Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. -The third lecture in the 2010-11 American Culture & Politics speaker series, titled "Cheaters Sometimes Prosper: Aristotle Onassis, Alexei Solyanik, and Other Scoundrels of 20th-Century Whaling," will be given by diplomatic and environmental historian Kurk Dorsey on Thursday, March 3.

The presentation will be at 4 p.m. in the Memorial Union Journey Room on the Oregon State University campus. It is free and open to the public.

The United States helped create the International Whaling Commission in 1946 to regulate whaling and conserve whales. Founders hoped that science would show the way to harvest whales sustainably, but their system didn't deal with whalers who skirted the rules. Dorsey will examine flagrant and accused, but sometimes innocent, violators of whaling rules, as well as the challenges of noncompliance.

Dorsey is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and teaches U.S. diplomatic and environmental history. He is the author of "The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era," and has received the Stuart Bernath Lecture Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

This series is sponsored by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. More information is available online at www.oregonstate.edu/cla/history