A Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and professor will be the first speaker in NIU’s newly-established “Distinguished Lecturer Series.”

Arthur Scheslinger Jr. will discuss the post-Cold War world in a free public lecture Nov. 14 at 8 p.m. in the Holmes Student Center’s Carl Sandburg Auditorium.

The new series will continue an NIU tradition established by a recently concluded speakers series on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, said NIU Provost Kendall Baker.

“I envision the series bringing to campus outstanding individuals from a wide variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary areas who can … engage students, faculty, and the larger community in discussions of significant contemporary issues,” Baker said.

NIU history professor Jordan Schwarz, chairman of the Bicentennial Series, will chair the faculty committee that will select speakers. The group plans to schedule two speakers each year and urges all interested persons to send nominations and recommendations to him.

“The lecture series will certainly support and enhance the intellectual environment of the university,” Schwarz said. The series will be funded by the provost’s office.

Although Schlesinger classifies himself as a writer and history educator, he probably became best known to the public in the early 1960s as a special assistant to then President John F. Kennedy, ranking as a leading member of Kennedy’s controversial “Harvard Brain Trust.”

A native of Columbus, Ohio, Schesinger, 73, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1938, then was a fellow at Cambridge.

He served in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, joined the Harvard history faculty in 1946, and later taught at Princeton and at the City University of New York.

Schlesinger was a member of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign staffs in 1952 and 1956, a trustee of the Twentieth Century Fund, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and a director of the boards of the John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman presidential libraries. He also once served as a juror for the Cannes Film Festival.

His many well-known books include “The Age of Jackson” (1945), “The Vital Center” (1949), “The Coming of the New Deal” (1958), “The Politics of Upheaval” (1960), “The Politics of Hope” (1963), “The Crisis of Confidence” (1969) and “The Imperial Presidency” (1973).

Schlesinger also has been president of the Robert Kennedy Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, national chair of Americans for Democratic Action and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on Foreign Relations. His office is in New York.