The Brigham Young University Department of History will sponsor the 22nd Annual Russel B. Swensen Lecture, featuring T. H. Breen, a specialist in early American and revolutionary history, Thursday, March 1, at 11 a.m. in 1060 Harold B. Lee Library.
Admission will be free, and the public is welcome to attend.
Breen will discuss “It Rained Dead Cats and Dogs the Day the Revolution Began: Political Ideology and Popular Mobilization on the Eve of American Independence.” He will focus on the contribution of “The Crisis,” an anonymously penned English newspaper column and pamphlet that took America by storm, to the events surrounding the American Revolution.
Breen says the publication “helped Americans make sense of the events that transformed their political lives … [and] encouraged armed resistance to an empire grown corrupt.”
Since receiving three academic degrees from and teaching at Yale University, Breen has taught at the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, Oxford University and Northwestern University. He recently received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and an appointment at the Max Planck Institute for History at Gottingen, Germany, from 2004-2008.
Breen’s publications include “The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England 1630-1730,” “Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories” and “Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence.” He is currently completing “The Revolutionary Moment: American Insurgency 1774-1776.”
For more information, contact the Department of History at (801) 422-4335.
