2011
Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities

The preeminent historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, delivered the 2011 McCreight Lecture Thursday, October 27, 2011. The Pulitzer Prize winning author presented “The Revolutionary Origins of the Civil War” at the Culture Center in Charleston. Professor Wood has been called an American institution. The yearly McCreight Lecture is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing followed the talk.

Wood’s talk examined how the ideas and ideals that came out of the American Revolution influenced the causes of the Civil War. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on a platform of forbidding the extension of slavery into the West, the Southern states felt their way of life was threatened and seceded from the Union. But why was the North willing to engage in a long and bloody war that cost Northerners hundreds of thousands of lives? Wood believes that to fully understand why the North cared enough to resist the secession of the Southern states we have to go back to the Revolution and the principles upon which our nation was founded.

Dr. Wood is Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1993. Wood’s latest book, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, was published in May 2011. Other recent works include Empire of Liberty (2009), The Purpose of the Past (2008), Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006), and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Information concerning the 2012 McCreight Lecture will be posted here in late summer.

The West Virginia Humanities Council board of directors established the annual McCreight Lecture in honor of founding board of directors member Betsy Keadle McCreight, who passed away in 1985.

This program is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.