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September 26, 2013
Charles C. Mann ’76 delivered Amherst College’s annual Hugh Hawkins lecture, titled “1493: Entwining Ecology and History,” in Paino Lecture Hall of the Beneski Building.
A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, Mann has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including BioScience, The Boston Globe, Fortune, Geo (Germany), National Geographic, The New York Times (magazine, op-ed, book review), Panorama (Italy), Paris-Match (France), Quark (Japan), Smithsonian, Der Stern (Germany), Technology Review, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post (magazine, op-ed, book review). In addition to 1491, he has co-written four other books: The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1986; rev. ed., 1995); The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1991), Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995), and @ Large: The Strange Case of the Internet’s Biggest Invasion (1998).
A four-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Margaret Sanger Foundation and the Lannan Foundation (a 2006 Literary Fellowship). His three-part graphic novel, Cimarronin, based in part on 1493, will appear late this year. It is co-written by Mann, science-fiction novelists Neal Stephenson and Mark Teppo, and Ellis Amdur, a master of classical East Asian martial traditions.
The annual Hawkins Lecture, sponsored by the History Department honors Hugh Hawkins, professor emeritus of history and American studies at Amherst. A distinguished scholar of American higher education, of the American South and of cultural and intellectual history, Hawkins retired in 2000 after teaching for more than 40 years at Amherst, where he helped build both the history and the American studies departments.