Bradley to Speak at Milner Feb. 18

Illinois State University Politics and Government Professor Robert Bradley will speak on "The Impact of Fear on Contemporary Political Dialogue" at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, on the main floor of Milner Library.  Admission is free and open to the public. 

Bradley's is the first of three lectures to be presented by Milner Library in conjunction with the poster exhibition, "Thoughts on Democracy," reinterpreting Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" posters, on display through May 7 on the main floor of Milner.  The poster exhibition, sponsored by the American Democracy Project and Milner Library, is free and open to the public.

Ross Kennedy from ISU's Department of History will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 3, on the main floor of Milner, on "A Manifesto of Power and Ideals: FDR's Four Freedoms Speech in Historical Perspective."  On Tuesday, April 6, School of Art's Melissa Johnson will speak on "Visual Culture and American Modernism in the 1930s and 1940s: Figuration and Abstraction" at 7 p.m. on the main floor of Milner.

Conceived by the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University in Miami Beach, Fla., "Thoughts on Democracy" brought together 60 renowned contemporary artists and designers to present original works inspired by Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" posters.

Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings were first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, and were later issued by the government as posters for a U.S. war bond drive.  The paintings illustrated the ideals expressed in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's impassioned "Four Freedoms" speech to Congress in 1941, in which he envisioned a "world founded upon four essential human freedoms"-Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.