MIDDLEBURY, Vt. ? On Friday, Oct. 6, author and historian James T. Patterson will deliver a lecture titled “A Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to 9/11.” The event, which is the annual Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture, will take place in Mead Chapel at 8 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

Patterson is the Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus at Brown University, where he has taught for 30 years. His research interests include political, legal and social history, as well as the history of medicine, race relations and education.

While teaching at Indiana University from 1964 to 1972, he published “Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,” “The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition,” and “Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft.” He received the Frederick Jackson Turner Book Prize from the Organization of American Historians in 1966 and the Indiana University Teaching Award in 1968, as well as two National Endowment for Humanities Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1972, Patterson joined the faculty of Brown University. His publications during that period include “America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1980;” “The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture;” “Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974,” which won the Bancroft Prize for American History in 1997; “Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy;” and “Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore.” Several of his books have been History Book Club selections.

He was elected a member of the Society of American Historians in 1974 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.

The Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture commemorates the gifted and much loved teacher who was an esteemed scholar at Middlebury College in the 1950s until his untimely death in 1961. Shortly thereafter, several colleagues and friends in the Middlebury community formed a committee and created a fund that eventually became large enough to establish an annual lectureship in American history as a tribute to him. Many prominent American historians of the past 35 years have delivered Grant lectures, including David McCullough, author of the best-selling biography “John Adams,” and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who served from 1961-1963 as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

Mead Chapel is located on Hepburn Road off College Street (Route 125). For more information, contact Travis Jacobs, Middlebury College professor of history, at tjacobs@middlebury.edu or (802) 443-5315.