T. J. Jackson Lears, one of America's most well-known and distinguished cultural historians, will give a lecture titled "Capitalism and Chance in 20th Century America," at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 3, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus. This talk is part of the Department of History's annual Verne Moore Lecture Series.
Lears will discuss the emergence, consolidation, and fragmentation of a managerial ethos in 20th century American culture. The discussion will take listeners through the attempts of monopolists, such as John D. Rockefeller, and of social democrats, such as John Maynard Keynes, to tame American economic life, and will discuss the results of these efforts to exert managerial controls over capitalism. The discussion will be a reinterpretation of 20th century U.S. history through a focus on the continuing balance of tensions between chance and control.
Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History and Editor-in-Chief of The Raritan Quarterly Review at Rutgers University, where he specializes in social and cultural history. His essays and reviews appear in national publications such as The New Republic and The Nation. In addition, he has received a number of honors and awards including the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the NJ-NEH Book Award for his book Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.