Hi all,

As I guess I had too much free time, I have taken over as director of the URI Center for the Humanities. Most of this stuff, you wouldn’t care about. But we also have an annual lecture series on a given theme and this year’s is “American Revolutions.” There is going to be 7 lectures in the 2026-27 school year. The fall series is about the American Revolution specifically and the spring takes its legacies forward in time and into Latin America and the Caribbean. These lectures are in person but also can be streamed and you can ask questions on the streaming. I thought that many of you might like to hear an excellent lecture series.

It starts on September 24, 4 PM Eastern with Robert Parkinson of SUNY-Binghamton speaking on “Everything You Wanted to Know about the Declaration But Were Afraid to Ask.” He’s the author of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence and Heart of American Darkness: A Story of Murder and Revolution on the Early Frontier, among other books.

You can register to view the talk, right here at this very link. After you do, you will get a link for the live streaming. Plus you get to see me live and in action. And what’s more exciting about that. Also, you can participate in the Q&A. You can ask questions on the link and we can read them out. We will tend to prioritize questions of people there live, as you can imagine, but we often ask these questions from our streaming viewers.

So since many of you enjoy history and quality educational events, I wanted to reach out to you and give you this opportunity. I’ll announce the other ones as they go. This will happen every year now, so long as I am running this center, which will be for at least 3 years. Enjoy and feel free to ask me any questions about it in the comments!

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