Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Applegate to speak at UNL

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln will host the seventh annual Carol R. Pauley Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 W Q St.

This year's speaker is Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, who will lecture on "Religion, Sex, and Politics: The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and 19th-Century American Culture." A reception begins at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the departments of History and English and the Program in 19th-Century Studies at UNL.

Applegate is the author of "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher." She has spent 20 years researching and writing about Beecher, whom she first discovered while an undergraduate at Amherst College. She continued her work on Beecher while a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale University, where she earned her doctorate in 1998.

Her writing has won her numerous prizes and fellowships, has appeared in publications from the Journal of American History to the New York Times. She has taught at Yale and Wesleyan universities.