Historian to be Featured at Chicago Humanities Festival
Kevin Boyle, professor of history and author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction, is a featured speaker at the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival on November 11. He will be giving the Baskes Lecture in History on The Other 1960s. Boyle’s much-anticipated new book on the topic, Change Is Gonna Come: America in the Sixties, will be published by W.W. Norton.
Boyle, a Detroit native, is one of the most widely respected historians of 20th-century America and a masterful storyteller. His landmark work, Arc of Justice, was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A gripping look at the murder of a white man by a black man in 1925 Detroit and the ensuing trial that garnered national attention and helped set the stage for the nascent civil rights movement, Arc of Justice was also selected for the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Tolerance Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Book Award.
This event is a new project in a recent collaboration between the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Arts and Sciences Humanities Institute. "Our partner in this wonderful event is the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University," said Matti Bunzl, artistic director, Chicago Humanities Festival and professor of anthropology, history, and German, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We commenced our association last year, with a widely hailed talk on “Tomorrow’s History” by Boyle’s colleague David Staley (associate professor, history) and we greatly look forward to continuing it with many more presenters drawn from the Big 10 powerhouse."
