Spencer Crew, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University. (Image provided)
Author and public historian Spencer Crew, Ph.D., will deliver the 2018 Walter Harding Lecture Friday, Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. in Doty Recital Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus. Crew's lecture, “Civil Disobedience, the Underground Railroad and Thoreau,” is free and open to the public.
Crew, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University, has worked in public history institutions for more than 25 years. He served as president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, for six years and worked at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), a Smithsonian Institution, for 20 years. Nine of those years he served as the director of NMAH.
"In his long career as a scholar, teacher, curator, and museum director, Spencer Crew has embodied the mission of 'public history': to give the widest possible audience an understanding of the past that inspires them to take informed and effective civic action in the present,” said Paul Schacht, professor of English at SUNY Geneseo and director of Digital Thoreau. “This makes him the perfect speaker to honor the legacy of Geneseo’s Walter Harding, who heard the call of civic conscience in Thoreau's writings and made it his life's work to help the widest possible readership hear it, too.”
Crew has written extensively in the areas of African American and public history. Among his books are, Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915–1940 (1987), Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, N.J., 1860–1920 (1993), and he co-authored both The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden (2002) and Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2002).
Crew earned his bachelor’s degree from Brown University. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
Geneseo launched the annual Harding lecture in 2004 in honor of the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus, who was the world's leading scholar on Thoreau and founding secretary and former president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest international organization devoted to the study of any American author.
Harding's wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of Geneseo students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.