Academic Year 1999-2000
Fall 1999
Alan Wolfe teaches political science and directs the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent book, the highly acclaimed One Nation After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, the Left and Each Other (1998), explores the moral beliefs of middle-class Americans as revealed in in-depth interviews around the country. He spoke at the Athenaeum on the topic “Have Americans Lost Their Virtue?”
Nelson Polsby is Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1988-99 he served as director of the Institute for Governmental Studies at Berkeley. Polsby is editor of the Annual Review of Political Science, political science editor of The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and serves on editorial boards of four scholarly journals. His works include Presidential Elections (9th ed., 1996), and The New Federalist Papers (1997). He gave two talks at the Athenaeum titled “A Revolution in Congress” and “What Do We Know About Presidential Elections?”
Spring 2000
Ernesto Cortes directs the Southwest IAF Network, which has helped over 25,000 people to lead their neighbors in identifying and finding realistic, politically viable solutions to local problems. The IAF pursues job training, health care, and community partnerships to improve public education. He has been widely honored for his work: in addition to being a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1984). He presented in the Spring semester on “The Importance of Politics in a Democratic Society.”
John Lewis Gaddis teaches History at Yale University and is a leading historian of US foreign policy. He is perhaps best known for his writings on the Cold War, including his highly influential books Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982) and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997). He spoke at the Athenaeum on the topic “Order vs. Justice: An American Foreign Policy Dilemma.”