January 17, 2006 Louis Galambos Appointed to Maguire Chair in American History at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress

Press Contact: Donna Urschel (202) 707-1639
Public Contact: Robert Saladini (202) 707-2692

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington appointed Louis Galambos to the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the John W. Kluge Center, effective January 1, 2006.

Galambos, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, is the fourth recipient of the honor. The first was John T. Noonan, a judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; followed by Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago; and Mark Noll of Wheaton College.

The holder of the Maguire Chair conducts research on ethical issues associated with American history. Research may include the conduct of politics and government at all levels of American life as well as the role of religion, business, urban affairs, law, science and medicine in the ethical dimensions of leadership.

Galambos was editor of the 21-volume publication “The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower” from 1971 to 1995, and co-editor with Daun van Ee, a curator in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, from 1995 to 2001. The Eisenhower papers project is unusual in the field of scholarly historical editions. Eisenhower, the former president of the United States and general of the U.S. Army, agreed to authorize the effort in 1963 in response to a request from the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees. Eisenhower also participated in the editorial process until his death in 1969. The last of the 21 volumes was completed in 2001, with the publication of a four-volume set titled “The Presidency: Keeping the Peace.”

Galambos also has taught at Rice, Rutgers and Yale universities, and he has served as president of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association. A former editor of The Journal of Economic History, Galambos has written extensively on U.S. business history, on business-government relations, on the economic aspects of modern institutional development in America and on the rise of the bureaucratic state.

Galambos, who received his Ph.D. from Yale, was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a business history fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business Administration. In addition, he has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center and at Princeton University.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom form the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.

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PR 06-016
2006-01-17
ISSN 0731-3527