The 2007 Marilyn Crandell Schleg Memorial Lecture will feature Professor Richard Aquila.

Professor Aquila comes to us through the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program. This is his second term as an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. The OAH Distinguished Lecturership Program was created in 1981 to provide public lectures by outstanding historians who have made major contributions to United States history. Only 1 percent of the nation’s historians are ever invited to become a Distinguished Lecturer, and usually for only one three-year term.

Professor Aquila is director of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. He specializes in U.S. social and cultural history, especially recent U.S. history, the American West, American Indians, and popular culture/mass media. His publications include Home Front Soldier: The Story of a G.I. and His Italian American Family During World War II (1999); Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture (1996); That Old Time Rock and Roll: A Chronicle of An Era, 1954-63 (1989); and The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701-1754 (1983, 1997). His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West, Journal of Popular Culture, Indiana Magazine of History, NPR Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, The History Teacher, and American Indian Quarterly. Aquila has also written, produced, and hosted numerous documentaries for NPR. From 1998 to 2000, his Peabody-nominated weekly public history series, "Rock & Roll America," was syndicated on NPR and NPR Worldwide. He expects to finish writing his latest book, Crazy, Man, Crazy: The Birth of Rock & Roll and 1950s America, this summer.

Prior to joining the Penn State Behrend faculty in 2004, Aquila was chair of the History Department and director of the American Studies Program at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He previously taught at Metropolitan State College in Denver, Colorado; Ohio State University; and was a fellow at the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in history from Bowling Green State University, and a doctorate in history from Ohio State.

Aquila's lecture is entitled, "'Into the Fire': September 11, Popular Music, and Public Memory" and will include a discussion of his research experiences in archives and libraries.

It is named for Marilyn Crandell Schleg, a 1958 graduate of Albion College and medical librarian with master's degrees in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin and library science from the University of Michigan. In 1998, a love for libraries prompted Marilyn to endow the college with an archivist position and fund an annual lectureship dealing with archives and libraries. She stated, "(My family and I) wanted to do something for Albion because Albion did so much for me." Marilyn was afflicted with Multiple System Atrophy, a form of Parkinson's disease, for many years before her untimely death in July of 2001. In 2005, her husband, Edward Schleg endowed the lecture so that it would continue to serve as a memory to Marilyn far into the future.

The lecture will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, October 15, 2007 in the Wendell Will Room of the Stockwell Memorial Library. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
 

Past Schleg Lecturers

2006	Keith Donohue of the National Archives, "The Stolen Child"
2005	Hank Meijer of Meijer, Inc., "Searching for Senator Vandenberg"
2004	Miles Harvey, journalist and novelist, "The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime"
2003	Lawrence Taylor, Ph.D., Albion College Professor Emeritus and founder of the Geology Department, "The Outrageous Hypothesis of Dr. J Harlen Bretz, ’05: A Perspective on the Life of a World Renowned Geologist & Teacher"
2002	Dr. James Wyatt Cook, Albion College Professor Emeritus of English, "Confession’s of a Stack Rat: Archives I Have Known & Loved"
2001	Candace Anderson Corrigan, singer, songwriter, producer and historical performer, "Through a Woman's Voice"
2000	Cynthia Davis-Buffington and David Szewczyk of the Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts Co., "Adventures in Bookdom: FAQs and Fiction"
1998	Robert Warner, Archivist of the U.S., Director of the Bentley Historical Library