Public Lecture:
The Emerging Dominance of the West in America’s Economy, Culture, and Politics

The University of Melbourne in partnership with the Australian American Leadership Dialogue presents a lecture by David M. Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University.

Event details

Monday 26 November
6.30pm
Lecture Theatre GM15, Law Building, 185 Pelham St, Carlton

Download the flyer (pdf 146kb)

Admission is FREE. Seating will be allocated in order of arrival. Doors open at 6.00pm.

For more information please contact:
Chris Fargher
(03) 8344 1181

This lecture is proudly supported by American Express and Qantas.

About the lecture

The American West is conventionally defined as including the sixteen states that lie in whole or in part west of the One Hundredth Meridian, plus, of course, Alaska and Hawaii. This lecture will explore the dramatic developments that have transformed this region since World War II.

Massive internal migration has combined with unprecedented immigration inflows to make the West America’s fastest-growing region. It now contains the two most populous states, California and Texas, which between them account for almost 20 percent of the nation’s population. Silicon Valley in California and the Microsoft-Amazon complex around Seattle are the world’s acknowledged centers of technological and commercial innovation. If California were an independent country, its nearly two trillion dollar economy would easily qualify it for membership in the G-8.

The western coastal states are America’s portal to Asia, the site of equally dynamic social and economic change. The political center of gravity in the United States has also marched steadily westward, as the western states alone will soon contain enough electoral votes to determine who occupies the White House. What are the implications of these seismic shifts for America’s, and the world’s future?

About the speaker

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history.

His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

Professor Kennedy teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of the twentieth-century United States, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, American literature, and the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America.