Historian James Patterson to Speak on LBJ
WILLIAMSTOWN — Author and historian James T. Patterson will deliver a lecture at Williams College titled "The Great Arm-Twister: LBJ and Domestic Policy."The talk will be held at 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 24, in Griffin Hall, Room 3. The public is invited and the event is free.
The Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, Patterson is the author of "Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore." His research interests include political, legal, and social history, as well as the history of medicine, race relations, and education.
He is regarded as a preeminent Brown v. Board of Education scholar. In 2001, he published "Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy." Patterson raises questions about the roles of the Supreme Court and President Eisenhower, of the effect of desegregation on the academic achievement of black children, and the ruling's role in the civil rights movement.
Before joining the Brown University faculty, Patterson taught at Indiana University, where he published his first works, "Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal," "The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition," and "Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft." While there, he received the Frederick Jackson Turner Book Prize from the Organization of American Historians in 1966 and the Indiana University Teaching Award in 1968, as well as two National Endowment for Humanities Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He won the Bancroft Prize for American History in 1997 with "Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974." A number of his books have been History Book Club Selections.
Patterson, Williams class of 1957, was elected a member of the Society of American Historians in 1974 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.
The lecture is sponsored by the Leadership Studies department.
