Dr. Andrew Roth, who served as interim president of St. Bonaventure University during the 2016-2017 academic year, will return to the university April 3 to speak on “The American Story: What Binds us Together as Americans.”

The program begins at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Walsh Science Center and is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Roth, former president of Notre Dame College, and currently a scholar in residence at the Jefferson Educational Society, will explore the divisions found in today’s political culture wars and the role of the American story in creating a common ground as citizens.

As recent elections have shown, the United States is a deeply divided nation. Some speculate the country is on the verge of a second civil war, that Americans are more divided now than at any other time since the 1860s. Others speculate the country is in a cultural civil war, that red and blue America are irreconcilably divided. If true, how did this cultural war begin and what are its lines of discord?

In a nation with an electorate deeply polarized along partisan political lines and cultural/tribal lines, is there an American story that be agreed upon? Is there an understanding of the American experience that provides a common ground for civil life? Does such a story continue to exist? Did it ever exist?

Or as, Roth asks, “Is there more than one ‘American Story’? Is it possible that the ‘American Story’ is actually a tapestry composed of many threads with two to three dominant motifs”?

Roth believes that America, founded on several essential beliefs, is actually an existential nation in a perpetual state of becoming as, even now in 2019, Americans seek to answer Hector St. John Crevecouer’s more than 200-year-old question “What then is the American, this new person (sic)”?

Roth will also meet with students in Dr. Phillip Payne’s History 417 class, Culture Wars: The Politics of Memory. During the class, Roth will present “1968: The Far Side of the Moon and the Birth of the Culture Wars,” his research and interest in the intersection between generational politics, culture wars, and historical narrative.

The program is sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of History at St. Bonaventure. For more information, contact Payne at ppayne@sbu.edu.