October 11, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson will give a talk titled “The Western Way of War” at 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13, in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College. The third lecture in the series sponsored by the Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst, Hanson’s talk is free and open to the public.

Hanson was a full-time farmer before joining California State University at Fresno in 1984 to initiate a classics program. Educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the American School of Classical Studies and Stanford University, Hanson still lives and works with his family on a 40-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, Calif., where he was born in 1953. Currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Hanson has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif., a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University, a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism, an Alexander Onassis Fellow and the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Hanson has written widely on Greek, agrarian and military history and contemporary culture. His many books include Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983), The Western Way of War (1989), Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience (1991), The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995), Fields without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996), Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, 1998), The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (1999), The Soul of Battle (1999); The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer (2000); Carnage and Culture (2001), Bonfire of the Humanities (with Bruce Thornton and John Heath, 2001), An Autumn of War (2002), Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (2003) and Ripples of Battle (2003).

Hanson has written essays for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, National Review, American Heritage, Policy Review, Commentary, National Review, the Wilson Quarterly, the Weekly Standard, Daily Telegraph and Washington Times. He has been interviewed often on National Public Radio, the PBS NewsHour and C-Span BookTV. He is a columnist for the National Review Online and serves on the editorial board of Arion, the Military History Quarterly and City Journal, as well as the board of the Claremont Institute.

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