For those of you not attending the Fourth Annual FDR Memorial Lecture this Saturday, I thought you might enjoy seeing a sneak preview of the The New Fireside Chats web casts I’ll be introducing there:

Of course, this is just an early version the trailer (well not so early, its the 15th one, actually) but I can’t tell you how excited we already are about this project – scheduled guests include nationally known scholar Skip Gates, who’ll talk about race relations in FDR’s time and what it means to be black in 2011, at Harvard and beyond; Nobel laureate Amartya Sen will visit to discuss the pluses and minuses of New Deal economic policy; historian and PBS scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin will be on hand to talk about FDR’s early years;  Ambassador John Gunther Dean ’44 will review the tremendous ups and downs of four decades of diplomatic service – and that’s just for starters. We’ve been sending out invitations to a whole host of folks from both sides of the aisle, to come in and discuss politics, religion, history, the arts, world events, you name it. With any luck, we’ll be posting one or two new broadcasts each month.

And finally, returning of the subject of this weekend’s lecture by Cynthia Koch, we have just five seats left, so if you wish to attend, email me immediately to reserve your spot.