Can Our Nation's Laws Protect Our Kids? History and Challenges to Policies for Children, Talk March 1

Chestertown, MD, February 9, 2006 — Washington College's Guy F. Goodfellow Memorial Lecture Series presents "Can We Protect Our Kids? History and the Persistent Challenges of American Policies for Children," a talk by Michael C. Grossberg, the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History at Indiana University, Wednesday, March 1, at 5:00 p.m. in the College's Hynson Lounge. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

A professor of history and law—and co-director of the Indiana University Center on Law, Society, and Culture—Grossberg specializes in the intersection of law and family in American society. His lecture will examine the history of child protection laws in the United States since the 1870s, assessing issues such as child labor, juvenile justice, social reform, disabilities, and child abuse.

Grossberg is the author of numerous books and articles on legal and social change. His 1985 book,Governing the Hearth, Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America, received the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize in the History of Law and Society. Additionally, he publishedA Judgment for Solomon: The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America in 1996 and co-edited the volume American Public Life and the Historical Imagination in 2003. He is currently co-editing the Cambridge History of Law in the United States.

An active force in public policy research, Grossberg is currently leading a project to devise guidelines for genetic testing in child custody cases. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the American Bar Foundation, and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

The talk is sponsored by the Guy F. Goodfellow Memorial Lecture Series, established in 1989 to honor the memory of the history professor who had taught at Washington College for 30 years. The series brings distinguished historians to campus each year to lecture and to spend time with students in emulation of Goodfellow's vibrant teaching style.