Goldstein was a scholar-in-residence at the Bates’ Muskie Archives last year when he was working on a book about the vice presidency.  This article includes a link back to the Archives.

Sponsored by the English department, the Emily Carroll Carleton Lecture at Bates is open to the public at no cost. A reception will follow.

Smith’s lecture at Bates is titled after his book The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009), which gives special attention to an inmate’s figurative passage from civil death to a secular rebirth.

Smith is an assistant professor of English at Yale University. His teaching interests range from American, African and Native American literature to law, historicism, prison studies and the critique of power.

“I am interested in how literary texts of various genres have involved themselves with such problems as punishment, secular justice, human rights and legal personhood,” Smith writes in his Yale bio.

Smith is working on his second book, which explores the public culture of justice in the Revolutionary and antebellum periods. The book considers legal, religious and literary texts in which speakers call upon a higher law as a source of their authority. Smith argues that such invocations enacted new ways of summoning public power in the era of print and popular sovereignty.

The Emily Carroll Carleton Lecture is funded by the King Family Charitable Lead Trust in honor of Emily Carroll Carleton ’99.

Thanks to a recent grant and a key donation of personal papers, one of the nation’s most comprehensive collections of political documents outside the presidential library system has grown even larger.

Katherine A. Stefko is the new director of archives and special collections at Bates College.

Stefko, who started at Bates on Oct. 1, previously worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she managed an archives project to integrate the museum’s manuscripts and institutional records into a processing and digitization program that included publication on the World Wide Web.

At Bates, she directs the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, and oversees the college’s archival and special collections programs.

“The archives is a resource for the students, faculty and staff of Bates College, as well as other researchers,” she says. “We really are open to everyone who has an interest or need.”

Stefko is charged with overseeing and promoting the growth, maintenance and accessibility of Bates’ archival and historic collections. Passionate about history, she believes that its study can’t be divorced from the photos, papers and recordings that history leaves behind — “especially now, when people are so tied to this presumption that if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.”

“Not everything you read in a book is accurate,” she says. “Just because it’s published doesn’t mean it’s the truth, and if it’s on the Internet it’s even more questionable. We actually have the documents, the originals — and I want people to come, look and really think critically about history.”

Naturally, the archives is an especially valuable resource for students, due to both the specific materials it preserves and the overall lessons it offers in the use of primary sources. For example, one assignment in a course about the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam — taught by archivist Chris Beam — is to write a paper based on research in the extensive collection of materials about U.S. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie ’36.

Located at the corner of Central and Campus avenues, the red-brick Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library houses three major collections:

– The Edmund S. Muskie Collection, consisting of almost all the extant records of the life and work of Edmund S. Muskie (1914-1996), a Bates graduate who dominated Maine politics from the mid-1950s to 1981 and became a national leader for environmental protection, government reform and fiscal responsibility. The Archives and Special Collections Library also holds such related collections as the gubernatorial papers of James B. Longley and the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Project.

– The Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, which include: publications pertaining to the Freewill Baptists in Maine and New England; 19th-century French history and literature; fine-press books published in Maine; Judaica; 19th-century books on natural history, particularly ornithology; and papers of people associated with Bates College or the Freewill Baptists. The Dorothy Freeman Collection contains a large body of correspondence with the biologist, writer and conservationist Rachel Carson.

– Finally, the Bates College Archives, which serves as the official repository of records and other materials that document the history of the college from its founding in 1855 to the present. The College Archives was formally inaugurated in 2000.

Previously, Stefko worked as information coordinator at the Property Information Resource Center at Harvard University, as a resident fellow at the Cambridge Historical Society and as an intern and consultant for the Visual Resources Collection of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard.

Stefko is a Cleveland native. She has an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, an M.A. from University of Texas at Austin in art history and a master’s in library and information science from Simmons College.

In next Tuesday’s presidential election, Americans have a choice between “fear and hope,” former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell told an audience of about 100 at Bates College at midday Thursday, Oct. 28. Speaking in support of Sen. John Kerry and presented by the Bates Democrats, the Maine Democrat was the one of the latest in a series of notable figures campaigning here on behalf of the presidential candidates.

Vanessa Kerry, the candidate’s 27-year-old daughter who is

studying health policy and economics in London, followed Mitchell by a day when she addressed a crowd of about 150 at 12:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 29, in Chase Hall Lounge. Kerry urged students to go to the polls on Nov. 2 and vote.

While his brief talk emphasized familiar themes from the Kerry playbook, the venue, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, had special significance for Mitchell, a former Muskie protégé and successor to his Senate seat. A member of the Bates class of 1936, Muskie was the prime mover behind landmark U.S. environmental laws including the Clean Air Act — a measure revised under Mitchell’s Senate leadership and enacted in 1990 with support from President George H.W. Bush. It’s “one of the great ironies of recent history,” Mitchell said, that the son of the first President Bush now seeks to roll back national environmental protections.

