In the Kusler-Cox Auditorium on the 3rd floor of the Rundel Library Building, Daniel Noah Moses will present a lecture titled Beyond the Mere Property Career: Lewis Henry Morgan, the Human Mind and the American Experiment in the Age of Donald Trump.

In observance of Lewis Henry Morgan's bicentennial year, Daniel Moses considers Morgan's scholarship as a quiet form of social criticism. Morgan was dissatisfied by what he considered to be the overemphasis around him on the pursuit of "gain." In his mature years, during what has become known as The Gilded Age, he was concerned about the growing concentration of resources and power in the United States, and the implication of such trends for the prospects of self-government and human flourishing. In his ambivalence, he converted nostalgia into an undercover radicalism based on his grasp of an unfolding human narrative and the assumptions at the foundation of his work: because what was is no longer, what is cannot remain the same. He dedicated himself to exploring what holds societies together and how societies change. Looking to the future, he envisioned a "revival, in higher form of the liberty, equality, and fraternity" of ancient societies. Morgan embodies tension within the American experiment, along with a critique that is uncomfortably relevant now, in 2018, and very much worth talking about.

[source: University of Rochester events calendar, 2018-Nov-13]