Thursday, June 13 – Morris County
The North Jersey American Revolution Round Table (NJARRT) holds its monthly meeting on June 13, 2019, at 7:00 p.m. The meeting is held in the auditorium of the museum at Morristown National Historic Park (Washington’s HQ), 30 Washington Place, Morristown, NJ 07960. The speaker for the June meeting is Stephen Fried on the topic of Dr. Benjamin Rush.
Fried’s book, Rush, Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor who Became a Founding Father was published by Penguin Random House.
From improbable beginnings as the son of a Philadelphia blacksmith, Rush grew into an internationally renowned writer, reformer, and medical pioneer who touched virtually every page in the story of the nation’s founding. He was Franklin’s protégé, the editor of Common Sense, and Washington’s surgeon general. He was a fierce progressive agitator—a vocal opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion or gender, a champion of public education—even as his convictions threatened his name and career, time and again. He was a confidante, and often the physician, of America’s first leaders; he brokered the twilight peace between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As a doctor, he became “the American Hippocrates,” whose brilliant, humane insights and institutional reforms revolutionized the understanding and treatment of mental illness in ways that still reverberate.
Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author who teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania. He is, most recently, the author of the historical biography Appetite for America, and the coauthor, with Congressman Patrick Kennedy, of A Common Struggle.
The NJARRT invites the public to join the organization and to attend monthly meetings on the second Thursday of the month from September to June. Membership is $40 for individuals and $50 for families. Payment can be made by check to NJARRT, PO Box 321, Florham Park, NJ 07932. The public is welcome to attend their first meeting free of charge.
