Public Forum by Orlando Patterson on Ordinary Liberties: What Americans Think and Do With Freedom 

Maxwell School's John Yinger, Professor of Economics and Public Administration, and Deborah Pellow, Professor of Anthropology, will respond.

Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and winner of the National Book Award, will speak on "Ordinary Liberties: What Americans Think and Do With Freedom," on Friday, November 9, at 4 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium. 

John Yinger, Professor of Public Administration and Economics at Maxwell School, and Deborah Pellow, Professor of Anthropology, will respond to Patterson's talk. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Associate Professor of History, will host the event. Second in Maxwell School's State of Democracy series, the event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by TIAA-CREF, The Alan K. Campbell Public Affairs Institute, and the Global Affairs Institute. A reception in the Maxwell foyer will follow the talk.  

Patterson, a prominent American scholar noted for his original thinking on important contemporary issues, has published widely on topics including U.S. and Caribbean (especially Jamaican) slavery, race, immigration, multiculturalism, and historical conceptions of freedom. He is finishing the second volume of his historical sociology on freedom which will deal with freedom in the modern world. The first volume, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, won the National Book Award in 1991. He has also published two volumes of a planned trilogy on American race relations. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award and was a co-winner of the American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Award of Best Scholarly Work on Pluralism. A public intellectual, Patterson, has written for Society, Commentary, The New Republic, Dissent, and the New York Times.

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Contact: Jill Leonhardt, director of communications, (315) 443-5492; jlleonha@maxwell.syr.edu.