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June 4, 2012

Louis Galambos to Discuss “The Creative Society and the Price Americans Paid for It,” June 13

Educated professionals have been responsible for shaping much of America’s history, according to scholar Louis Galambos. Since the turn of the 20th century, teachers, scientists, doctors, administrators, lawyers and business managers, among others, have been at the forefront of innovation and have provided solutions to many of the nation’s challenges. Our forebears from all walks of life make up this creative class that sought education to improve life and in the process made advances for American society.

Galambos will discuss his new book "The Creative Society – and the Price Americans Paid for It" at the Library of Congress at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, June 13 in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center, the lecture is free and open to the public. No tickets are needed.

In 2006 Galambos held the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library’s Kluge Center.

In his book, Galambos asserts that entrepreneurial thinkers have always been the staple of American progress. Throughout America’s history, immigrants have advanced themselves through access to education, and as a result of professionalization, have been better able to grapple with such issues as the complex problems of urban life, the economy and international relations.

This system has created problems—corruption, lack of communication among professions, a widening gap among economic classes, growing disparities in quality and cost of education—but Galambos thinks American ingenuity can also solve these problems, given time.

A graduate of Indiana University and Yale University, Galambos is a professor of history at The Johns Hopkins University and editor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. He also is the co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise.

Galambos has taught at Rice, Rutgers and Yale universities and is a former editor of The Journal of Economic History. In addition to holding a chair at the Kluge Center, he has been a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration, the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson Center, and The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship while working on this book.

His books include "America at Middle Age: A New History of the United States in the 20th Century"; "The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. Business and Public Policy in the 20th Century"; "The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics"; "Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995"; "The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880-1940: A Quantitative Study in Social Change"; and "Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World."

The Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History was established to explore the history of America with special attention to the ethical dimensions of domestic economic, political and social policies. The chair is funded by a generous endowment from Cary M. Maguire, a member of the Library’s James Madison Council.

The Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000, through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge. The center’s mission is to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

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PR 12-118
06/04/12
ISSN 0731-3527

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