Historian David Hackett Fischer, who has played a pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present, has been selected to receive the American Enterprise Institute's Irving Kristol Award for 2006. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 8, 2006, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are combining modern methods of research and interpretation with renewed appreciation for the importance of contingency, choice, and character in the unfolding of the American drama. His bestselling books Washington's Crossing (Oxford, 2004), which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Paul Revere's Ride (Oxford, 1994) are more than meticulous retellings of great revolutionary events: they provide readers with a vivid sense of how the events were experienced in the immediate moment and of how they affected choices and decisions yet to come.
David Hackett Fisher’s lecture was broadcast on “History on Book TV” on C-Span at 8:05pm on Sunday April 2, 2006.
The Irving Kristol Lecture is intended to illuminate central issues of public policy in contemporary America. The lecturer, selected by AEI's Council of Academic Advisers, is an eminent thinker who has made notable intellectual or practical contributions to improved public policy and social welfare.
The Irving Kristol Lecture is delivered at the AEI annual dinner in Washington.
The Irving Kristol Award replaces the Francis Boyer Award, AEI's highest annual award for the past twenty-five years. Named for a distinguished chief executive of SmithKline in the 1940s and 1950s, the Boyer Award was first conferred in 1977, on former president Gerald R. Ford. Boyer Award recipients have included prominent statesmen, intellectuals, jurists, educators, and executives--among them, in 1991, Irving Kristol.
View more information about AEI's annual dinner and lecture series, along with a list of previous lectures.
