Photo: James Henry Breasted. Courtesy of University of Chicago Library.

Date: Saturday, September 3, 2011, 7:00 p.m.

Chapter: Illinois

Speaker: Lindsay Ambridge, Oberlin College

Location: La Salle Bank Room, The Oriental Institute

This free lecture is held at the Oriental Institute, LaSalle Bank Room. 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, 60637.

For more information call 773-702-1062.

Description: James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, was a prolific writer of popularizing books on the ancient Near East. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he began writing Ancient Times, a History of the Early World, published in 1916 by one of the largest distributors of American textbooks. Widely read and very popular, a revised version appeared at the end of his career in 1935. This lecture examines the book’s themes of race, imperialism, and Breasted’s definition of “civilization”, highlighting significant changes between the first and second editions. Breasted mapped the geo-racial boundaries of early civilization and advanced a model of enlightened exploitation which not only explained the ancient past to generations of students, but also provided a commentary on the socio-political conditions of his own time.