Speaker
Dr. David Emory Shi has given hundreds of speeches on campuses, at professional meetings, in churches, and at corporations. His topics are wide-ranging, from a variety of subjects related to American history, to issues of environmental conservation and promoting sustainable organizations and communities, to high school and college graduation addresses, and philosophical subjects such as the pursuit of happiness.
His most recent speech topics include the following:
“Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness: Why Is It SO Darned Hard?”
“Was Slavery the Cause of the Civil War?”
“From the Golden Door to Trump’s Wall: America’s Ambivalence about Immigration”
“The Space Race and the Cold War”
“A More Perfect Union: Race Relations in American History”
“What Happened to the Simple Life?”
“The Fate of Books in a Digital Age”
“Rescuing the Puritans”
“Dancing with Change: Developing a High Performance Organization”
Videos
David Shi on the balance between states' rights and effective national government
David Shi on the market revolution in nineteenth-century America
David Shi on westward expansion in nineteenth-century America
David Shi on forging an American identity in the early republic
David Shi on the settlement and annexation of Texas
David Shi on the successes of progressive reform
David Shi on economic development and social stratification after the Civil War
Vision Voice - Dr. David Shi
Praise
These are the books students at the top US colleges are required to read
Shi honored with AASHE Lifetime Achievement Award
Furman University President David Shi Announces Retirement
TEDxGreenville - March 5, 2010
What People are Saying
Speaking Engagements
“David Shi is such a wonderful historian and sparkling speaker because he fully understands that people, their stories, and their lives are what fascinate and connect us to each other, both in the past and the present.”
– Jon Durbin, History Editor and Vice-President, W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., New York City
“David Shi might be the only Commencement speaker I ever wished would keep talking. Amazing!”
– Rae Carlton Colley, Faculty Member, The Mount Vernon School, Atlanta, GA
“David Shi is one of the most engaging and funny speakers I have ever heard speak on the topic of sustainability. His deep commitment to creating a healthy, just, and sustainable society is demonstrated in both his personal and professional endeavors, and he draws from this experience in such a way that the challenges we face as a society become not only comprehensible but also, ultimately, opportunities to forge a different, more satisfying future.”
– Toni Nelson, Vice President of Programs, Second Nature, Boston, MA
The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (1985)
“Shi's fine book makes clear that the ideal of the simple life so popular in the 1960s and 1970s involved more than a passing yen for trail mix and alfalfa sprouts.”
– Jackson Lears, The Nation
“A well-written book covering the sweep of American history... Step out of the rat race long enough to read it.”
– Martin Marty, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The subject is an important one, and its treatment by Shi is exemplary. The book serves as a handbook to guide us in facing the insistent and inevitable challenges of the future.”
– Sierra Magazine
“A clear presentation of... fascinating material. Not a little of the book's merit lies in Shi's style--lucid, entertaining, even jaunty at times, without sacrificing clarity or elegance of expression.”
– New England Quarterly
“An illuminating intellectual history.”
– Christian Science Monitor
“A good book on the good life... It maintains moral perspective without tyrannizing the reader.”
– American Quarterly
Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920 (1995)
“Mr. Shi is determined to find common ground. Surveying not just writers and critics but also painters, photographers and furniture makers, he brings shared commitments into view: a broadening of the issues (divorce, poverty, prostitution) and social classes (factory workers, the unemployed) that could be legitimately addressed by respectable novelists, and an antipathy to ornament (in the architecture of John W. Root and Louis Sullivan) and decoration (in the furniture of Gustav Stickley) as distractions from the plain truth of functional form.”
– The New York Times
“Shi’s book undoubtedly will become the standard survey for students and general readers. In accessible prose, it provides a wealth of information, especially about the visual arts, jettisons the old progressive interpretation of unambivalent realist achievement, and dissects the gender politics involved.”
– American Historical Review
“This is a beautifully written and quite splendid study of the development of American artistic realism in the nineteenth century. Mr. Shi expertly synthesizes the diverse manifestations of the movement in literature, painting, and architecture.”
– John Aldridge, author of Talents and Technicians
“Nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive, Facing Facts provides the definitive account of the realist phenomenon, revealing why it played so great a role in American cultural history, and why it retains its perennial fascination.”
– Oxford University Press