Amity Shlaes Lecture

Syndicated columnist and author Amity Shlaes will deliver a lecture on the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal and their impact on us today. The lecture will be held in Kresge Hall in the Ford Center for the Fine Arts at Knox College on Thursday, October 15, 2009, at 7 pm.

The lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture is sponsored by the Office of the President and the Dean of the College.

A syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Shlaes writes on political economy, taxes, and is a contributor to Marketplace, on the American Public Media network. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows over the years.

Shlaes was formerly a columnist for the Financial Times and, before that a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. In the early 1990s she served as the Journal's features, or "op-ed" editor. Prior to that, she followed the collapse of communism for the Wall Street Journal/Europe.

Over the years she has published in the National Review, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs (on the German economy), the American Spectator, the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.

Shlaes has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary, her field's best known prize. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. In 2003, she spent several months at the American Academy in Berlin as the JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her essay, titled "The Chicken vs the Eagle" looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal.

She is the author of three books: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; The Greedy Hand, a national bestseller on America's experience with its tax code; and Germany: The Empire Within, a book about German national identity. Arrangements for the appearance of Amity Shlaes made through HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, New York, NY.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 47 states and 48 countries. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.