The first annual Rush D. Holt Lecture was presented by the West Virginia University Department of History on April 11, 2011. The lecture series is supported by the family of Senator Holt through the Senator Rush D. Holt Endowment established in 1998.
Inaugurating the lecture series was the Honorable Rush D. Holt, Jr., a U.S. Congressman from New Jersey and son of former U.S. Senator Rush D. Holt of West Virginia, after whom the series is named. Since the first Holt Lecture held in 2011, this series has brought some of the most prominent historians in American history to WVU to share their research and knowledge with the students in our department.
13th Annual Senator Rush D. Holt Lecture
"Writing a World History of the American Revolution" with Dr. Sarah Pearsall
of Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
4–5:30 pm in Hodges Hall 202
Over the last few decades, there has been increasing attention to the United States in the world and an enlarged geography for early America. Yet the American Revolution has been largely resistant to such a treatment, remaining sturdily provincial, especially in popular understandings. This lecture will consider the challenges and advantages of globalizing the American Revolution. In particular, it will address the stakes of expanding both the geography and the cast of characters, especially during tumultuous times.
Past Holt Lectures
-
2024 - Scott D. Sandage, Carnegie Mellon University
"Laughing Buffalo In Paris: Metis History as Indigenous History" -
2022 - Gabriel Winant, University of Chicago
“The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America” -
2021 - Lisa Tetrault, Carnegie Mellon University
"When Women Won the Right to Vote: An American Fiction" -
2019 - Elizabeth Veron, University of Virginia
"Armies of Deliverance: Union War Aims and Motivation" -
2018 - Walter Hixon, University of Akron
"Israel’s Armor: The Role of the Israel Lobby in the History of the Palestine Conflict" -
2017 - Jon Butler, Yale University
“Protestantism, American Religion and the Unanticipated Reformation” -
2016 - Martha Hodes, New York University
“Mourning Lincoln: The Assassination and the Aftermath of the Civil War” -
2015 - Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University
“The Seventh Tea Ship; or, a Tale of Shipwrecked Sailors, Combative Communities, and a Fractured Family” -
2014 - Joshua Piker, Professor, William and Mary Quarterly, Editor
“Telling Stories in Early America, or, The Indian Who Went to London with an Eagle and Came Home with a Lion” -
2013 - James Green, University of Massachusetts, Boston
"America's Ireland: The National Impact of the West Virginia Mine Wars, 1912-1924" -
2012 - Nancy MacLean, Duke University
“The Quest for Jobs and Justice since the 1950s” -
2011 - Rush D. Holt Jr.
“Senator Rush Holt’s Filibuster, 1936: Aesop’s Fables and Miners’ Wages” — Inaugurating Lecture