In his conclusion, Mitchell linked Kerry with bedrock American ideals and said that the Massachusetts senator represented hope and a new direction for Americans.

The audience included 19 fifth-graders from Lewiston’s St. Joseph’s School. “We’re not supporting Kerry or Bush,” explained their teacher, Pandora Lawler. “We’re just here to learn.”

Bates College presents Michael Miclon, a well-known Maine comedian and new vaudevillian, with a talk about the state’s creative economy at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 25, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, Campus Avenue.

Part of the Bates College Seminar Series on Entrepreneurship, the talk is sponsored by the Office of Career Services and is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6232.

Miclon is a juggler, humorist and slapstick comic. He and his wife, Kim, own the Oddfellow Theater, in Buckfield, an establishment featuring an eclectic range of family-friendly entertainment — including the popular variety revue, the Early Evening Show. In its first six years, the theater has presented more than 300 performances for more than 10,000 audience members.

Miclon is a member of the Odd Company, a trio with Fritz Grobe, four-time gold medalist at the International Jugglers Festival and co-founder of the juggling and dance ensemble “blink,” and Amanda Huotari, from the Boston improv comedy troupe “Juice.”

The former executive director of Maine Arts Inc., Miclon is known for his advocacy of the arts as an economic force in the state.

Miclon began his career in 1982 at age 14 as an apprentice to Benny and Denise Reehl, of the New England New Vaudeville Revue, based in Gardiner. He also studied with the late mime master Tony Montanaro at the renowned Celebration Barn Theater, South Paris.

Miclon has performed across Maine, at the Kennedy Center and the White House in Washington, D.C., the Keller Theater in Giessen, Germany, and the Festa Americana in Naples, Italy.

Fuerth was national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and is now Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Relations at George Washington University.

After a brief review of the chemical, biological and radiological agents that might be used as weapons of mass destruction, Fuerth noted that even small atomic bombs are within the reach of terrorists who hate the United States. He said such bombs require only a “Coke can-sized container of plutonium or enriched uranium.” He said the construction of an atomic bomb would require no more computational capacity than that of a personal computer.

“We are in a battle against time to block this,” he said, although he predicted it will take “years” before the new Office of Homeland Security “develops the kind of homeland defense system that we need.”

Fuerth said that countries around the world must change laws so that terrorists will be denied secure electronic communications and banking services. He said the American government should be willing to consider preemptive military strikes that set back development of weapons of mass destruction, such as the air strike Israel made against an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction in 1981.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he said, remains “a menace, and there is no way to discriminate between him and the unfortunate nation that he dominates.”

Fuerth observed that since Sept. 11, Republicans have been espousing  the same sort of engagement in foreign affairs that they criticized during the Clinton Administration. “If the Republicans succeed in nation-building (in Afghanistan), it will be because of Democratic experiences in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.”

Fuerth declined a request to say what he would have recommended since Sept. 11 to a Democratic administration, had Gore won the presidency. He said he would use the same reply that Gore gave a reporter, that “President Bush is my commander-in-chief.”

He noted that in the Arab world, the meltdown of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has increased the militancy of average citizens. He said a very large and young Arab population in the Middle East is being raised in a “culture of anger, in part against globalization with an American face. It is a cultural anger taught in the schools.”

Asked by a listener how Americans might defuse that anger, Fuerth replied: “I don’t know if that is possible.”

A talk by the Indian author Amitav Ghosh, scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College, has been postponed due to air travel restrictions. The time, date and location for the rescheduled talk will be announced.

Ghosh’s visit to Bates College is sponsored by the college’s Multicultural Center. For more information, call 207-786-8215.

Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank in Manhattan, Fla. He has extensively researched school choice and voucher programs in several American cities, and has published his findings in The Public Interest, the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor. He is also the author of the Manhattan Institute publication The Education Freedom Index, a state-by-state ranking of how much choice is afforded to parents in educating their children.

Greene’s studies have indicated that children who use vouchers to attend private schools fare better academically than those in public schools and that voucher programs encourage improvements in public schools. Finally, Greene writes, “private schools are more likely to be integrated and to promote civic virtues like tolerance than public schools.”

A former professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Houston, Greene lives in Weston, Fla.

Greene’s appearance is part of Difference . . . Race, Class, Gender, Etc., a lecture series at Bates College. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Taking part in the session will be Chris Beam, a lecturer in history, who teaches a course on the Vietnam war; Andrew Gentes, an instructor in Russian history, who will discuss the Soviet war in Afghanistan; Lillian Guerra, assistant professor of history, who is a Latin American specialist; and Steven Kemper, professor of anthropology, who is an authority on South Asian nationalism and tribal politics. Kemper has also traveled several times to Afghanistan.

Each commentator will offer historical perspectives on the attacks and the U.S. response. The panel will then invite the audience to participate in a general discussion.