The Alfred E. Golz Memorial Lecture
This event is available as a webcast. A webcast of the 2006 Alfred E. Golz Lecture is available through Hawthorne-Longfellow Library's Special Collections Archive.
Alfred E. Golz Lecture Fund was established by Ronald A. Golz '56 in 1970 in memory of his father. This fund is used to support a lecture by an eminent historian or humanitarian to be scheduled close to the November 21 birthday of Alfred E. Golz. Past Golz lecturers have included Peter Hayes, Lizabeth Cohen, Natalie Zemon Davis, James McPherson, Jonathan Spence, Ira Berlin, and David Brion Davis.
Adam Hochschild was the Golz lecturer for the 2007-2008 academic year. His lecture, "Twelve Men in a Printing Shop May 22, 1787: A Great Human Rights Movement Is Born" was held Monday, September 24, 2007 at 7:30pm in Daggett Lounge, Thorne Hall.
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award Britain’s Duff Cooper Prize. His books have been translated into twelve languages and four of them have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His Bury the Chains:
Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves , was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. His last two books have also each won Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize and the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards. In 2005, he received a Lannan Literary Award for the body of his work.
Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. His articles have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and elsewhere. He was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and has been a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, and has given writing workshops for working journalists in the United States, Britain, India, Zambia and South Africa. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild. They have two sons and one granddaughter.
Past Alfred E. Golz Memorial Lecturers
Peter Hayes '68, Northwestern University, 2006
Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University, 2005
Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia, 2004
Friedrich Katz, University of Chicago, 2003
Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis 2002
Weiming Tu , Harvard University, 2001
Martin Schaffner, University of Basel, 2000
Ira Berlin, University of Maryland, 1999
Michael Blakey, Howard University, spring 1998
Jonathan Spence, Yale University, fall 1998
William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley, 1997
David Keightley, University of California, Berkeley, 1996
Hans Guggisberg, University of Basel, 1995
Abiola Irele, Harvard University, 1994
James McPherson, Princeton University 1993
Nancy Farriss, University of Pennsylvania 1992
Pierre Sauvage, Los Angeles, 1991
Frederic Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley, fall 1990
Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, spring 1990
David Brion Davis, Yale University, 1989