Hall Center Lecture Series Oct. 2 to focus on Winston Churchill

LAWRENCE -- Victor Bailey, director of the Hall Center for the Humanities and professor of history at the University of Kansas, will present a lecture on "Winston Churchill: The Greatest Adventurer of Modern Political History" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in the Spencer Museum of Art, 1301 Mississippi St. The free, public lecture is part of the 2003-04 Hall Center Lecture Series.

Bailey's lecture will explain how Churchill became the trusted and beloved political figure remembered today even though, as late as 1939, he was reviled by the British as a fanatical, fickle egotist and distrusted by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt as an alcoholic imperialist.

Bailey is a scholar of British history, primarily the history of Victorian British society, the environment in which Churchill was raised and began his political career. Bailey has published an article on "Churchill as Home Secretary: Prison Reform" and numerous articles and books about society and crime in Victorian Britain. Among these are "The Shadow of the Gallows: The Death Penalty and the British Labour Government," "'This Rash Act': Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City" and "English Prisons, Penal Culture and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895-1922."

The Hall Center Lecture Series includes Bailey's talk and the lectures that make up the Humanities Lecture Series. Upcoming speakers include author Sherman Alexie Jr., art historian Linda Stone-Ferrier and biologist E.O. Wilson.