Voices for Peace: 1914/2014

Date and Time
November 7, 2014
Event Details

The New York Public Library, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Carnegie Corporation of New York invite you to join us in marking the 100th anniversary of World War I with a series of discussions by eminent historians, who will look at attempts to prevent war in 1914 and today’s ongoing efforts to achieve international peace.

Register here. Registration is free and grants access to all three sessions.

Schedule of events:

Friday, November 7th, 2014. 

9:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Registration

10:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Welcome

10:45 am – 12:15 pm
Who Were the Voices for Peace Then (And Why Did They Fail)?
Moderator: Lewis Lapham
Panelists: Jack Beatty, Adam Hochschild, Michael Kazin

12:30pm – 1:15pm
Keynote Speech
"A Fool for Peace: Andrew Carnegie and the Coming of the Great War"
David Nasaw
Introduction by Jessica Mathews

1:30pm – 3:00pm 
Where Are the Voices for Peace Now?
Moderator: Lewis Lapham
Panelists: Leslie Cagan, David Cannadine, Steve Fraser

3:15pm and 3:45pm 
Tours of The New York Public Library's exhibition, Over Here: WWI and the Fight for the American Mind

All events take place in the Celeste Bartos Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

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Jack Beatty is News Analyst for On Point, the NPR public affairs program produced at WBUR-Boston. He was literary editor of the New Republic and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (1992), winner of an American Book Award; The World According to Peter Drucker (1998), a New York Times Book Review  Notable Book of the Year; Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007), named a Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune; and the editor of Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America (2001), among the 10 titles chosen by Business Week as The Best Business Books of 2001, and The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War Was Not Inevitable (2012). Beatty has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He has won a William Allen White Award for criticism from the University of Kansas and an Olive Branch award for writing about war and peace from New York University.

Leslie Cagan has worked in peace and justice movements for almost 50 years. Most recently, Cagan was co-coordinator of the September 21 People’s Climate March, which brought 400,000 people into the streets of New York City, demanding action on the global climate crisis. Cagan was the National Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition that grew to 1,400 member groups. Her coalition-building and organizing skills have mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in many of the nation’s largest demonstrations and hundreds of other events, including the million person Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in NYC on June 12, 1982; the historic lesbian/gay rights march on Washington in October, 1987; and the largest mobilizations against the Iraq War (2/15/03, 3/22/03, 8/29/04, 9/24/05 and 1/27/07). Cagan has worked on progressive electoral campaigns, including serving as the Field Director in the 1988 Dinkins New York Mayoral race. Her writings appear in 10 anthologies and in scores of print and online outlets.

Sir David Cannadine FBA is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Class in Britain, Ornamentalism, Mellon, and The Undivided Past, and has just completed a biography of King George V. Cannadine is a Trustee of the Wolfson Foundation, the Royal Academy, the Library of Birmingham, the Rothschild Archive, the Gladstone Library and the Gordon Brown Archive. He is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vice chair of the Westminster Abbey Fabric Commission and the Editorial Board of Past and Present, a vice president of the Victorian Society, and a member of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee and the Editorial Board of the History of Parliament. Sir David makes frequent appearances on radio and television in the UK.

Steve Fraser is a writer, editor, and historian and the co-founder of the American Empire Project, a series of books devoted to exploring the impact of America’s imperial ambitions at home and abroad. He is the author of Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, and Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, among other works. His new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, will be published by Little Brown in February. Fraser has been in jail numerous times for all the right reasons. 

Vartan Gregorian has served as president of Carnegie Corporation of New York since 1997. The Corporation is a philanthropic institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911. Previously, Gregorian served as president of Brown University and as president of The New York Public Library. Earlier, he was the founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and also served as provost.  Gregorian is the recipient of numerous fellowships, honorary degrees and awards, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the American Academy of the Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Service to the Arts, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed him to serve on the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. He has authored The Road To Home: My Life And TimesIslam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith; and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946, which is soon to be reissued with a new introduction.

Adam Hochschild’s writing has usually focused on human rights and social justice. His seven books include King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, which won a J. Anthony Lukas Award in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For the body of his work, he has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. He is the author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation; A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan; America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (co-authored with Maurice Isserman); The Populist Persuasion: An American History; and Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era. He is also editor-in-chief of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. He writes a regular online column for The New Republic, as well as articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other periodicals and such websites as Politico and The Daily Beast. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright Program. Kazin is currently working on War Against War: The Americans Who Fought for Peace, 1914-1918, to be published by Simon and Schuster.

The founder and editor of Lapham's Quarterly, Lewis Lapham was editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 2006. He is the author of thirteen books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, and The Wish for Kings. Lapham’s writing over the years has prompted the New York Times to liken him to H. L. Mencken, Vanity Fair to suggest a resemblance to Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe to compare him to Montaigne.  He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editor’s Hall of Fame in 2007. Lapham has lectured at many of the nation’s leading universities and colleges, including Dartmouth, Michigan, Princeton, and Yale. Among the topics that he is most often asked to discuss are: The Changing Character of American Journalism, The American Class System, What Constitutes a Decent Education, Who and What is An American? and The Uses and Value of History. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lapham lives in New York City.

Jessica Tuchman Mathews has been president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997. She was director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Washington program and a senior fellow from 1994 to 1997. While there she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, “Power Shift,” chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal’s 75 years. From 1982 to 1993, she was founding vice president and director of research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural resource management issues. From 1977 to 1979, Mathews was director of the Office of Global Issues at the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales, and human rights. She has published widely in newspapers and in scientific and foreign policy journals and has co-authored and co-edited three books. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology and graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College.

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the current president of the Society of American Historians. Nasaw’s most recent publication is The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, selected by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography. He is also the author of Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ambassador Book Prize for Biography, and the Sperber Prize for Biography. Nasaw received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.   

[Illustration]
Flag of Peace, 1907
Presented to Andrew Carnegie by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution as a "token of their affectionate appreciate appreciation of [his] bountiful labor of love in the holy cause of peace."