Annual McGinty Lecture to be given by Thomas J. Sugrue, a prize winning historian

Salve Regina’s annual John E. McGinty Lecture in History will be taking place on Thursday, April 27, at 6:30 p.m. in the Bazarsky Lecture Hall in O’Hare Academic Building. The lecture is free and open to the Salve Regina Community, as well as the general public. To register, go here.

Entitled “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North,” the lecture will be given by Thomas J. Sugrue, a prize winning historian and leading authority on twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights and race.

The lecture is based off of Sugrue’s book by the same name. “Sweet Land of Liberty” is a book written about the fight for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York — and how the North’s battle differed from and was inspired by the South’s.

Sugrue’s book covers the 1920s to the present – more than eighty years. In this span of history, he writes about the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities, as well and the long and tangled histories of integration and Black power. In it, he dispels any myths that the North was somehow an unquestioned safe haven for Black citizens, and he documents the countless stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches and movie theaters in the North, as well as the struggles to dismantle Jim Crow schools.

Copies of the book will be for sale on site, and Professor Sugrue will sign books following the lecture.

Sugrue is the Julius Silver Professor of history and social and cultural analysis at New York University (NYU). Having a Silver Professorship is the most prestigious honor that NYU can bestow upon a faculty member. Sugrue is also the director of the NYU Cities Collaborative, which creates ongoing series of lectures and seminars on urban issues connecting NYU faculty with urbanists worldwide.

Sugrue’s first book, “The Origins of the Urban Crisis,” won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, and the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Urban History. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected “The Origins of the Urban Crisis” as one of its 100 most influential books of the past one hundred years and published a new edition of “The Origins of the Urban Crisis” as a Princeton Classic.

Sugrue has written multiple others books, and he has also published many essays and reviews in places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, the London Review of Books and the Chicago Tribune. 

Thomas J. Sugrue

To register, go here.