Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Award-winning author and civil rights historian John Dittmer and Mississippi State doctoral candidate Alyssa Warrick will be the featured speakers Wednesday [March 23] at the university's annual John F. and Jean A. Marszalek Lecture Series.
To begin at 2 p.m., the program is free and open to all in Mitchell Memorial Library's John Grisham Room.
Dittmer's topic will be "Sick and Tired: Race and Health Care in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Years." Warrick, winner of the 2011 Marszalek History Graduate Student Award, will speak on "Fighting the Jim Crow Army: African-American Protests in World War II."
Now a professor emeritus, Dittmer led DePauw University's history department 1985-2003. Among his honors are the 2006 Indiana Humanities Award and 2005-07 Ford Foundation Fellowships. He is the author of "The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care" (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2009) and "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi" (University of Illinois Press, 1995), among others. [For more, visit www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=23341.]
Warrick earlier worked for the National Park Service at locales including the Central High School National Historic Site in Little Rock, Ark., and Vicksburg National Military Park. She began doctoral work at Mississippi State last year after receiving a master's degree at the university, with concentrations in American and environmental histories and a special focus on the South. She also holds a history degree from Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo.
The Marszalek Library Fund and Lecture Series was established in 2002 by MSU history professor emeritus John Marszalek and his wife Jeanne, in collaboration with the MSU Libraries. The goal is to encourage use of primary source materials related to American history, including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jacksonian America, and race relations.
For more information on the lecture series and the Wednesday program, visit http://library.msstate.edu/content/templates/?a=580.