EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: Sept. 18-Oct. 25, 2012

A series of free lectures and films will be offered later this month and throughout October to provide historical context for the national conference “A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement in its Time and Ours” Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at the University of Michigan.

The Preview Lecture and Film Series features seven speakers, mostly U-M faculty, who will explain some of the background to the Port Huron years in preparation for the conference.

The Port Huron Statement, drafted by Tom Hayden, former editor of the Michigan Daily student newspaper and a civil rights activist, emerged from a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society at the United Auto Workers Retreat on Lake Huron in June 1962. It became a legendary document of the New Left movement of the 1960s and its call for participatory democracy still resonates with today’s activists.

“The series introduces members of the campus and community to some of the fundamental historical conditions from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, which inspired an age of dissent still echoing in American memory,” said Howard Brick, the Louis Evans Professor of History and conference organizer.

Lecture and film highlights include:

• Sept. 20: Finn Brunton, assistant professor of information at the School of Information, will explain how mass protest was organized by the simple communications technologies of mimeograph machines and telephone calls.
• Sept. 25: Thomas Weisskopf, professor emeritus of economics, will discuss a dimension of scholarship that came out of New Left movements, in part under his influence: the dissenting field of radical political economics.
• Oct. 2: “Harvest of Shame,” a 1960 documentary by renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow that exposed the plight of migrant workers.
• Oct. 4: John McMillian, guest lecturer from Georgia State University, will address offbeat underground newspapers of the 1960s counterculture and radical activism.
• Oct. 18: Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, will discuss the meaning of “participatory democracy.”
• Oct. 25: “Berkeley in the Sixties,” a film about the student protests and radical initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s.

PLACE: Lectures are in 1014 Tisch Hall. Films are in 2160 Shapiro Library Screening Room, unless noted. Check the conference website for event times: www.lsa.umich.edu/phs/events. Campus map: http://campusinfo.umich.edu/article/central-campus-map.

SPONSORS: College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Office of the Vice President for Research and numerous academic departments.

INFORMATION: Howard Brick, (734) 929-4484 or hbrick@umich.edu.