Presidential historian to speak at Purdue
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Project Impact's forum series surrounding the 2012 presidential election continues on Dec. 1 with a historian and author who created or directed libraries and museums for several American presidents.
Richard Norton Smith, now a scholar in residence at George Mason University, is a regular contributor to C-SPAN and the PBS NewsHour. He is creator of "The Contenders," a C-SPAN series about presidential candidates who ran and lost, but changed history.
Smith's talk, entitled "Choosing a President: What History Tells Us," is at 6:30 p.m. at Krannert Building, Room G016. It is free and open to the public. As with Project Impact's two previous forums on the presidential election, everyone attending will be asked to participate in a brief poll at the beginning of the evening. Participants will use their personal cell phone to text poll answers. During the question-and-answer period after Smith's talk, questions can be asked via Twitter (@Project_Impact) or in person. Attendees are encouraged to follow Project Impact's Twitter for updates on Smith before the forum.
This event is organized by Project Impact, an experiential learning, leadership and civic engagement initiative of Carolyn Curiel, a clinical professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication and former White House senior aide and U.S. ambassador. This forum is the third in the yearlong series, "2012: It's Not Just Politics, It's Our Future."
"As we at Purdue involve ourselves with the issues and the personalities of the current presidential race through our forum series, it is important to take a historical view," Curiel said. "Richard Norton Smith has the rarest of perspectives: He is a scholar who brings history alive, and he informs his research with the personal experience of having worked in the executive office of the president at the White House."
He created or directed presidential libraries dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. His first major book, "Thomas E. Dewey and His Times," was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He also has written "An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover" and "The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation." "His Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation" was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, while his 1997 biography, "The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick," received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School.
Since 2000 Smith has been working on a life of Nelson Rockefeller, a project involving thousands of pages of newly available documents as well as more than 150 interviews with Rockefeller associates.
Smith's appearance at Purdue follows Project Impact forums with the immigration scholar Roberto Suro of the University of California's Tomás Rivera Policy Institute and Mark Halperin, best-selling author and senior political analyst for Time Magazine and MSNBC. With the assistance of a select student planning committee, Curiel has designed the forums to engage the Purdue community on election issues.
Forums next semester will include executives from Google, Twitter and C-SPAN on social media and democracy. Dates and locations of future events will be announced for the series, which will continue until the 2012 presidential election.
The series is made possible by support from the Office of the Provost, the Krannert School of Management, CERIAS (the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security), Department of History, International Programs, the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence, the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue Alumni Association, the Purdue Exponent, College of Technology, Department of Political Science, and community contributions.
Source: Carolyn Curiel, curiel@purdue.edu