October 29, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.-William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will deliver the annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture at Amherst College on Thursday, Nov. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115). Sponsored by the Department of History, the lecture and a reception to follow are free and open to the public.
Cronon, one of the nation's leading scholars of Western American and environmental history, will speak on "The Portage: Time, Memory and Storytelling in the Making of an American Town." The lecture will offer a preview of his forthcoming book on Portage, Wisc., home to historian Frederick Jackson Turner and environmentalist Aldo Leopold.
A prolific writer and influential teacher, Cronon is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Award.
The Hawkins Lecture honors Hugh Hawkins, longtime professor of history and American studies at Amherst College who retired in 2000.
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