Colloquy

“Don’t.” That’s the first of Roger Rosenblatt’s More Rules for Aging, and the underpinning of many of the new book's 114 others. Don’t try to catch that 20-something jogger who just left you in the dust on your morning walk. Don’t criticize. Don’t worry about awards or accolades—or, for that matter, regrets. And don’t retreat, especially to Vermont.

Embedded in these wry and often funny maxims is genuine, hard-won wisdom gathered from a life now in its ninth decade of reading, teaching, and perhaps above all, writing. Rosenblatt is here to share some of it with us today.

Roger Rosenblatt is a New York Times guest essayist whose work has been published in 15 languages, the author of five New York Times Notable Books and three best sellers. He has received two George Polk Awards for journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and a Peabody. He held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard, has received seven honorary doctorates, the Kenyon Review Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, and a Fulbright to Ireland, where he played on the Irish international basketball team. He received his PhD in English and American literature and language from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 1968.

The historian Vanessa Williamson, PhD '15, asserts the Patriots who dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, were actually protesting a corporate tax break for the British East India Company. Discover how the fight for taxation has been central to American democracy, liberty, and the pursuit of equality since the founding.

Armed troops in the streets of an American city. A leader in a faraway capital determined to exercise his power over the people there. Screams of protest from residents who demand the force's withdrawal. Resistance, violence, and tragic deaths. These are the elements that made Boston the cauldron of the American Revolution in the 1770s. Are they playing out again in the United States today? And what are the limits of looking to history to better understand the current moment? Historian and former presidential adviser Ted Widmer joins us to consider these and other questions about the use of state power then and now.

In the decades after becoming the first Black US citizen to receive his PhD from Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois helped transform sociology from theory and speculation to a social science rooted in rigorous methodology and hard data. But despite conducting groundbreaking research, particularly on the lives of Black people, Du Bois chose to leave the academy and become an activist, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. What inspired him to make the change? And what can we learn today from Du Bois’s research, his writing, and his life during our own time of white backlash? The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis joins us for part two of our look at the life of the early 20th century’s leading intellectual and spokesperson for Black liberation. 
(A word of caution: Several minutes into the show, Professor Levering Lewis describes an episode of racist violence. We have preserved that portion of the conversation, rather than editing it out, because it describes a turning point in Du Bois’s life and career.)

How did the Harvard PhD experience influence W.E.B. Du Bois, the man who would become one of the leading Black activists and intellectuals of the 20th century? And what connections did he make in the vibrant Black community outside of campus? Join us as we explore these questions in the first of a two-part conversation with New York University professor and National Humanities Medal recipient David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois.