About this Event
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Free Event
Speaker event – lunch provided!
The Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, the Department of American Studies, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library welcome Professor Dean Kotlowski to UT. Professor Kotlowski is professor of history at Salisbury University and was the 2022 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian National University (ANU).
Among US presidents, Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson had the strongest ties to Australia. Hoover spent over a year in Australia as a mining engineer, while in 1942, LBJ passed part of his pre-presidential career in Australia. President Johnson’s visits to Australia in 1966 and 1967 helped to solidify and celebrate US-Australian ties while encouraging Australian independence, even if during a war directed from Washington. While Hoover left his mark on Australia’s physical landscape, Australians found little appealing in the dour, Depression-era president who had come and gone without regarding their country as a friend or ally. Johnson thus became a consequential figure in Australia’s national history in ways Hoover never did.
