the other four women in O’Brien’s story were, in some cases, better pilots and their stories are no less compelling. O’Brien recounts for us the amazing exploits of Ruth Elder, the first American woman try to fly across the Atlantic Ocean after Lindbergh’s feat in 1927; Ruth Nichols, […]

Mark Twain had a school-boy declare: ‘Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name’ – which suggests that the myth of the author endures, despite scholarly attempts to debunk it. The earliest sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BCE: from them we can establish that […]

Sixty-six years after his lynching, the story of Emmett Till is more prominent than ever. Beginning with the murder in 1955, Dave Tell will chart the long after-life of Emmett Till. Tell will explain how and why Till’s story was buried for 49 years before roaring back to life in the twenty-first century. Tell will […]

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to enslaved parents during the tumult of the Civil War, Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) joined a generation of young Black men and women who aspired to professional careers and successful lives as full citizens in the decades after Reconstruction. Following her parents’ tragic deaths during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, […]

One of first female Prime Ministers in the world and the first and only in India, Indira Gandhi was born in 1917 to a prominent political family at the height of India’s nationalist movement for freedom from British colonial rule. She spent a lonely childhood as her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, noted nationalist leader and later, […]

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy’s “Golden Age”—spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s—when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. In his slide show and presentation, Eric […]

Sandra Day O’Connor was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. […]

Dolly Parton is having a moment in popular culture, from lifetime achievement awards to adulation from much younger generations. Reduced to jokes about her figure over decades of her impressive career, Parton is finally being recognized as a creative genius and a trailblazer for her gender. What does her emergence as a uniquely unifying figure--a […]

In this talk, Heather Clark will discuss her award-winning biography of Sylvia Plath, an iconic poet who holds a mythic place in the public imagination. Clark will discuss her reasons for embarking upon a new biography of Plath; her determination to present Plath as an innovative writer rather than a psychological “case”; and the challenges […]

Although Clive Staples Lewis died over a half-century ago, his works live on in the hearts and minds of countless readers, young and old, all over the world. From the Lewis Memorial recently installed in Poets' Corner to the new Narnia films scheduled for release by Netflix over the next decade, the life and legacy […]