A sincere thank you to all who attended the Michael J. Colligan History Project this spring. Our final event of the semester was a welcome return by distinguished writer, historian, and Miami Journalism Professor Jim Tobin (pictured below) on “Polio and the Making of FDR.”
This was also our 174th program since we began exploring and commemorating a diverse array of historical perspectives in 2000. During this time we have developed formal partnerships with the City of Hamilton, Fitton Center, Heritage Hall, The Lane Libraries, Smith Library of Regional History, Hamilton Schools, and Miami Hamilton Downtown Center. The Colligan’s distinctive public programing has been made possible through a cooperative funding arrangement between Miami University Regionals and the Michael J. Colligan Fund Committee of the Hamilton Community Foundation. We thank them for this unique support and look forward to announcing further exciting historical programs in the fall and spring of 2017-2018, to be announced soon on this website. In the meantime, we hope you all enjoy a restful and pleasant summer, and encourage you to keep in touch on FaceBook: www.facebook.com/colliganproject/
The conventional wisdom of recent decades–that Franklin Roosevelt engaged in a massive deception about his disability–is flat wrong. In fact FDR might never have become president at all had it not been for his extraordinary comeback from polio. Award-winning author James Tobin spent 20 years as a reporter and freelance writer, published Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II in 1997, and The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight in 2003. The Man He Bacame: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency appeared in 2013.
The legend of Johnny Appleseed is based on the life of a real person. Born into a poor Yankee family on the eve of the American Revolution, the young John Chapman headed west in the last years of the 18th century. This talk recovers the life of the “real” Johnny Appleseed, teasing out fact from myth, and revealing the life of an extraordinary individual whose real story is more compelling than the myth that emerged in the years after his death.
