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Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough will kick off the Lives of Liberty Lecture Series 2007-08 with a talk entitled “Ties that Bind: America and France” at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 5, in Kamine Gymnasium, Allan P. Kirby Sports Center.
Open to the public free of charge, this will be the keynote address for a series of lectures by distinguished speakers honoring the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette. The series is part of the College’s yearlong celebration in 2007-08 in recognition of the life and legacy of the man for whom it is named. Major events also include a historical exhibit, entitled A Son and his Adoptive Father: The Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington, and a birthday party on Sept. 6.
The father of a Lafayette graduate and recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree from the College in 1995, McCullough was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his biographies of Harry S Truman and John Adams. He was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President George W. Bush in December 2006. He is a world-renowned writer and historian who has received more than 70 awards and honors for his books and articles. McCullough’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, won the National Book Award for Biography in 1982 and The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, won the National Book Award for History in 1978.
The Marquis de Lafayette is “a great story. He was a great man,” McCullough said in a recent interview with The Journal & Courier of Lafayette and West Lafayette, Ind. “He believed in liberty, and he was willing to contribute his abilities, his money, his heart and soul and his life if need be. He didn’t want to just talk about it, he wanted to do something about it.”
McCullough is also the author of The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), The Johnstown Flood (1987), Brave Companions: Portraits in History (1992), and most recently 1776 (2005). None of his books has ever been out of print.
McCullough has been honored with the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, National Humanities Medal, St. Louis Literary Award, Carl Sandburg Award, and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award.
McCullough holds B.A. in English literature from Yale University and honorary degrees from more than 30 colleges and universities. He has also hosted public television’s Smithsonian World and The American Experience and narrated Ken Burns’ documentaries The Civil War and Napoleon and the movie Seabiscuit.