U. of Oklahoma’s McClay presents Tocqueville lecture

University of Oklahoma History Professor Wilfred M. McClay, Ph.D., will speak about Tocqueville and the American Republic Wednesday, April 2 at 4:30 p.m. in Watkins Room of the Trone Student Center on the Furman University campus.

His talk, “The Tocquevillean Moment … and Ours,” is free and open to the public and is part of Furman’s Cultural Life Program. Dr. McClay’s lecture is presented by the Tocqueville Program at Furman University whose sponsors are Ginny and Sandy MacNeil, Beth and Ravenel Curry, and several private foundations.

McClay holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. This new position was created to emphasize the importance of both undergraduate teaching and historical and contemporary issues of freedom. He is also a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and senior fellow of the Trinity Forum. McClay has served on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

McClay’s book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are The Student’s Guide to U.S. History; Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America; Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past; and recently published by New Atlantis Books (Feb. 2014), Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America.

McClay received his bachelor’s from St. John’s College and a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University.

For more information, contact Paige Blankenship in the Department of Political Science, 864-294-3547, or visit: www.furman.edu/tocquevilleprogram.