‘The Greatest Generation’ Winchester Lecture tonight at 7
klykins@tntech.edu
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A native East Tennessean who holds a doctorate from Harvard will visit campus on April 5 to present “The Best Years of Their Lives? The Greatest Generation’s Return from World War Two,” a lecture based on his recent research and book about war veterans.
Thomas Childers, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, says the title plays off the name of the 1946 Academy Award-winning film that featured the stories of three veterans who deal with extensive injuries, post-traumatic stress syndrome and alcoholism.
While working on the book, Childers told a Penn Current interviewer that the point is not to somehow undermine the notion of the Greatest Generation, but to suggest that the price they paid was actually much greater, and the toll they took was much greater, than old stories usually heard under the rubric of the Greatest Generation.
Childers received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Tennessee and earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1976. Since then, he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Grant, a fellowship in European Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a West European Studies Research Grant from Harvard.
Childers is the author and editor of several books on modern German history and the Second World War. He recently completed a trilogy on the Second World War. The first volume of that history, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1995), was praised by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post as "a powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful book."
The second volume, We'll Meet Again (New York: Henry Holt and Co.) was published in 1999 and is set in wartime Germany, France, Britain and the United States. The final volume, Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) examines the difficulties of veterans returning home from the Second World War.
Knoxville attorney J. Michael Winchester established the endowment in TTU’s history department to provide lectures free to students and the public. Winchester, president of Winchester, Sellers, Foster & Steele, P.C., earned all-America honors as a member of TTU’s baseball team and was inducted into the university’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1996. He was also named the 2010 Outstanding Alumnus by TTU’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Childers shares with Winchester the distinction of having once been a Tennessee Tech student athlete and a baseball player, though not at the same time. Childers was a member of the 1964 TTU football team. Following an injury, however, he transferred to the University of Tennessee on a baseball scholarship.
Childers’ presentation will be held at 7 p.m. in Derryberry Hall Auditorium, and it is free and open to the public.
For more information about the Winchester History Lecture, call TTU’s history department at 931/372-3332.
