 Otis L. Graham, Jr.
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Visiting Scholar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“FDR and The Environment: The Southern Front”
Tues., Sept. 11
3:30 p.m.
Royall Room
George Watts Hill Alumni Center
UNC-CH campus
The James A. Hutchins Lectures are presented with support from the UNC General Alumni Association.
All historians, perhaps even all undergraduate history majors, know that one of Franklin Roosevelt’s lifelong enthusiasms was conservation, and he made it a large part of his New Deal. While the scholarly literature on FDR’s presidency is immense and has from the first contained a strong critical strand, that cannot be said for his conservation record, which has been the subject of a few monographs that generally do not place his efforts in an historical context. This presentation will do so, with an emphasis upon his administration’s efforts to address the environmental problems of a region especially close to his heart, the American South.
Otis L. Graham, Jr., was born in 1935 and is a historian of modern America, a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently Visiting Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A native of Tennessee, he is a graduate of Yale University (B.A., 1957) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1966), and served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is the author or editor of nineteen books and numerous articles on the history of the United States, especially on American reform movements, political economy, and environment and immigration. He has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, and received the Robert Kelley Memorial Award from the National Council on Public History.
“I have a long-standing concern over the collision of our rapidly multiplying human numbers and the natural ecosystems that support and refresh us—a concern going back to high school encounters with the classic books by William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn. These environmentalist commitments began to influence my writing on national planning, and have been the central focus of my work since the early 1990s. Currently I explore the Population component of the ‘problem-cluster’ of population, resources, and the environment, especially the role of immigration in preventing population stabilization in the United States.”--Otis L. Graham, Jr.
For more information, see www.otisgraham.com.
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