Constitution Day at the Byrd CenterThe fifteenth annual Tom E. Moses Memorial Lecture on the U.S. Constitution will be given by Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History. Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on European and American intellectual and cultural history, the Age of Revolutions, and the History of Democracy. Rosenfeld’s 2011 book Common Sense: A Political History won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic book prize. Her essays and articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as the New York Times, Washington Post, Dissent, and The Nation.
Citizens in democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. But while some details of this issue may be novel, the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In exploring the major trends that have led to the rise of our “post-truth” public life, Sophia Rosenfeld will discuss the longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. |
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About the Moses Memorial LectureThe Moses Memorial Lecture is named for the late Tom E. Moses, a longtime civil libertarian, activist, and founder of the Eastern Panhandle branch of the ACLU-WV. The inaugural Moses Lecture was given by Senator Robert C. Byrd in 2005. You can view videos of some of our past Moses Memorial Lecture on the Byrd Center YouTube Channel >>
Past Constitution Day Speakers: 2005: Senator Robert C. Byrd
2006: Joseph Onek 2007: Anthony Williams 2008: Dr. Donald A. Ritchie 2009: David Cole 2010: Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia and Bob Edgar 2011: Richard Dreyfuss 2012: Dr. Michael Austin 2013: Dr. Raymond Smock 2014: Clay Risen 2015: Dr. Ralph Young 2016: Dr. Elizabeth Hinton 2017: Ganesh Sitaraman 2018: Senator Tom Harkin |
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