Events

Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Edward Larson discusses his new book that explores the ideas and battlefield sacrifices of 1776 to remind us why the year matters to all of us. At the beginning of 1776, virtually no one in the colonies was advocating independence. By the end of 1776, independence was on every patriot’s lips. The many tyrannies of a king had made an independent republic necessary. In this talk, Larson gives us a compact, insightful history of that pivotal year by tracing a narrative arc that runs from the inspiring appeals of Paine’s Common Sense; through the soaring ideals of midsummer, when the Continental Congress grounded independence in the self-evident truths of human equality and individual rights; to Paine’s urgent pleas of December, when “the times that try men’s souls” required Americans not “to shrink from the service of their country.”

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About the Speaker

Edward Larson holds the Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law and is University Professor of History at Pepperdine University. He earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from Harvard and has taught courses at Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, University of Melbourne, Leiden University and the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. Prior to becoming a professor, Larson practiced law in Seattle and served as counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Ohio State University. Dr. Larson was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in History and numerous other awards for writing and teaching. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books and over one hundred published articles. His 2015 book, The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789, was a New York Times bestseller. He was a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study Center, held the Fulbright Program's John Adams Chair in American Studies, participated in the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Writers and Artists Program, and served as an inaugural Fellow at the Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. A panelist on the National Institutes of Health's Study Section for Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Larson is also interviewed frequently for broadcast, print, cable and internet media, including The Daily Show, The Today Show and multiple appearances on PSB, BBC, the History Channel, C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, MNBC and NPR.