Two of America’s lesser-known presidents, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, will be the focus of this year’s Presidential Lecture Series sponsored by the Northwestern Oklahoma State University Institute for Citizenship Studies and Social Sciences Department.
The event is Tuesday, March 22, at 1 p.m. in the Vinson Hall Alabaster Room on the Alva campus. It is free and open to the public.
Dr. Michael Cohen, research professor in the Department of Government and a faculty fellow in the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, is the program’s feature speaker.
He will discuss the lives of Taylor and Fillmore, as well as career opportunities in the field of public history.
A historian of 19th century America, Cohen serves as editor and project director of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. This project at CCPS aims to locate and publish letters of the 12th and 13th U.S. presidents.
As the final editor of the James K. Polk Project at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Cohen in 2019 completed a decades-long endeavor to publish the 11th president’s letters. Earlier he worked at Rutgers University in New Brunswick on the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
In addition to three volumes of the Correspondence of James K. Polk, Cohen has published articles on the history of U.S. politics, education and society, as well as on the editing of historical documents in journals including The New England Quarterly and The Good Society. His book “Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War” won the Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the Linda Eisenmann Prize from the History of Education Society.
He has appeared on the “Voice of America,” delivered the 2016 Presidential Lecture at Northwestern, and in 2019, organized the conference James K. Polk and His Time.
For more information on the event contact Dr. Aaron Mason, professor of political science, at mason@nwosu.edu or (580) 327-8522. For more information about the NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies visit https://www.www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/nwics.
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CONTACT FOR RELEASE
Erin Davis, University Relations Specialist
eedavis@nwosu.edu, (580) 327-8480