Born at the start of the Civil War, Juliette Gordon Low grew up in Georgia, where she struggled to reconcile being a good Southern belle with her desire to run barefoot through the fields. Deafened by an accident, “Daisy” married a dashing British aristocrat and moved to England. But she was ultimately betrayed by her […]
Lecture Date: February 2, 2012 Get to know Noah Webster, a brusque, ambitious intellectual who influences you every time you speak or start to write. Noah Webster was born in 1758 in Connecticut of a prestigious Puritan Yankee lineage. Although he tried variously to be a lawyer, a school teacher, and a newspaperman with various […]
Louisa May Alcott spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library and excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau. When she was 35, she wrote the beloved Little Women in her childhood home, basing the novel on her family during the Civil […]
Lecture Date: January 31, 2012 The Marquis de Lafayette, who came from a long line of French military men dating to the Crusades, wanted honor and glory from a young age. But he had to leave the comforts of his native France and sail to America in order to find them. Born in nobility and […]
Lecture Date: January 24, 2012 And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut, author of the now-classic Slaughterhouse Five: Vonnegut’s World War II experiences turned into fiction. Published in November 2011, Charles J. Shields’ biography was chosen by the New York […]
John A. Farrell’s biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011) — “impeccably researched, beautifully written, and timely,” said the San Francisco Chronicle— describes the career of the limelight-stealing, two-fisted attorney who resigned from corporate law to defend union organizers, powerless minorities, and those accused of sensational crimes. Darrow is perhaps best known for […]
On February 14, the same night that it premiers on HBO, the Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series will show clips from The Loving Story, with guests attorney Bernard Cohen, who was part of the ACLU team that represented the Lovings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Peggy Fortune, the Lovings’ daughter. ___________________ From director […]
April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the 20th century. World War II had just ended; democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for […]
Columbus, said a New York Times reviewer of Laurence Bergreen’s biography, Columbus: The Four Voyages ($35, Viking, 2011) was a “terribly interesting man — brilliant, audacious, volatile, paranoid, narcissistic, ruthless and (in the end) deeply unhappy.” Part explorer, part entrepreneur, part wannabe-aristocrat, Columbus initiated the most important period in Western history as a result […]
On February 14, the same night that it premiers on HBO, the Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series will show clips from The Loving Story, with guests attorney Bernard Cohen, who was part of the ACLU team that represented the Lovings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Peggy Fortune, the Lovings’ daughter. ___________________ From director and […]
The Arab Spring puts us in mind of the early days of our Republic. And just as exiles, ex-patriots, and lovers of liberty have rushed to the North African coast and the Middle East to lend a hand in overthrowing oppressive governments, the American Revolution attracted volunteers from far away. One of the most famous […]
Vice-president of the United States, brilliant attorney, duelist, and renegade leader of Western adventurers— Aaron Burr cut a path through American history that is bold, at times erratic, and highly controversial. In his fast-paced book, American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America (Simon & Schuster, $30) historian and constitutional lawyer David O. Stewart— […]
In 2006, Charles J. Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no (“A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer”). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a […]
Noah Webster was as prickly and hard as a horse chestnut. The 18th-century compiler of the first American spelling book and dictionary was opinionated, quick to anger, self-righteous, and drove himself to exhaustion. Friends and family learned that nothing matter to him except the work: codifying American speech with as much rigor and self-imposed […]
The April 23, 2009 lecture on Ronald Reagan. Stephen J. Farnsworth Professor of Communication, George Mason University Author, Spinner in Chief
The April 21, 2009 lecture on Hugh Hefner. Steven Watts Professor of American Intellectual and Cultural History, University of Missouri Author, Mr Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream
The April 14, 2009 lecture on Harry Potter. Philip Nel Professor of English, Kansas State University
The April 7, 2009 lecture on Frankenstein. Susan Tyler Hitchock Author, Frankenstein: A Cultural History
The April 2, 2009 lecture on James Farmer. Raymond Arsenault Professor of Southern History, University of Southern Florida Author, Freedom Riders
The March 31, 2009 lecture on Mary Todd Lincoln. Jason Emerson Author, The Madness of Mary Lincoln