BRATTLEBORO — Jack Beatty, news analyst for the public radio talk show On Point, considers the presumed inevitability of World War I and chronicles largely forgotten events leading up to the conflict in his talk, The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began, on Wednesday, Oct. 3, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Brooks Memorial Library.
This talk is the first presentation of the 2012-13 season of the First Wednesdays series, sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. The series is popular for its variety of thought-provoking topics, its quality of speakers, and the interaction it affords between speakers and the public.
Beatty was a longtime senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, which he joined in 1983, having previously worked as a book reviewer at Newsweek and as the literary editor of The New Republic.
Beatty is the author of The Rascal King (1992), a biography of the legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; The World According to Peter Drucker (1998), an intellectual biography of the social thinker and management theorist; and Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007), a thematic history of the Gilded Age.
He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, an Olive Branch Award from New York University, a William Allen White Award for criticism from the University of Kansas, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Born and raised in Boston, Beatty now lives in Hanover, N.H.
Beatty is a regular Friday guest on On Point, produced by Boston public radio station WBUR and broadcast daily on Vermont Public Radio.
The complete listing of talks in Brattleboro for the 2012-13 season can be found at www.vermonthumanities.org/WhatWeDo/FirstWednesdays/FirstWednesdaysBrattleboro/tabid/159/Default.aspx.