Kickoff Event for the Department of History's CELEBRATING 1776 Series

Join us for a conversation between two of the nation's leading scholars of American history: Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis and the University of Kentucky's own Amy Murrell Taylor. Book signing to follow.

About Joseph Ellis

The author of 12 books, Ellis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" and won the National Book Award for "American Sphinx," a biography of Thomas Jefferson. He has taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His commentaries have been featured on CSPAN, CNN, and PBS’s News Hour, and he appears in the major new PBS documentary "The American Revolution."

Ellis’ latest work, "The Great Contradiction," examines how a government that had been justified and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalized slavery and created a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of Indian lands.