Daniel T. Rodgers (Lea Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton )

Age of Fracture: The Transformation of Ideas and Society in Modern America

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program and UWM History Department

“Fracture” now seems everywhere in our contemporary United States: in social relations, partisan politics, growing economic inequalities, and enduring culture “wars.” But the “fracture” of our times began in the realm of ideas, as larger ideas of society, economy, selves, and political culture shattered into smaller, more individualistic ones. The phenomenon, which occurred on both the political right and the political left, shapes the world we live in.

This lecture, based on a Bancroft Prize–winning book of this title, will tell the story of how that happened and what it means for our present moment.

Brown bag lunch discussion

Tuesday, February 14
12 noon, Curtin 939
Reading: Daniel T. Rodgers, “When Truth Becomes a Commodity,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 2017.
When Truth Becomes a Commodity

Daniel T. Rodgers is Lea Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton. He is the author of four prize-winning books, including The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (1978), Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics (1987), and Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), a pioneering work in the emerging field of transnational history

His most recent book, Age of Fracture (2011), a history of social ideas and arguments in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century, was a co-winner of the Bancroft Prize. His articles run the gamut from American exceptionalism, to the career of “republicanism,” to the election of 2000. His current book project is a “biography” of John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” and the “city on a hill” phrase it contained.

Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar Program

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students. The fifteen men and women participating during 2016-2017 will visit 110 colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, spending two days on each campus and taking full part in the academic life of the institution. They will meet informally with students and faculty members, participate in classroom discussions and seminars, and give a lecture open to the university/college community and the general public. Now in its 61st year, the Visiting Scholar Program has sent 648 Scholars on 5,288 two-day visits.

Founded in 1776, the Phi Beta Kappa Society is the nation’s most prestigious academic honor society. It has chapters at 286 colleges and universities and more than half a million members throughout the country. Its mission is to champion education in the liberal arts and sciences, to recognize academic excellence, and to foster freedom of thought and expression.

Phi Beta Kappa’s website has additional information about the Visiting Scholar Program.