FARMINGTON – Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood will give a lecture titled “American Enlightenment” at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, at the University of Maine at Farmington’s Lincoln Auditorium.
Wood’s lecture is part of UMF’s Reading Revolutions program, a series of talks designed to “build upon the strength of our historic book collection,” said UMF spokeswoman Mary Sylvester.
The collection is currently on loan to the college from the Remnant Trust, and it includes such rare writings as a handwritten copy of the Magna Carta from 1350. Sylvester said all the books in the collection are “related to the great ideas associated with democracy,” and that the Reading Revolutions lecture series was designed to highlight many of those ideas.
In addition to Sunday’s lecture, talks in the series will cover subjects including “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli and the essays of Michel de Montaigne.
Wood was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”
His talk will focus on the ideas and belief-system espoused by America’s founders – beliefs that Wood says still inform our concept of what it means to be an American. In a recent UMF press release, Wood explained that “America is unique. We are not a nation in the traditional sense of the term; we are not an ethnicity. What makes us a nation is a set of beliefs.”
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