17th Dibner Library Lecture Today!

As part of the Libraries' two-day symposium, “The Era of Experiments and the Age of Wonder: Scientific Expansion in the 17th – 19th Centuries” today and tomorrow, March 5 British historian Richard Holmes will give the 17th Dibner Library Lecture. Holmes, whose latest book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008), was shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. Holmes is an award-winning biographer of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Coleridge, and in The Age of Wonder he examines the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic Age who laid the foundations of modern science.

This celebration marks the reopening of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, one of the Libraries’ two facilities for rare books and manuscripts. The Dibner Library is located in the National Museum of American History. For more information and a program schedule, visit www.sil.si.edu or call 202.633.1522.—Liz O'Brien

Richard Holmes, c. Stuart Clarke