University of Michigan Professor David Hancock Delivers 2017 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Lecture, April 5

The public is cordially invited to hear David Hancock, Professor of History at The University of Michigan and director of Michigan’s Atlantic Studies initiative, deliver the 2017 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Lecture: “The Man of Twists and Turns: Personality, Portrait & Power in the Re-Shaping of Empire,” on Wednesday April 5. The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library. A reception will follow.

The subject of Professor Hancock’s lecture, the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, was one of the most influential prime ministers of the eighteenth-century who crafted the terms of the peace that ended Britain’s War for America in 1782 and 1783. He was a wealthy aristocrat who possessed large estates in Ireland, England, and America. He was an army officer who served with distinction in Europe during the Seven Years War; he was a politician who dominated the political scene from the 1760s through the 1790s. He was a formidable intellectual figure who undertook to make the Anglo-Atlantic community a model for world improvement. Yet contemporaries and historians alike have despised him. Why?

David Hancock serves on the Board of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and its journal The William & Mary Quarterly. He teaches and researches in Business History, Atlantic History, Imperial British History and Early American History, and is the author of Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale University Press, 2009). He is completing a biography of the cosmopolitan 2nd Earl of Shelburne.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to Patrick Garcia, or call (434) 924-9640.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series is a collaboration between the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the University of Virginia Library, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair in the the UVA Corcoran Department of History. The lecture was established to bring to the University eminent scholars whose research provides fresh insights into topics related to Jefferson.

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