A HISTORY & LITERATURE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

Clara Bingham

Clara Bingham '85 is a journalist, author, and former White House correspondent for Newsweek. Bingham has written for popular and academic publications alike, including Talk, Vogue, Harper's Baazar, and Washington Monthly. She is also the author of Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress (Times Books 1997), an account of power politics after the 1992 elections, a time when the number of women in Congress increased dramatically.

Bingham's most recent publication, with Laura Leedy Gansler, Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law(Doubleday 2002), was praised for its graceful combination of journalistic style and legal analysis. The book, which explores a little-known but landmark sexual harassment class action lawsuit, was adapted into a screenplay for the 2005 film "North Country," starring Charlize Theron.

Bingham received her A.B. in the History and Literature of America in 1985 and titled her thesis "Henry Watterson: Southern Politics and the Origins of U.S. Expansionism, 1898-1900."

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Peter Blake

Peter Blake '91 is a screenwriter and producer who has worked on some of television's most critically-acclaimed dramas.

After working for a brief period as a management consultant at Monitor Company, Blake accepted a position as a film development assistant, later becoming an executive at Castle Rock Pictures. For four years Blake wrote for ABC's legal drama, "The Practice.” He is currently in his third year as a writer and producer for FOX's hit medical drama, "House, M.D.", and is developing a project for NBC Universal Television Studio. He has also written screenplays for Paramount Pictures and Working Title Films.

Blake graduated from Harvard in '91 with an A.B. in the History and Literature of France and America. His thesis, "Double Standards: American Intellectuals and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine," explored neoconservative thought in the 1980s. He graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1995.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Rosa Brooks

Rosa Brooks '91 is an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. She is currently taking a leave of absence from Georgetown to serve as Special Counsel to the President's Office at the Open Society Institute in New York.

As an undergraduate, Brooks was president of Phillips Brooks House Association; her History and Literature senior thesis focused on female pioneers in the medical profession. After leaving Harvard, Brooks went to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, then on to Yale Law School. Since then, she has served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute; an instructor in Harvard's Expository Writing Program; Acting Director of Yale's Schell Center for International Human Rights and faculty supervisor of Yale's Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic; Senior Advisor to Assistant Secretary Harold Koh at the US Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School; and an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Over the years, Brooks' work has taken her to many of the world's trouble spots, from Iraq and the Gaza Strip to Kosovo, Uganda and Sierra Leone, and both her scholarly and popular writing reflect this background. Brooks' legal scholarship focuses on international law and policy issues relating to failed states, post-conflict reconstruction, human rights, terrorism, and the law of war. Her book, Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law after Military Interventions (with Jane Stromseth and David Wippman), was published in September by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently working on a book about post-9/11 detention and interrogation issues. Her weekly columns for the Los Angeles Times focus mainly on foreign policy and US politics.

Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton '60, a historian of early modern Europe, is a leading
authority on eighteenth-century France. He is the Shelby Cullom
Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University and
Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at
Princeton. Known for his interests in the literary world of
Enlightenment France, his uniquely anthropological approach to history has illuminated a
large collection of pre-Revolution "illegal" literature and spurred new interpretations of
the French Revolution. He is also recognized as a pioneer in the field of the history of
the book.

Professor Darnton, who has taught at Princeton since 1968, was previously Director of the
Program in European Cultural Studies and a former President of the American Historical
Association. His books include Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
(1968); The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979),
for which he he received the Leo Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association; The
Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982); The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;
The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1989); and Revolution in
Print: the Press in France 1775-1800 (1989, with Daniel Roche). His Edition et
Sédition (1991) won the French Prix Médicis, and he is the recipient of a National Book
Critics Circle Award for The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995).
Mr. Darnton's most recent book is George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional
Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2004).

Professor Darnton graduated from Harvard in 1960, where he received an A.B. in History
and Literature. His thesis was entitled "Woodrow Wilson's Image of the American Past."
A Rhodes Scholar, he received his Ph.D. (D. Phil.) in history from Oxford University in
1964, worked briefly as a reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 1965, and
was then elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, 1965-1968. Darnton was awarded
Princeton University's Behrman Humanities Award in 1987, the Gutenberg Prize (2004), and
the American Printing History Association Prize (2005). The French government,
recognizing Darnton's high level of achievement, named him Chevalier of the Legion
d'Honneur. In the spring of 2006, Darnton became a fellow at the National Library of the
Netherlands (KB) and NIAS, where he continues his research on the history of the book
with a focus on the role of publishers in pre-Revolutionary France.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Wai Chee Dimock

Wai Chee Dimock '76 is the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1997, Professor Dimock taught at Rutgers University, the University of California at San Diego, and Brandeis University. Her scholarship investigates the relationship of American literature to world cultures and specifically to law, philosophy, and the history of science. Her current work includes the application of alternative conceptions of time to literary historiography.

