The cultural history of economic depression, focusing on the 1890s depression, is the subject of an upcoming public lecture at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Visiting professor Dr. Susan Curtis will present the lecture titled “Remembering the 1890s:  Hard Times and the Tough Road to Recovery” from 3-4 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, in St. Pat’s Ballroom B of the Havener Center. Refreshments will be provided. This lecture is free and open to the public.

“The lecture is over the little-known depression that was overshadowed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was certainly much better documented through film, photography, art, theater performances and New Deal programs,” says Curtis, this semester’s Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Missouri S&T and a professor of history and American studies at Purdue University.

Curtis’ lecture will bring the social and economic conditions of the 1890s alive with the words of ordinary men and women who experienced it, who wrote letters to the editor, essays, and poems about it, and who took direct action to change their way of life.

“There are many similarities between the 1890s and our current economic hard times,” Curtis explains. “I believe our ancestors can remind us that economic progress need not come at the expense of our social responsibilities to one another and to our dignity as workers and citizens.”

Missouri S&T’s Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professorship in Humanities, established by an estate gift to the university in 1999, is rotated among S&T’s arts, languages and philosophy department, the English and technical communication department, and the history and political science department.

Weiner graduated from Missouri S&T when it was known as the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. He also studied at the University of Hawaii and at Washington University in St. Louis. He retired from Westinghouse Electric Corp.

For more information about the upcoming lecture, contact Missouri S&T’s history and political science department at 573-341-4801 or email Dr. Michael Bruening, interim chair of history and political science, at bruening@mst.edu.