America's Fourth Revolution

The Charles and Rosemary Licata Lecture

James Piereson
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
11 AM

Drescher Graduate Campus Auditorium
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California

Three times in its history, the bold experiment in liberty that gave rise to the United States has faced the challenge of a regime change: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. The year 2012 may present American citizens for a fourth historic choice between following the apparent decline of West Europe’s democracies, or a reaffirmation of the American Exceptionalism reflected in the choices Americans made when confronted with the three previous crossroads. James Piereson’s book on how the Kennedy assassination shattered American Liberalism, and his more recent work in the area of American Exceptionalism, equips him to provide fresh and important insights to this critical conversation.

James Piereson is president and a trustee of the William E. Simon Foundation, a private grantmaking foundation located in New York City and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York where he is director of the Center for the American University and Chairman of the Selection Committee for The Veritas Fund, which allocates grants to programs on college and university campuses.

Piereson came to the Simon Foundation from the John M. Olin Foundation, which awarded grants to support research and scholarship in the areas of public affairs and policy, where he served as executive director and a trustee of from 1985 through 2005.

Prior to joining the Foundation, he served on the political science faculties of several prominent universities, including Iowa State University (1974), Indiana University (1975), and the University of Pennsylvania (1976-82), where he taught courses in the fields of United States government and political thought.

Piereson earned his PhD in political science from Michigan State University. His most recent book is Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books, 2007). Piereson serves on the board of several nonprofit and other tax exempt institutions, including the Board of Visitors for the School of Public Policy.