About The Mecdec Speaker Series

In 2006, the May 20th Society launched its Annual MecDec Speaker's Series to bring nationally known historians to Charlotte to speak on Charlotte Mecklenburg's Revolutionary history.

Each year our Speaker participates in two events: the first is a lecture for American history students which has been held at the ImaginOn Theatre and sponsored by Wachovia. Later that evening, our guest Speaker discusses "MecDec Through the Ages" in a formal atmosphere to a distinguished list of sponsors and supporters.

About the 2008 speaker, Ken Burns.

Ken Burns is an American director and producer of documentary films known worldwide. Among his most notable productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001) and The War (2007).

Burns’s documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards (Brooklyn Bridge in 1982 and The Statue of Liberty in 1986) and six of his documentaries have been nominated for one or more Emmy Awards. He won three Emmy Awards for The Civil War, for Baseball and for Unforgivable Blackness.

Burns's film series The Civil War is a masterpiece. Narrated by Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough, Burns filled in many other roles, serving as director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director, and executive producer of The Civil War. The series has been honored with more than 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America, People's Choice Award, Peabody Award, duPont-Columbia Award, D.W. Griffith Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, among dozens of others. The nine episodes explore the Civil War through personal stories and photos that create a very different kind of experience from watching nearly any other modern movie today. During the creation of the movie Burns filmed thousands of archived photographs. This resulted in the coining of the aforementioned term the “Ken Burns Effect”. The Civil War has been viewed by more than 40 million people.

The May 20th Society is both thrilled and honored to welcome this dynamic talented filmmaker and historian as our guest and lecturer at The May 20th Society 2008 Speaker Series.

About last year's speaker, David McCullough.

Nationally known historian David McCullough addressed “The Spirit of Mecklenburg” at the Charlotte City Club in 2007. Mr. McCullough has been widely acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history,” “a matchless writer.” He is twice winner of the National Book Award, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In December 2006 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nations’s highest civilian award.

His books have been praised for their scholarship, their understanding of American life, their “vibrant prose,” and insight into individual character. Mr. McCullough’s most recent book, 1776, the number one New York Times national bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, has been called, “brilliant…powerful,” “a classic,” while his previous work, John Adams, remains one of the most critically acclaimed and widely read American biographies of all time. To date more than two million copies have been sold.

In the words of the citation accompanying his honorary degree from Yale, "As an historian, he paints with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character."

Mr. McCullough’s other books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, Brave Companions, and Truman. As may be said of few writers, none of his books has ever been out of print.

David McCullough is as well twice winner of the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize, and for his work overall he has been honored by the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award and the National Humanities Medal. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received more than forty honorary degrees.

In a crowded, productive career, he has been an editor, essayist, teacher, lecturer, and familiar presence on public television -- as host of Smithsonian World, The American Experience, and narrator of numerous documentaries including The Civil War. His is also the narrator’s voice in the movie Seabiscuit. A gifted speaker, Mr. McCullough has lectured in all parts of the country and abroad, as well as at the White House. He is also one of the few private citizens to speak before a joint session of Congress.

Born in Pittsburgh, Mr. McCullough was educated there and at Yale, where he was graduated with honors in English literature. He is an avid reader, traveler, and has enjoyed a lifelong interest in art and architecture. He is as well a devoted painter. Mr. McCullough and his wife Rosalee Barnes McCullough have five children and eighteen grandchildren.

CLICK HERE to listen to David McCullough's 'The Spirit of Mecklenburg' address from last year's celebration.

About the 2006 speaker, Michael Beschloss.

In 2006, NBC President historian Michael Beschloss spoke at the Morehead Inn to a packed room.

Mr. Beschloss is an award-winning historian of the Presidency and the author of eight books, including his most recent work, the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. Newsweek has called Beschloss "the nation's leading Presidential historian." He is a regular commentator on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and a contributor to ABC News.

Beschloss was born in Chicago on November 30, 1955. He is an alumnus of Eaglebrook School, Andover, Williams College and Harvard University. He has been an historian on the staff of the Smithsonian Institution (1982-1986), a Senior Associate Member at Oxford University in England (1986-1987), and a Senior Fellow of the Annenberg Foundation in Washington, D.C. (1988-1996).

The Conquerors was an immediate national bestseller. In a front-page review, Thomas Powers wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the "vigorously written" book was "history as it was spoken at the time, and there is not a dull page."

Taking Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1997) was the first volume of Beschloss's highly-praised trilogy on President Lyndon Johnson's newly-released secret tapes. The Wall Street Journal called it "sheer marvelous history," the New York Times editorial page "an important event." The second volume, Reaching for Glory (Simon & Schuster, 2001) was called "an incomparable portrait of a President at work" by the New York Times Book Review. Both volumes were national bestsellers.

Beschloss's first book, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980), started as his senior honors thesis at Williams College. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (Harper, 1986), was called "a grand narrative. . .crowded with well-drawn portraits" by the New Yorker. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (HarperCollins, 1991), won the Ambassador Book Prize and was called by the New Yorker the "definitive" book on John Kennedy and the Cold War.

Beschloss co-wrote At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Little, Brown, 1993) with Strobe Talbott. As literary executor for the late Newsweek columnist Meg Greenfield, he edited Ms. Greenfield's posthumously-published book Washington (PublicAffairs, 2001), which was a New York Times bestseller. He is now working on a history of Abraham Lincoln's last days and his assassination, to be published by Simon & Schuster.

Beschloss holds two honorary doctorates. He is a trustee of the White House Historical Association, the National Archives Foundation, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), the Urban Institute, and the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Afsaneh and their two sons.