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This year's Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Lecture Series is bringing Dr. Richard White, the esteemed Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, to Villanova University for a lecture titled: "The Late Great Environmental Crisis of the Gilded Age: A Success Story."

The Lecture Series is a gift by my father to the university from which my mother graduated with honors after raising three children. Each year it brings extraordinary people to the campus for dialogue with students and the community. Jill Lepore has joined us. Andrew Bacevich. James McPherson. Others.

The selection of Dr. Richard White for this year's lecture is especially timely—and inspired. Dr. White is a Pulitzer-Prize nominated historian with a special interest in environmental history and Native American history. Through his Spatial History Lab at Stanford, he "explores the construction of space by transcontinental railroads during the late nineteenth century." It's a topic about which he wrote in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, a Los Angeles Times Book Award winner.

My father, the Kephart family, and Villanova University invite you to join us for this free event:

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It has been my privilege, through the years, to share word of the annual lecture series created by my father and Villanova University in memory of my mother, Lore Kephart. My mother was, herself, a distinguished woman—not just a graduate of Villanova and a writer, but a woman of great intelligence and grace who also (with enviable ease) served dinners no one who ever ate them will forget.

My mother would have deeply appreciated the time that the Villanova team, together with my father, put into selecting Dr. Isabel V. Hull, Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University, as this year's honored guest. Dr. Hull has two degrees from Yale University in History, as well as an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. At Cornell she teaches courses with titles like "The International Laws of War," "The First World War: Causes, Conduct, Consequences," and "History of Liberalism." She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a John Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Research Fellow.

This year Dr. Hull published her new book, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War, which Samuel Moyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, wrote: "is a strong demonstration of the worth of international law and the laws of war in particular, and vindicates Ms. Hull's standing as one of our greatest historians of modern European politics."

It is this book that will form the basis of Dr. Hull's talk at Villanova University on October 9, starting at 7 o'clock. The event is free and open to the public. The Kephart family and Villanova University extend a warm invitation.

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On December 6, 2011, starting at 7 PM, Jill Lepore will join hundreds of students, faculty members, and university neighbors in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. I'm extremely proud that Dr. Lepore represents the third speaker in The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series, an annual event that my father created in memory of my mother, who graduated in the top of her Villanova University class following a college career that was not initiated until she had raised her three children.

Dr. Lepore's talk is titled "Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister," with the further subtitle: "an 18th century tale of two Americas."  We get some hint of the fascinating content to come in this New York Times op-ed piece, which appeared on April 23, 2011.  I am excerpting at length, and I hope to be forgiven:

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.

“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.

He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.

She had one child after another; her husband, a saddler named Edward Mecom, grew ill, and may have lost his mind, as, most certainly, did two of her sons. She struggled, and failed, to keep them out of debtors’ prison, the almshouse, asylums. She took in boarders; she sewed bonnets. She had not a moment’s rest.

And still, she thirsted for knowledge. “I Read as much as I Dare,” she confided to her brother. She once asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails,” he joked. He sent her what he could; she read it all. But there was no way out. 

Dr. Lepore, whose work in The New Yorker always thrills me and whose mind seems to track one curiosity after the other—Charles Dickens, Planned Parenthood, the Tea Party, Stuart Little, (she's even got a co-authored novel to her name)—is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American history at Harvard University.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engag

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My mother went to college after she had raised the three of us—choosing Villanova as her academic home and remaining an essential fixture on the campus long after she had graduated in the top of her class. She and my father sponsored aspiring historians and contributed to funds. They befriended Villanova scholars and dreams.

Shortly after my mother passed away, my father decided to make her presence at Villanova a permanent one by creating and endowing The Lore Kephart, '86, Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. Working with a team of historians and administrators (including my own dear friend Paul Steege), he has, in her honor, launched what will be an extraordinary yearly lecture, open to the entire community.

Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, Ph.D. will give the inaugural lecture—"Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief"�on September 30, 7 PM, in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. The George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Princeton, Dr. McPherson won his Pulitzer for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a book that went on to sell some 600,000 copies and precipitated a renewed interest in the Civil War. In 1998, Dr. McPherson won the Lincoln Prize for his book, For Cause and Comrades: When Men Fought in the Civil War.

My father, I, and all of the Kepharts hope those of you who live near enough will join us for this evening of celebration and learning. Registration for the free event happens here.

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Paul Steege is a friend. A Princeton graduate who reminds me, often, of my own brother, another Princeton alum. A broad-thinking, socially responsible, inventive soul with whom I loved serving on our church outreach committee. An associate professor of history at Villanova University, who was in attendance this past Friday evening at a dinner honoring the Distinguished Historians Lecture Series my father has bestowed there in memory of my mother. A man with whom I can talk at length about readerly/writerly things.

Paul Steege is all of that (oh, yes, and also: Paul played goalie for Princeton's soccer team), and he is as well the author of Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949, a book that I have just this morning finished reading. I knew Paul through some of the years that he spent working on this book—would see him at the local coffee shop pounding away on his laptop. We'd talk about its contents, but not until I read would I actually see just how smart Paul is on the page, how evocatively he brings to life the black market terrors, compromises, and small, lit-up salvations of a Berlin ransacked by divisions and impossible politics. This book is fresh; the past is parsed. What happened is here, but more to the point is how Paul discovers, for us, what the past means, how he challenges "all ordinary people," in his words, "to consider their complicty in the making of their worlds, but also their potential to transform them."

The years 1946-1949 were brutal and harrowing in Berlin: buildings were shorn, winters were fierce, women were so frequently raped that rape became the commonplace of conversation, and even for the most ethical-minded, the black market was the essential salve. Within this unambiguous context of suffering, there were, still, grace notes of humanity—gestures Paul sets aside with Terrence des Pres-like care. This one, from Paul's book, will touch any reader deeply:

Even in the midst of the extreme cold, Berliners sought out opportunities to reassert their humanity and do more than just survive. Ruth Andreas-Freidrich described sitting in an apartment with friends bundled up in hats and coats and listening to one of them recite poems by Goethe. 'And when you think about it, they seem even more beautiful at twenty degrees below zero, without electricity or coal.'

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