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Lafayette’s Lehigh Valley Alumni Chapter will host a book signing and discussion with Donald Miller, MacCracken Professor of History, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 8 in the Oechsle Hall Auditorium.
The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Miller’s latest book will be available for purchase.
Released Oct. 10 by Simon and Schuster, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany weaves the narrative power of fiction with recent interviews, oral histories, and accounts from American, British, and German archives into a deeply personal story about bomber crews during World War II.
Some of the real-life heroes chronicled in the work are Robert Morgan, pilot of the legendary Memphis Belle; Paul Tibbets, who later would fly the Enola Gay on the atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima; andRobert “Rosie” Rosenthal, leader of the famous Bloody Hundredth, who flew 52 combat missions and is one of the key figures in the book.
Masters of the Air also details the reporting of war correspondents Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney and even the wartime heroics of movie stars Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, who both flew in the Eighth Air Force.
The book garnered a large amount of advance praise.
Mary Pat Staats, associate director of alumni affairs, worked with Miller’s publicist at Simon and Schuster to coordinate an alumni event on his book tour. Though the Lehigh Valley Chapter’s event is the only one organized by Alumni Affairs, other alumni chapters will visit book signings in their regions.
“Our alumni often tell us that some of their fondest memories of their Lafayette student experiences involved interactions and relationships built with faculty,” says Staats. “We were happy to collaborate with Simon and Schuster, as doing so coincides with one of our objectives to reconnect alumni with our faculty whenever possible.
“Our alumni chapters look to faculty speakers for intellectual stimulation, the opportunity to reflect on the ongoing excellence of the Lafayette faculty, to hear descriptions of new programs at the College, and to offer a means for alumni to connect with each other and the College.”
Remaining dates on Miller’s book tour include:
Like many of Miller’s projects, students played a key role in the production of Masters of the Air. History and art double majorMargarita Karasoulas ’08(Harrison, N.Y.), history and economics & business graduate Alexandra Kenney ’06; English and history double major Jess Cygler ’07 (Scarsdale, N.Y.), and history major Marisa Floriani ’07 (Wyckoff, N.J.), helped Miller with fact checking, proofreading, and critiquing as part ofLafayette’s Community of Scholars initiative.
Community of Scholars is supported by College funding and a $200,000 grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation. The three-year program allows faculty members from a variety of disciplines to work with students in small group settings.
Miller has won six awards for excellence in teaching, five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a resident scholar at All Souls College, Oxford. He was also named the Crayenborgh Lecturer at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
In 2003, PBS aired a four-hour American Experience series based on Miller’s book City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, which won a Great Lakes Book Award. He played a multifaceted role in the production of “Ulysses S. Grant,” a four-hour American Experience program that premiered on PBS television in 2002. Miller was also lead scholar and on-air host of A Biography of America, a video series and telecourse that aired on PBS stations throughout the country in 2000-01. The 26 half-hour programs covered the sweep of American history from the pre-Columbian beginnings to the present.
The PBS American Experience program “Victory in the Pacific,” which was based in large part on Miller’s book The Story of World War II, was nominated for three Emmy Awards.
His book D-Days in the Pacific was the companion volume to a three-part History Channel program of the same name that debuted last year.
Following Hurricane Katrina, Miller appeared on CNN and National Public Radio and was quoted by a number of national publications, including the New York Times, for his writings on American and European urban disasters, including the Great Chicago Fire and the destruction by bombing of Japan and Germany during World War II.
Miller received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and joined the Lafayette faculty in 1978.