Dimock is the author of a study of Herman Melville's novels, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (1989) and Residues of Justice (1996), an interdisciplinary exploration of law, literature, and moral philosophy which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. She has contributed articles to the journals PMLA, SAQ, ALH, and Narrative and is a recipient of the Dactyl Foundation Literary Theory Prize for her article, "A Theory of Resonance." She co-edited several volumes, including Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations with Michael T. Gilmore (Columbia University Press 1994), "Literature and Science" in American Literature (2002), "American Literary Globalism" in ESQ (2005), and "Transnational Citizenship and Humanities" in ALH (2006). Professor Dimock's recent work attempts to link American literature to world literatures. Her forthcoming book, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2006; another, entitled American Literature and the Planet, will be published in 2007. Professor Dimock has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies as well as the New Jersey Governor's Fellowship in the Humanities.

Following her graduation from Harvard in 1976 with an A.B. in History and Literature, Dimock received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982. In addition to her teaching responsibilities at Yale, Dimock served as acting director of the Humanities Division. In 1994 she was a visiting associate professor of English at Harvard. She continues to be a visible and frequent lecturer at interdisciplinary university conferences throughout the United States and abroad.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Adam Goodheart

Adam Goodheart is a historian, travel essayist, teacher, and critic. A 1992 graduate of Harvard, he was a founder and senior editor of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, which won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in its first year of publication. He has been a prolific writer and independent scholar, contributing frequent essays and reviews to such publications as The New York Times (where he also served as deputy editor of the Op-Ed page), the American Scholar (of which he is a contributing editor and former Editorial Board member), the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, Preservation, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Goodheart is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure, and his travel writing has appeared in Outside, GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, and other magazines. Among the prizes his work has received are the Lowell Thomas Award of the Society of American Travel Writers (2004) and the Henry Lawson Award for Travel Writing (2005); his essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including the prestigious Norton Reader. He is currently working on a book on the origins of slavery in America, under contract with Alfred A. Knopf.

Goodheart graduated with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. His thesis was titled "Last Summer of the Republic: The Centennial Exhibition as Experiment and Experience." Mr. Goodheart currently teaches American studies and history at Washington College, where he is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, a forum for fostering innovative approaches to studying, teaching, and writing about American history. A native of Philadelphia, he now lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild '63 is an award-winning essayist and author
of several historical volumes.

Among his publications are Half the Way Home: A Memoir of
Father and Son (Penguin 1986), The Mirror at Midnight: A
South African Journey (Penguin 1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Penguin 1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (Syracuse University 1997) is a collection of his essays and reportage. King Leopold's Ghost (Mariner 1998), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium, won Britain's Duff Cooper Prize and was also a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Hochschild's most recent book about the antislavery movement in the British Empire, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin 2005), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the first person to win Canada's Lionel Gelber Prize twice for the best book on international affairs published in English. Hochschild was also the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2005.

Beginning his career as a daily newspaper reporter, Hochschild wrote and edited for the leftwing Ramparts magazine and in the mid-1970s co-founded Mother Jones. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He has also appeared as a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and taught writing at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Mr. Hochschild graduated from Harvard in 1963 with an A.B. in History and Literature.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Lemann '76 is Dean and the Henry R. Luce Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, establishing himself as a respected commentator on race relations and American society. A lifelong journalist, Lemann was a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and a staff writer for The New Yorker. In addition, Lemann held an editorial post at Texas Monthly and was managing editor of Washington Monthly.

During his tenure at The Atlantic Monthly, Lemann contributed cover articles on the underclass and on the War on Poverty, which laid the groundwork for The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (Vintage 1991), a book about the mid-century migration of millions of Black Americans from the South to the North. He is also the author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1999), which addresses the rise of high-stakes standardized testing, and most recently, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2006), about the failure of Reconstruction in postbellum Mississippi. Lemann has written numerous other pieces for The Atlantic Monthly on national and local politics, education, television, biography, and travel, as well as occasional book reviews.

Lemann graduated from Harvard in 1976 with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. His thesis was entitled "Revolutionary Patriots: Covington Hall and the Southern Anti-Capitalist Tradition." While an undergraduate, he served as President of the Crimson.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Frank Rich

Frank Rich '71 has been a writer for The New York Times since 1980. His column in the
paper's Sunday Op-Ed section offers weekly commentary on American politics and
popular culture.

Rich's career in journalism began in the early 1970s, when he was a founding editor of
the Richmond (VA) Mercury, a weekly newspaper. Subsequently, he worked as film critic
and senior editor of New Times magazine, film critic for the New York Post, and
film and television critic for Time magazine. During the 1980s, when he was The New
York Times' chief theater critic, Rich earned the sobriquet "the Butcher of Broadway" for
the frequency of his negative reviews. In the published collection of his theater reviews,
Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993 (Random House 1998),
Rich provided evidence to dispel his "butcher" image, noting that he had given positive
reviews to a number of shows—including Miss Saigon and Les Miserables—that
some critics had panned.

Rich is the author of several books, including The Theater Art of Boris Aronson
(Knopf 1998), co-authored with Lisa Aronson, and Ghost Light: A Memoir (Random
House 2000). Film rights to the latter have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment.
His new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11
to Katrina, will be published this fall by Penguin Books.

