Michael Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

with Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley, as respondent

Professor Katz's book, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What it is Becoming, which he co-authored with Mark J. Stern (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), and Professor Reich's book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Knopf, 2007), will be available for sale and signing at this event.

Since the mid-twentieth-century America has experienced two great social movements: the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Although neither movement reached all its goals, each achieved major successes. Yet, in the years of these movements' greatest accomplishments, Americans became massively more unequal. How and why did this happen? At this colloquium, Professor Katz will discuss several key arguments of his book (co-authored with Mark J. Stern), One Nation Divisible, which seeks to clarify why America remains one nation divisible, what those divisions are, and the powerful role played by government in both mitigating and exacerbating them. In the book, Katz and Stern trace the impact and consequences of economic globalization at both ends of the century and argue that today the nation is undergoing economic and social transformations as profound as the ones driven by the industrial revolution of past centuries.

Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Educated at Harvard, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; he also has held a fellowship from the Open Society Institute. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, National Academy of Social Insurance, and the Society of American Historians. His work has focused on three major areas: the history of American education, the history of urban social structure and family organization, and the history of social welfare and poverty. His numerous works include, among many others, The Irony of Early School Reform (1968, reprinted with a new introduction, 2001); Reconstructing American Education (1987); The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (1981); In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986, expanded edition 1996); The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1990, a finalist for the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award); and The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (Metropolitan/Holt, 2001; Owl Books, 2002).

Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a member of the faculties of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and of Brandeis University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio's "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people. In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclev Havel Foundation Prize, by the former Czech president, for his pioneering work in economic and social thought. In 2005, his play, Public Exposure, broke box office records at its world premiere on Cape Cod. As the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor, Reich implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, led a national fight against sweatshops in the U.S. and illegal child labor around the world, headed the administration's successful effort to raise the minimum wage, secured worker's pensions, and launched job-training programs, one-stop career centers, and school-to-work initiatives.