April 14, 2013 “The Ike Age: Eisenhower, America and the World of the 1950s” Lecture by William Hitchcock, May 2
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Cold War historian William Hitchcock will discuss President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s leadership during the 1950s and his impact on today’s world.
Hitchcock, who holds the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, will present “The Ike Age: Eisenhower, America and the World of the 1950s” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 2, in Room 119 in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the Kluge Center, the lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets are not needed.
Hitchcock is a professor of history and a senior scholar at the Miller Center for Public Policy, both at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on the international, diplomatic and military history of the 20th century, particularly the world wars and the Cold War. He has written widely on trans-Atlantic relations and European history and politics.
While at the Kluge Center the past five months, Hitchcock has conducted research in the Library’s collections on his forthcoming book, “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s,” which will be published by Simon and Schuster. In his book, Hitchcock argues that “between 1945 and 1961, no single person personified the era as well as Dwight Eisenhower. The 1950s in America is usually considered a decade of quiet prosperity and contentment. But beneath the placid surface of the Eisenhower years, America was going through dramatic changes.”
In the lecture, Hitchcock will discuss how Eisenhower’s beliefs, ideas and domestic and foreign policy choices shaped an era for the nation and the world.
Hitchcock co-edited “The Human Rights Revolution: An International History” with Petra Goedde and Akira Iriye (2012); authored “The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe” (2008), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; “The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present” (2002); and numerous books and scholarly articles.
The Kissinger Chair program offers outstanding thinkers and practitioners a unique opportunity to pursue advanced research in the largest and most international collection of library materials in the world.
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center; visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.
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PR 13-074
2013-04-15
ISSN 0731-3527