At Harvard, Rich, a resident of Lowell House, was editorial chairman of the Crimson
and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his A.B. in History and Literature with a
thesis entitled "Crossing into the New World: Consciousness and Women in F. Scott
Fitzgerald."

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Joan Shelley Rubin

Joan Shelley Rubin '69 is Professor of History at the University of Rochester, where she has been on the faculty since 1995. Rubin's work as a cultural historian centers on the complex relationship between readers and books. She is the author of Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980) and The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), a study of the role of book clubs, great books series, and book journalism in shaping middle-class reading in the early twentieth century. Her forthcoming book, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, will be published by Harvard University Press in Spring, 2007. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In addition to her scholarly work, Rubin has been active in professional organizations, serving on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Journal of American History and on committees for the Organization of American Historians, the American Studies Association, and the American Historical Association.

Rubin received her A.B. in the history and literature of America in 1969, submitting a thesis titled "'An Effort in Human Actuality'": James Agee and the Documentary Writers of the Depression." After completing her undergraduate degree, Rubin earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, where she was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, and the John Addison Porter Prize.

Arthur Schlesinger, JR.

Author, academic, activist and advisor to presidents, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 is one of America's preeminent historians. He is widely regarded as the leading authority on post-World War II liberalism.

During the war, Schlesinger served in the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services, and the United States Army. In 1948 he was a special assistant to Averell Harriman in Paris during the early months of the Marshall Plan. Later, his active association with postwar politics included work as a staff member on Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign, the national chairmanship of Americans for Democratic Action (1953-1954), and stints as a speechwriter for the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. From 1961-1964, he served as a special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Schlesinger's academic career was equally distinguished. In 1946, he was appointed associate professor of history at Harvard, later becoming a full professor at the College, a position he held from 1954-1961. Following a year as a visiting fellow at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study in 1966, he was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York, a position he held until his retirement in 1996.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Age of Jackson, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1945, and his memoir of the Kennedy presidency, A Thousand Days, for which he won both a second Pulitzer (for biography) and the National Book Award. A second National Book Award followed in 1979 for his 1978 biography Robert Kennedy and His Times. He received many additional awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, the Gold Medal for History from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fregene Prize for Literature, the Bruce Catton Prize for History, the National Humanities Medal, and the Four Freedoms Award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Other books include The Cycles of American History, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Running for President, the autobiographical A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, and War and the American Presidency. From the early 1960s through the early 1980s, Schlesinger also wrote film reviews for a number of publications, including Vogue, Saturday Review, and American Heritage.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1938 with an A.B. in History and Literature. His thesis, "Orestes Brownson: Pilgrim's Progress," was published as a book in 1939. A Henry Fellow at Cambridge University after graduating, he then returned to Harvard as a member of the Society of Fellows. He served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, president of the Society of American Historians, co-chairman of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, as a member of the advisory board of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (named for his parents), and as a trustee of the Twentieth Century Fund.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09

Ted Widmer

On July 1, Edward (Ted) Widmer '84 was welcomed as the new director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, returning to the prestigious institution for advanced research in history and humanities where, as a research fellow in 1994, he was known for his "quick intelligence and sharp sense of humor."

Widmer came to Brown from Washington College, Chestertown, MD, where he was Associate Professor of History and the first director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. In his five years at the Starr Center, Widmer inaugurated a wide variety of educational initiatives, including the first American Studies Institute (a joint venture with the U.S. Department of State). He also served as Special Assistant to former President Clinton (2001-2004), conducting interviews with the ex-president as Clinton wrote his autobiography. Widmer had been associated with the Clinton administration since 1997, when, as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Director of Speechwriting for the National Security Council (1997-2000), he wrote speeches on foreign policy. From 2000-2001, he served as Senior Advisor to the President for Special Projects, directing the Clinton Administration History Project and advising on matters related to history and scholarship, including the Clinton Oral History Project. From 1993 to 1997, he was a lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard, where he received the Stephen Botein Prize for Teaching Excellence.

A prolific author, Widmer's books include Martin Van Buren (Henry Holt 2005), one of a series of presidential biographies edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (Oxford University Press 2001), recipient of the 2001 Washington Irving Literary Medal. Soon to be published are Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Farrar Straus Giroux), American Speeches (Library of America), and African Drums and their Repercussions (Oxford University Press). A former contributing editor to George magazine, Widmer is also the author of academic and popular essays. His articles frequently appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune, among other publications.

Following his graduation from Harvard in 1984 with an A.B. in the History and Literature of France and America, for which he wrote a thesis on "The New Heaven and the New Earth: Samuel Sewalls' Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica and the Redefinition of America," Widmer earned his A.M. in History and his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. Currently a consultant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Widmer is a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Advisory Board of the Lincoln Prize (for best book on the Civil War or Lincoln). He has been a trustee of The Harvard Lampoon since 1996. Widmer's curriculum vitae notes his discovery of the "earliest baseball score" (1845), the unearthing of which was featured on the front page of the October 4, 1990 edition of The New York Times.

Compiled by Caroline Smart '09